Venture Voice

Jon Oringer is not a professional photographer. But when he needed images to market his growing internet business, the traditional stock agencies were still stuck in the world of print, so he took the DIY approach. What started as a way to fill a need for his own company turned into a side business that quickly gained traction. So quickly, in fact, that he turned his attention to it full time. Jon built Shutterstock on a “two-sided marketplace” subscription model that has its roots in Pop-Up Eliminator, a tool he built while he was still in college. While that app was disrupted out of existence when Microsoft built pop-up blocking into Internet Explorer, he’d grown it to a million dollars in revenue by that time. In this episode, Jon shares how he started with a portfolio of app ideas that was eventually whittled down to Shutterstock. You’ll hear about the company’s rapid growth trajectory, Jon’s decision to take secondary funding in 2007 to accelerate the pace even more and what it was like to take the com