Jon Oringer - Building Shutterstock Into A Billion Dollar Empire

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What is going on? Everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode we have the founder of Shutterstock, John Oranger. John Oringer is an American programmer, photographer and billionaire businessman, best known as the founder and CEO of Shutterstock, a stock media and editing tool provider. O' Ranger started his career while a college student in the 1990s when he created one of the web's first pop up blockers. He went on to found about 10 small startups that used a subscription method to sell personal firewalls, accounting software, cookie blockers, trademark managers and other small programs. In 2003, O' Ranger founded Shutterstock to provide micro stock photography, which has now been publicly traded on the New York stock exchange since 2012. As a result of going public in 2013, O' Ranger was reported to be New York's first tech tech billionaire. This conversation that I had with John Oranger was absolutely incredible. We spoke about what he learned after being a CEO of a publicly traded company for over 16 years. And if you didn't know, he recently stepped down as CEO as of April 1, 2020. And we spoke about what he's now doing and where he's spending his time and what he's looking forward to as the economy that has recently changed in such a dramatic way. So that being said, make sure you take a moment to subscribe to the Rise of the Young podcast. Share this episode with a friend that you believe would enjoy it and last but not least, enjoy the show. All right, what is going on everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode we have the founder of Shutterstock, John Oringer. Thanks so much for coming on, John.

Thanks for having me.

So I know we've been back and forth on Instagram for quite some time. And you recently stepped down as CEO after 16 years. And I'd love to start the conversation because you've had such an incredible ride with Shutterstock. You guys not only built such an amazing company, but your story as an entrepreneur is phenomenal. And I want to take the time to address just why did you decide to step down and what has life been like since that decision?

Yeah, so I started Shutterstock in 2003. I had started 10 other companies at the same time. I was trying to find one that can get some traction. I wasn't planning to build anything super big. I was kind of one man show. I was a programmer, I was an entrepreneur, I was kind of an online marketer, and I kind of wore all the hats. I did the customer service, I. I took the photos, I recruited the photographers, I did the marketing emails. I improved the site. I was kind of doing everything myself, and I started to kind of learn what I was good at and what I wasn't. If you asked me back then, if 15 years later I'd be running a public company, I would have said, absolutely not. That was my skill set at the time. But what happened was every time a new challenge comes, kind of came up. I wanted to take it. So we got to 100 employees. I kept going. We went global and had multiple offices around the world. Kept going, we added more product lines, kept going. It was kind of working. What started to happen, though? Well, we went public and I figured, yeah, I'll be a public company CEO. Why not? How hard could that be? And so I just kind of kept going with it. But what started to happen was we started to add more employees, add more complexity. The competitive environment was getting more complex. Our customers needs were getting more complex. We had so many different types of customers, from independent graphic designers, independent businesses, one man shops, all the way up to the biggest companies on the planet. I started to realize I was a bit out of my skill set. This was 14 years in. And so I started building my team in a way that I had some succession, planning. I could. I could start to offload stuff I wasn't good at. Managing a thousand employees around the world is a different skill set than starting a company from scratch.

Very interesting man when it comes to just recently with the transition, you talk about, you know, you started Shutterstock by accident. What was that process like in your life back then when you had 10 different projects going on? And why did you decide to stick with Shutterstock and go all in there?

So it had to do with traction. I was solving my own problem. So I was a software developer. I was building software. I needed to market the software. So I would get images, I would take images. I had a security software product line, pop up Eliminator with would kill the pop ups. Spyware protector would delete the spyware as it was coming onto your computer. The firewall would protect you from traffic kind of coming in that wasn't supposed to come in. These things would run in your browser and they would kind of keep you Safe. This was 1997, right? The company was called Surf Secret. I needed images. I would take them because they were too expensive. I needed images I can use globally. The images that were sold online at the time by the incumbent competitors we still have today were only allowed to be used specific geographic areas. This was the Internet, it was global. So I started taking pictures of people frustrated, punching their keyboard. I hate these pop ups. I would create the marketing email and I would send this thing out. And I realized that the images sold the thing. It was the thing I was using to communicate. And there wasn't a really good product for this. So I didn't realize I was gonna be the one that would, that would, that would take traction over Surf Secret. But turns out Shutterstock was the one that started growing. It started doubling every single month in 2003, 2004.

