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We have a lot of customers in Japan, but they don't quite get the local content that they always need, so we want to encourage all of our product teams to start thinking globally.
Instagram is great for us because it's encouraging people to shoot more stuff. Some of those snappers will become professional, and they may choose to sell their photos through us.
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.
In high school, I used to teach guitar and fix computers by the hour. I was looking for some way to make some cash, so I actually learned how to play guitar in order to try to teach it.
I like San Francisco, but I don't think I'd want to work in Palo Alto. It seems like a pretty rough commute. In many ways, I think New York has a lot of things the West Coast doesn't have.
Shutterstock's ability to cultivate a healthy and expanding marketplace for both customers and contributors remains a key competitive advantage and a crucial component of our sustained growth.
There is a lack of talent in technology, and we need to be encouraging kids in school to learn how to code. We need to encourage computer science as a major. We need to encourage entrepreneurism.
To ensure we are meeting the demands of existing customers while also attracting new users, we remain focused on building cutting-edge technology and introducing new and innovative product offerings.
We recognized early on that media consumption was evolving and customers were looking for moving images to include as part of their advertising campaigns, website designs and corporate presentations.
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.
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.
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.
At around 50 employees, you get to the point where you can't see what's going on all the time. So you start to have weekly check-ins, and you have days that go by without knowing exactly what's going on.
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 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.
Rex has photographers around the world - it's a higher touch business: there are a lot of relationships involved. If you throw an event, there are certain photographers you've worked with before and you want there.
The growing demand for content across our platform delivers bigger payouts to our contributor base and encourages them to upload fresh content to Shutterstock, further facilitating the network effect of our business.
You can't be afraid of the problem. Don't be afraid of failure; don't be afraid to make mistakes. Make sure you learn from each step; iterate, and stay as efficient as possible without being paralyzed by a difficult situation.
I started Shutterstock without any outside funding; I believe in creating a lean startup. By not taking outside investors early, I was forced to use every dollar I had as efficiently as possible. And I was able to keep a large part of the company.
Many entrepreneurs have shifted their focus to pursuing VC funding as a primary strategic priority instead of concentrating on generating value for their users. This is worrisome because raising capital alone is misleading as a benchmark for success.
The best thing is to go public only when you're absolutely sure that's the right move for the company. And in order to make sure that is the case, you need to have as much control over the company as possible, which means not giving up control early on.
I found it very helpful not to do the venture round. Instead, I started with very little money, a few thousand dollars, and I did every job myself. I was the first photographer. I was the first customer service rep. I was the first online marketing person.
As I saw more and more people buying the images that were happy buyers, and people selling the images that were happy with how the market was pricing them, I started to get the sense this could be the go-to place for businesses to get the images they need.
The problem with taking venture capital is if you take $5m from someone, it may feel great; you may feel like they're validating your business model. But they're giving $5m out to 20 different people, hoping one of them will be a hit. They don't really care if it's you.
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.
Evolution has been the key tenet of success over the past 13 years, and we have transformed from a single subscription e-commerce image business into a company with a diversified portfolio of content offerings, servicing the needs of businesses of all types and sizes globally.
While the scale of our library is certainly attractive to our users, equally important is the quality of the content we provide and our state-of-the-art processing operation that vets every single piece of content that's submitted to ensure only the most suitable content is included.
Was I going to start companies outside of Shutterstock or inside? Going public kind of meant I was going to start them inside, and I kind of thought this through and decided that if I was going to do that, I was going to continue to operate Shutterstock like it was an incubator of startups.
I would still rather be in Silicon Alley. I like the West Coast also, but it's sort of fragmented. You have companies in downtown San Francisco, companies in Mountain View, and people are driving between them all. It's kind of nice in New York to just jump in a cab and reach another company so easily.
At Shutterstock, we've been offering tutorials to customers and contributors on our blog for many years. Our audience already viewed us as thought leaders on the latest digital and creative skills; we felt it so natural for us to launch Skillfeed, which is an online marketplace for professional learning.
When a user signs up for Skillfeed, they get unlimited access to thousands of video courses and creative and technical skills, all as a part of one inexpensive monthly subscription. Instructors from around the world can apply to have their course from Skillfeed and earn money based on how much their courses are viewed.