This is article from BBC on someone here in NY I have never heard of with a company I have never heard of either...and supposedly "Silicon Alley"'s first billionaire..
How Jon Oringer became Silicon Alley's first billionaire
Jon
Oringer, 39, founded 10 companies before he hit on the idea for
Shutterstock, the successful stock-photo website that has made him
Silicon Alley's first billionaire.
Now, after a successful stock market debut in October 2012 and with more than 28 million photos, videos and illustrations in its vast database, shares in Mr Oringer's Shutterstock are soaring.
With an ownership stake estimated at more than 55% of the company, Mr Oringer has become the first billionaire to come out of Silicon Alley - New York's thriving tech sector - with an estimated net wealth of $1.05bn (£682m).
Courting failure
Mr Oringer did not start out aiming to get involved in the stock photography trade.
He had been working on software that would stop unwanted windows from opening while browsing the internet - so-called pop-up blockers that are now automatically installed in most browsers like Firefox and Chrome.
"I was creating software at the time and I was trying to get people to renew their subscription. I needed images of just general stuff to send out and I started to realise that this stuff was hard to get," remembers Mr Oringer of the way he came up with the idea for Shutterstock in 2003.
Some of Shutterstock's most successful images dot the office's walls
Those companies, like Getty Images, were tailored mostly for news agencies and were expensive for smaller companies just looking for a simple photograph of an apple or a skyline.
So with a couple of thousand dollars and no real formal photography background, Mr Oringer bought himself a good camera and started placing adverts on Craigslist for models.
Continue reading the main story
Jon Oringer"Photography's changing and lots of different things about photography are changing all the time”
He wandered the streets of his
hometown, New York City, and eventually, the globe, looking for pretty
much the exact opposite of what most tourists are after - the most
mundane shot, the most generic view.
"The turning point was when I couldn't keep up with the demand any more," says Mr Oringer.
Hometown pride
He did all of this from his home base in Manhattan.
"People were wondering why I didn't go out to Silicon Valley and enter the start-up machinery right away," he says of his decision to stay put in New York - a radical idea for a start-up, particularly back in 2003.
"Part of it was that I was fortunate that I didn't need to raise money."
Unlike many technology companies, Shutterstock was founded with no initial outside investment, in fact with barely any investment at all, just the few thousand dollars needed to buy a camera and to rent a tiny office space.
Shutterstock sells stock photos to its members, who use them to illustrate their websites and newsletters
He would listen to customer complaints and offer refunds, noting areas where he thought the business could be improved.
Even when he hired his first employees, he did not go for the obvious and recruit photographers. Instead, he employed engineers, a challenge in New York, before relinquishing any control of the rest of Shutterstock's product.
"I wanted to create this thing the way I wanted to create it," says Mr Oringer.
"At the time it worked and I was able to do this with thousands of dollars, not millions of dollars."
Shutterstock now has more than 250 employees on four floors in Manhattan
In addition to allowing him control, by refusing the cushion of often-lucrative outside funding, Mr Oringer says he was focused on profits from the very start - unlike tech companies such as Twitter and Foursquare, who have struggled with revenue generation.
It is an approach that has paid off.
Shutterstock now sells images to 750,000 customers in more than 150 countries, and raked in more than $47.5m in profits last year - a 117% increase.
And the future looks bright. The company estimates that the market for digital images - photos, videos and illustrations - will grow to be more than $6bn in 2016, from $4bn now.
"Photography's changing and lots
of different things about photography are changing all the time," says
Mr Oringer, noting that as newspapers and traditional outlets for
photographers have shut down or pared back, Shutterstock has provided a
valuable source of revenue generation for its members.
More than 40,000 artists submit images and videos to the
Shutterstock marketplace, responding to real-time data that tells them
what the site's members are looking for - a picture of a cat, for
instance.As those cat photos are downloaded, the photographer makes a cut of the fee that Shutterstock's members pay.
The company estimates that more than $150m has been paid to its contributors, allowing many to make submitting images to the site a full-time job.
Shutterstock's offices look like a start-up straight out of Silicon Valley, with the requisite white board
While Mr Oringer's wealth has obviously spurred headlines and congratulatory pats on the back from New York's biggest tech boosters, he remains modest about his success.
When asked about his billionaire status, he grimaces - and tries to change the subject.
The only real extravagance he has allowed himself has been the pursuit of his passion - helicopters.
He recently became a certified pilot and bought himself a helicopter, which he flies to areas including the Hudson River valley, just north of the city.
He is fascinated by helicopter machinery and likens it to his first "business" - repairing computers in his parents' house as a teenager.
That business model "wasn't scalable", he says with a laugh.
The reality is, beyond a summer internship in college, he has never had a traditional job.
Although he admits: "This may be a real job now."
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