Wow.

I started to realize that I really hit on the product market fit, which is the key starting any business, really.

Absolutely. What was the most challenging part of being a CEO of a publicly traded company with over a thousand employees?

Well, yeah, there's a lot of challenging parts. I mean, the biggest challenge I found was managing the company for the super long term, which you have to do as a company to be successful. And also managing the quarterly expectations. Wall street. And often they don't align. Right. You have people coming in and out of your stock and they may not be happy with what you're doing, which is running a long term, sustainable, building a durable product, running a sustainable business. And that's a hard balance. It's a hard balance to have. Every public company has that same exact problem. It's hard.

Interesting. When you were, you know, 18, 19 years old, what got you into software development? And where did that entrepreneurial drive come from?

I was from a really early age, I was obsessed with how businesses were formed and entrepreneurs and how they built what they had. I remember, you know, when I was really young going to, you know, one of the first Apple, Apple. It was called Apple Fest. It was, it was you know, like, like a conference for computing. So, so Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, like these, these were like people I was, I wanted to like, reverse engineer how they did what they did. And so I remember thinking, you know, I was in high school, I was in college. Like, I don't want to just go out and get a job. I want to hack my way into figuring out how to do this. And so I just, I read everything I could and then it just came down to trying it. I just built. I knew that programming is kind of a superpower early on, and I taught myself. And it really, I mean, it gives you, it gives you this skill set that allows you to take what you're thinking and like multiply it by a lot. And so as I started to, I just really got hooked on it. And then I wanted to sell things on the Internet and I was just trying to figure out how to sell stuff.

Love that. What's your advice to an entrepreneur who's launching a software company? What should they look out for and what's your advice to them?

Yeah, I would say that. So a lot of people have an idea, they put together a deck, they find a co founder and then they go out and they try to, you know, here's the round I'm raising. And they go out and they raise money. For better or for worse. I mean, I don't know what would have happened if I had the opportunity to actually raise money. But, you know, in New York in 2003, after September 11, after the dot com bubble burst, there was no one giving anyone money to start something on the Internet. So it didn't exist. So I had to be good at everything. I had to. And the things that I knew I wasn't good at, I did it anyway. Like, I'm not a good customer service person. I can't. But talking to my customers was one of the most important things I did really early on because I was able to iterate on the product really quickly. I wasn't, you know, I'm not a designer. So the website looked, looked really bad, even going the Wayback Machine. And there are some bad shutterstock versions from back in 2003, 2004 for 2005 that were online. But they worked because I was fast. I would iterate and I would react really quickly to what my customers wanted. And so I think there's like a different dynamic there when that happens, when you have to figure it out yourself. Even today, I go back and I think about those times and I still am able to, I think, connect with the customer in a different way because of those early experiences that I had. And I think those are important. So I would say to any entrepreneur, just be every job in the beginning, take it all on yourself. Even though you're not going to be good at some of that stuff, the learnings early on are going to be so important. And today you can do it cheaper than ever. You can aws. I had to go rack servers in a data center. Today you can just go on AWS and Bing. You have five servers. Like that didn't happen back then. And so it's so much easier today. I mean, with that comes a lot more competition.

Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask you just for reference too, because, you know, when you Launched Shutterstock In 2003, I was three years old. I'm 19 now. And the landscape has shifted when it comes to the way people launch companies with all the access and technology. So if you were to launch a company today with the resources, where do you start and what are you excited about moving forward into this new chapter in your life?

Yeah, well, it's a lot more crowded today, but at the same time there's a lot more users. I mean, in 2003, you didn't have everyone on the Internet. It wasn't even close. You had small fraction of people using a browser. Right. So today you have to move fast. Today you probably do need to raise money, but you should still follow that principle of actually doing each job yourself because that combination is going to be really powerful to really have that connection to the customer early on and also have enough dry powder in terms of cash to really expand into the space because it's so much bigger today than back then. I think you can mix those two things together. You don't have to say, look, I don't know how to create a website, so I'm just going to hire a team to create a website. But it's actually changing the elements on the website as you're listening to your customers and what they need. That's going to be the key to really iterating fast and getting somewhere big. Love that.

