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

All businesses need images to sell their products and services.

It turned out it was really easy to create commercial stock footage.

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

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

We sell to businesses who sell other stuff, so we're just going to concentrate on doing that.

Every time someone downloads a picture, the photographers get paid about 30% of what we charge.

There aren't enough people out there that are becoming experts in technology as technology moves.

Shutterstock has the tech ethos. Rex has the relationships, packaging, and merchandising know-how.

As I started college, I started to build software products that I could sell to people over the Web.

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

In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin.

If people want to code, and they want to be entrepreneurs, there's opportunities for them to do that.

To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting.

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

Offset is helping to expand our relationship with large enterprises and serve a broader set of imaging.

We believe PremiumBeat will accelerate our mission to make licensable music accessible to every creator.

We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription.

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

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

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

I love meeting contributors and hearing how we inspire them to create art. I'm also proud of creating hundreds of jobs.

I hear so many startups talking about how they can raise VC instead of questioning whether they need it in the first place.

We look for the scrappy entrepreneur: the kind of person who will get things done without looking to spend money right away.

I opened up Shutterstock to the whole world. I created a contributor community that anyone could give stock photography a shot.

I believe anything has to be possible. You have to be able to face any problem that comes along and unravel it into a solution.

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

I think, as an entrepreneur, you have to see the unlimited amount of potential but concentrate on your day and just keep building.

By investing in diverse asset types from SD video to HD video to 4K video, we can satisfy the video needs of a wide array of users.

There's tonnes of room for more people in the tech market, and there are lots of content gaps that have still not yet been tapped into.

On average, an e-commerce client who evolves into a premier enterprise client increases their annual spend by 10 times in that first year.

Many entrepreneurs think that cash is the ultimate solution to all of their problems: the one thing standing between them and their dreams.

Editorial imagery licensing includes celebrity, entertainment, sports, and news images that capture what is happening in the world around us.

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.

Equally important to having the right content is providing the proper tools for the users so they can quickly find the images and videos they need.

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.

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.

Offset and Skillfeed are examples of products launched in 2013 that have expanded our opportunity with both large enterprises and across new content types.

Business is a string of seemingly impossible problems looking for solutions. Each problem you solve creates a new barrier to entry for your next competitor.

It's typical for video customers to often use licensed music - whether a soundtrack, background music, or sound effects - to complement their video projects.

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.

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.

Rex is 60 years old with 13 million images and 10 million in archive. It's the first time we've had a historic archive to work with, which is super interesting.

I was trying to create products to complement the pop-up blocker. All these people were giving me their credit cards. I figured I could sell them something else.

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

I needed to make the buyer happy: I needed to provide a price point and sort of a model that was attractive to them. But I also needed to make the contributor happy.

I started Shutterstock out of my own need. I'd previously created a few software companies, and each time, I struggled to find affordable images to use on my websites.

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.

I figured managing people was obvious - I'd tell someone what they needed to do and they'd do what I wanted. It turns out that's not the case. It was frustrating at first.

Each time I went to create my website, I needed imagery. It was complicated to get, the process was expensive, I had to negotiate rights. I knew there had to be a better way.

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