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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.
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All businesses need images to sell their products and services.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Anyone can contribute images, and we sell them to designers and agencies all over the world.
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Just as we are enhancing the customer side of our marketplace, we are also looking for ways to increase our contributor expense.
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I love meeting contributors and hearing how we inspire them to create art. I'm also proud of creating hundreds of jobs.
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Every time someone downloads a picture, the photographers get paid about 30% of what we charge.
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I think that initial independence is very important; that's what being an entrepreneur is all about.
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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.
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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.
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Offset and Skillfeed are examples of products launched in 2013 that have expanded our opportunity with both large enterprises and across new content types.
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I've little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I'm a New Yorker.
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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.
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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.
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In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin.
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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.
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As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?