What's been just when it comes to leadership. Right. Building a team, going from someone that's trying to do everything, learning all their skill sets. When did you start to delegate and focus on your strengths? And how do you advise an entrepreneur to do that?

Yeah, well, I've probably been bad at delegating since the beginning. Skill set I. I wish I had more of the ultimate delegation is hiring a CEO. So I did it.

Yep. Love it.

But early on, it was hard. It's hard because you build this thing, you know, the customer, you're doing everything. It's live or die. And handing that off to someone else is hard. But it's really hard to scale if you don't do it. I mean, there were times that I was really just like, there were no more hours left in the day. That's not good. You can't do that. As an entrepreneur, I would not recommend that. But the second you can kind of take something, mechanize it, hand it off, that's when you should hand it. Once you have it compartmentalized into something that can be handed off, you have to do it. You have to do it to scale. It's hard.

I have to ask you, just what would you say are three fundamental business principles that you've learned through your journey that you'd want someone to learn today?

Yeah, so I would. I think it's do every job yourself. I think it's in the beginning, before you delegate, just so you know, you're really close to each of those pieces. I would say limit the amount of capital you take to only what you need. This kind of idea of like when the markets are good, stockpiling capital, I do not think that that's the way to go. I think when you have the business humming, you get what you need, you limit your dilution, and you don't go for the crazy valuations that'll kill you later. You really just use what you need and you use every single penny as efficiently as possible. You really, really keep track of costs. I think that's really important. I'd say third is just iterate like hell. Iterate. Just constantly test, constantly get feedback, constantly make changes, and you'll get to a better place at the end. You'll get there faster than your competitors will. I mean, the kind of slow, methodical, analysis paralysis way does not work. It just doesn't. You gotta move quick. You can think about launching a certain product feature forever, and then it'll be too late. Sometimes you gotta just get it out there. You gotta test it. You gotta get out to 25% of your traffic and just test it. That's when you really start to start to know what's going on and when you can do that faster than your competitor. That's how Shutterstock got big. That's why there's some competitors of Shutterstock that started in 2003 also that are not around today. We're able to move fast.

Love that. So I want to Be very tactical when it comes to launching a software company. You recommend putting out a product, not making it perfect and getting the customer's feedback.

Is that correct? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Getting the customer's feedback and iterating. I mean you can overanalyze and then never launch. And it's really important. Get something out there, test it, see what happens. And it's going to be different. It's not going to be the thing that you thought you're going to launch.

Yeah, interesting.

Launch it. You're going to get the data a thousand iterations later. It's gonna be something you cannot predict.

Love it. Did you have any like mentors in the tech world that you were close with as you built Shutterstock?

I mean I kept close to other entrepreneurs but I was really heads down for all those years just driving the business, driving the network effect, getting photographers, getting buyers, changing the product and rinse, repeat.

What was like the, you know, the, the lifestyle as you're growing this company? Because you know, there's a lot of young entrepreneurs that they want to, they want to know behind the scenes like what was John Oranger doing day to day and what was his, you know, his day to day habits that he was implementing to really grow the company?

I would, I would work when it, when it made sense. Like I didn't have, I didn't have specific hours, I didn't have, you know, I would work when it makes sense. I would work out when it makes sense. I would go somewhere when it made sense. Like I would go with what my body was telling me, with my, what my mind was telling me. I wasn't forcing it. You know, I worked from remote sometimes, I worked in the office sometimes. I constantly used my competitors products. I used my own product every day. I still use Shutterstock, just, just I find stuff, I mean it's, it's important to always be in it. I guess that's the thing. There's no real rule. I mean you just gotta like whatever works. Sometimes I would just, you know, it would be 10 o' clock at night, I would have some inspiration. I'd be up all night coding. Just some days that happens. Love that.

