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

In high school, I used to teach guitar and fix computers by the hour. I was looking for some way to make some cash, so I actually learned how to play guitar in order to try to teach it.

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.

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

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.

The best thing is to go public only when you're absolutely sure that's the right move for the company. And in order to make sure that is the case, you need to have as much control over the company as possible, which means not giving up control early on.

When a user signs up for Skillfeed, they get unlimited access to thousands of video courses and creative and technical skills, all as a part of one inexpensive monthly subscription. Instructors from around the world can apply to have their course from Skillfeed and earn money based on how much their courses are viewed.

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.

The growing demand for content across our platform delivers bigger payouts to our contributor base and encourages them to upload fresh content to Shutterstock, further facilitating the network effect of our business.

Was I going to start companies outside of Shutterstock or inside? Going public kind of meant I was going to start them inside, and I kind of thought this through and decided that if I was going to do that, I was going to continue to operate Shutterstock like it was an incubator of startups.

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.

As I saw more and more people buying the images that were happy buyers, and people selling the images that were happy with how the market was pricing them, I started to get the sense this could be the go-to place for businesses to get the images they need.

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.

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

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

You can't be afraid of the problem. Don't be afraid of failure; don't be afraid to make mistakes. Make sure you learn from each step; iterate, and stay as efficient as possible without being paralyzed by a difficult situation.

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

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

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.

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

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

I would still rather be in Silicon Alley. I like the West Coast also, but it's sort of fragmented. You have companies in downtown San Francisco, companies in Mountain View, and people are driving between them all. It's kind of nice in New York to just jump in a cab and reach another company so easily.

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.

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

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.

I started Shutterstock without any outside funding; I believe in creating a lean startup. By not taking outside investors early, I was forced to use every dollar I had as efficiently as possible. And I was able to keep a large part of the company.

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.

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

We continually hear from our engaged customer base that Shutterstock's content is a true differentiator, given not only the size of the library but also the quality and diversity of the images we offer.

At around 50 employees, you get to the point where you can't see what's going on all the time. So you start to have weekly check-ins, and you have days that go by without knowing exactly what's going on.

At Shutterstock, we've been offering tutorials to customers and contributors on our blog for many years. Our audience already viewed us as thought leaders on the latest digital and creative skills; we felt it so natural for us to launch Skillfeed, which is an online marketplace for professional learning.