Quotes from Jon Oringer

I wanted a CFO with public company experience; I needed an HR department, new office space, and a board which could help me grow the business. Insight, the private equity firm I chose, helped me with all that.

I met with several public company CEOs to learn about their experiences of going public and listened to as many earnings calls as I possibly could.

Any business that is trying to sell something should be willing to spend a couple dollars for a stock photo to not have ads in it and not distract the user from using the product they're trying to sell.

When I started Shutterstock, I tried to get people access to big events. It's very hard to keep up, to publish them quick, and to get the right photographers.

Try to rally up as many people as you can with as much information as you can to try to get it to appear in front of the right people in the organization who are the decision-makers to greenlight the project.

I shot images of everything I could find over the course of a year. I would go all over the world and take pictures. In a day, I could easily take thousands.

I don't own a helicopter because I want someone to bring me places quickly. I own it because it's an incredible machine that I like to fly and learn about. I like the complexity of it.

I've never been very flashy or high-profile.

Nobody is opposed to paying taxes; governments need to coordinate, work together and simplify the law.

I hadn't really worked in an office before Shutterstock, so I didn't have the experience of building a culture, nor did I understand how important that is for attracting and retaining the best talent.

Working with limited resources is an excellent way to hone skills that will serve you well for the rest of your career. You will prioritize profitability from the start.

In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.

We significantly increased our global presence in 2014. During the year, we expanded the number of languages in which we serve customers to a total of 20.

The decisions you make affect a lot of people. You have investors, employees, and customers who all rely on you. Being a leader is a 24-hour-a-day job.

All businesses need images to sell their products and services.

The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images... and they were very expensive.

Anyone can contribute images, and we sell them to designers and agencies all over the world.

Just as we are enhancing the customer side of our marketplace, we are also looking for ways to increase our contributor expense.

I think that initial independence is very important; that's what being an entrepreneur is all about.

As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?

We continually hear from our engaged customer base that Shutterstock's content is a true differentiator, given not only the size of the library but also the quality and diversity of the images we offer.

I've little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I'm a New Yorker.

Some people are serial entrepreneurs and want to just move on to the next thing. They just want to clean the slate and start from scratch. I feel that sometimes, too, and the way that we do that here is we build things inside Shutterstock: we launch new products all the time.

Shutterstock has evolved from an image-based marketplace for small businesses to a much broader platform, with a large and expanding addressable market opportunity.