Just regarding, you know, recently stepping down, hiring a CEO, that's the ultimate form of delegation. In your words. Where do you spend your time now with that transition?

Yeah, so I'm still the largest shareholder of Shutterstock. It's a public company. I own about 45% of it. So I'm chairman, I'm executive chairman actually. And I spend about half my Time with Shutterstock. I spend a lot of time with Stan, he's the CEO. I spend the rest of my time investing. I spend some time thinking about what I'm going to incubate and start. I'm thinking a lot about that zero to one kind of thing when I started Shutterstock and how I could put a lot of things into market. Have a lot of CEOs doing that with me. So I'm constantly looking for talent and for ideas to figure out how to make that happen. This is relatively new, though. I mean, April 1st was the day. So I'm about 45 days into not being CEO after 16 years. So I'm trying to take it so I don't want to jump into too, too fast. But at the same time, I'm going to do it like I did before. It's going to be fast, it's going to be things in market. It's going to be quick iteration. It's going to be knowing the customer. I'm going to train CEOs to do what I did early on.

Very cool. So when you're investing into a company, what do you look for as an investor when deploying your capital?

I like marketplaces. I look for network effects. I look for businesses with entrepreneurs that run through walls. I look for entrepreneurs. I like to iterate. I look for everything I've been talking about in another person. That's what it takes. Love that.

I want to touch on just, you know, the current state of the economy. How has this allowed you guys to pivot? Especially at Shutterstock with it happening? You guys are based in New York. It's really bad out there. How has this current situation with COVID 19 affected you guys and how have you been able to pivot?

Yeah, it hasn't been that hard for us because we've always been. I mean, we're a tech company from the start. We use all of Google's tools. So what's crazy is for years that little Google Meet link has been in every one of our meetings. And we would even sometimes if someone was running late and they were in the same building, they would dial it to the meeting. So we were always like, kind of flexible that way in that the meeting had to happen. But getting to the meeting, like from remote, you could be in the same office and like, I don't have time. Like, I had to work right up into the next meeting. I don't have any time to find that person. Like, I'm just gonna bring them here. And so the culture was kind of Built in. So when we left the office back march, like 13th or whatever it was, it was like it was instant and it was okay. And I mean, we're lucky. We have a business that is driven by people working on screens, so it's not that affected either. And so it happened pretty naturally. And so it's really starting to get us thinking. Like, I don't know how much office space we really need. We have 17 offices around the world or something like that. Definitely over 50. It's like close to 15 or a couple more. And I don't know if we need all this. Like, we need salespeople in the field to sell. They need to meet with their clients. But you know, I talk to people every day now and they're pretty happy. They don't have that hour long commute in the morning and the afternoon.

That's very cool.

It's kind of wild how much more they can do. Yeah, that's great. I think it's definitely. It's going to change so many tech companies.

Yeah. I wanted to ask, what is the future of tech companies and working remotely and how do you see that? Jack Dorsey tweeted how the employees of Twitter can work remotely forever however long they want to. So how do you see the landscape of working from home moving forward?

Yeah, I think we're gonna learn a lot through this. There was always the. We always had people working from home. We always had people working from remote. We had a global teams, so we had to, we had to work from remote. But this is, this is different. This is, this. I mean, it was like a click of. It was like a switch turned and everyone had to work from remote. And it was a crazy task. And now it's pretty wild. It, it's crazy how naturally it happened and how naturally we work every day. I think a lot of things are going to change. I think people are going to. It's going to. It's going to be the kind of thing where you want those extra two hours. You're commuting, you want to work instead, that's fine. You know, it'll be, you know, we need to get together as a group. We're going to get together a group in this meeting. You know, everyone has to be in person because we're doing a strategy session. It's like an off site. It's two days. Like you got to come. So it's going to be like, it's going to be really clear as to what we need to do. But this whole idea that everybody has to come to an office every day. I think I'm surprised.

That's an interesting insight.

Not for work. That way. Yeah.

Do you remember, like, where were you at on the day you went public? And what was that day like for you? Because that's something every entrepreneur thinks about. Hey, if I go public one day, what is it gonna feel like? How am I gonna respond to that? So where were you that day and how did you feel?

Yeah, it was 10, 11, 12. October 11, 2012, I was at the New York Stock Exchange. We were ringing the bell that morning. We rang the bell, then we walked over to the market maker that was handling our stock and watched it open. It was really exciting. It was exciting. But it was also important to realize at the time, which I know I did, because I remember thinking, this, this isn't the end. Like, sell the company. Like, you're not done. In fact, it's the beginning of a really different type of company. And it was intense. I mean, we had to, we learned fast. For a couple of years, we did mock quarters where we kind of reported to ourselves what we were doing. But once you go out there, it's rough. Being a public company is hard. It's different. You know, investors can come and go in a second, literally. It's not like it was before. And, you know, there's a lot of good side, there's a lot of good arguments going public. Also, your employees have equity they can sell, and it's very clear what the value of that equity is worth. Every quarter you have news, it's kind of cool. Every quarter there's, there's like some, you know, people are tuning in to understand what's going on with your business, which is kind of cool when you're private, you know, it's not like every quarter, you know, they're knocking at your door, which is, which is a good thing. It's, it's, you know, you have, you have, you have dozens of investors that are listening, and that's a good thing. If you're a business, you want people to be listening and you have analysts covering you. There's new rules on what you can communicate. Everybody has to learn everything at the same time. There's a lot of overhead. There's SOX compliance. There's stuff that starts to weigh you down in different ways. But at the same time, you can then use your equity to build the business, which we've done and will continue to do. It's the ultimate kind of, kind of place to grow as, as a, as a medium to large sized company. I mean, there are a few companies that figured out how to be private forever.

When did you decide you guys were gonna go public? And what, you know, what made that decision clear?

Yeah, it was. It was probably around 2009, 2010. People didn't know how big we were. We were pretty under that. We were really under the radar. I mean, we were. No one knew we were hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. No one knew how. You know, people kind of discounted this when they're like, stock photos, you know, like, you know, they made fun of them. They didn't really know how big. It's a big market, right? People can't afford to always do their own photo shoot, and visuals are what sells everything. So I think it was good in that, you know, we were allowed to kind of grow and under the radar, we were kind of this elephant, you know, fighting. And then. And then we just. We wanted to get out there. We wanted to get out there to get the bigger clients because bigger clients wanted to know how.

How.

How solid of a business we were. We wanted to get out there because we wanted to use our equity to do M and A. We wanted to get out there so that our employees can get some liquidity. And so that was the reasoning behind it. And I knew it would put us on the map. There wasn't like a. We were one of the first big New York businesses to get out there. And it was fun. You know, there was, you know, for many years, we had this amazing tailwind where we could hire anyone we wanted. You know, we were like the New York company. We still are. There's a lot of companies that have since grown and become bigger than we are in New York. And that's great. Also helps the whole ecosystem. But back then, I knew that when we went out, we were going to be. It was going to be big news. And so it was good. It built our brand, built the company up. We went from 230 million that first year of revenue to over 600 in the latest year.

How did you handle that growth personally? And what were some of the, you know, the personal changes you had to make during that exponential growth period?

Well, I mean, like I said earlier, I was always challenging myself. I always wanted to. I didn't want to. I didn't want to not be good at it. Right. So I tried to figure out how to do it. I mean, public company CEO, it's an interesting job. You need to suddenly run your company in the public spotlight. You need to. And suddenly you have, you know, different stakeholders you didn't have before public investors, the analysts, regulators, things like that. So I had to adapt. But you know, a few years in, I started to realize there's probably a CEO in our future that's not me. I started to realize that's okay. I mean, you know, there's plenty of things to be good at. Don't have to be good at running a thousand person public company. Right. You can be, you know, you can kind of isolate in on what you want to get better at even. And that's what I kind of realized over the past few years is I want to, I want to be more in the 0 to 1 game. I want to start more stuff. I want to continue to be good at that. But at the same time, 16 years of Shutterstock knowledge is not going anywhere. And I still work with the company and Stan the CEO and our entire board in a different way. And I think I could be more productive actually this way even half the time than I was full time as CEO.

That's very cool. Moving into this new chapter in your life. What are you excited about with this new time you have and you know, creating those new products? What excites you?

I think it's the 0 to 1 game. It's starting new stuff that's what excites me the most. I mean, I make investments here or there. I mean entrepreneur, I like, I want to put some money behind them. That's exciting. The real thing I'm looking forward to though is starting something. And so I'm looking at a whole bunch of different spaces and kind of thinking over all the issues that I've dealt with at Shutterstock that have, that don't have solutions that we had to build bespoke solutions for. So just like I was thinking back in 2003, wouldn't it be nice to have a subscription image service where I can get whatever I needed whenever I wanted it? I'm thinking about the problems I had at Shutterstock over the past 10 years. Running a company that's that big, there are solutions missing in the market. There are plenty of problems, really big ones, really like multi billion dollar problems out there that need to be solved that have not solved yet.

What are just regarding those multi billion dollar problems, do you have any, you know, key industries that stick out to you that you want to pursue?

Yeah, I mean I look a lot at like DevOps type stuff like data center to cloud migration, for instance. There's still so many businesses that are, that are in data centers that need to move to the cloud and it's not easy. It's like the total headache. You have to, you have to remove people from revenue generating opportunities at your business to do this data center migration all of a sudden. And code that was built even 10 years ago, if you didn't build it for AWS, is not ready for AWS, it's not ready for Azure, it's not ready for the cloud. So you need to. That whole area, there's so many different tools and services that can be worked on there. I think that's really big. I think there's a lot of companies that have not done that move and that need to do that move and they will be doing that move. So I think that's going to be a big area. So I would put that in like the DevOps data center to cloud migration kind of world. Another area I'm looking at is telemedicine. The behavior change that's going on right now with COVID 19 is insane. I don't think we're going back. It's kind of wild. You can, you know, like, I mean, I wasn't even able to email with my doctor before. Now they want to meet on Zoom. Like it's pretty cool. And this is going to be a new normal. I mean, you know, going to a waiting room and waiting, you know, and there are a lot of things, I mean, obviously you can't get your blood drawn through a Zoom teleconference, but you can diagnose other things. I mean, if you look at the entire behavioral therapy space, you know, like, why can't, why does that have to be in person? Yeah, there's plenty of opportunities to make that better. Also just routine medical visits. Like if you can get the measurement on the other side of the screen, imagine how much more you can do. Your patient could be anywhere. So I'm thinking a lot about that. I don't think people are going back. People have to visit doctors, of course, but there's plenty of, I mean, think about dermatology.

I just, I had an appointment with us on Zoom with a dermatologist and it was the first time I ever did something like that.

Yeah, how, like how did we not do that before?

Yeah, very cool. I was asking myself, I was like, oh, I need to go to dermatologist. Dermatologist. And then this happened and then, you know, looked it up online, found the right service and it was the easiest, straight to the point solution, got my medicine and that was that. So that's very cool.

There you go. I think all this stuff has changed. It's changed for the better. It's changed permanently. I think there was a lot of resistance before. People didn't really know, like there was a stigma attached to it. Is it gonna work? Is it as safe? Is it. I mean, and you just had doctors saying no to everything. That's gonna change. So that's an area I'm looking at. A few other areas also I'm looking at, but those are the two big ones.

Cool. Well, I want to be respectful of your time, John. Last question before we wrap up. Everyone has their own definition of success, but I want to ask you, what does success mean to you?

Success to me. Being able to wake up whenever I want, work whenever I want, work hard, build stuff, but do it at my own pace and do what I want. I think that's successful.

Love it. That being said, where is the best place for people to stay updated on the new projects you're working on and where they. Where can they stay up to date with you on social or let them know?

Yeah, I think Twitter. Follow me John Oranger on Twitter. Maybe Instagram as well. Those are two good spots. Perfect. Foreign.

Legacy of Monsters An Apple Original Series the world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me, the most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise. Monarch Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV.

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