The problem with taking venture capital is if you take $5m from someone, it may feel great; you may feel like they're validating your business model. But they're giving $5m out to 20 different people, hoping one of them will be a hit. They don't really care if it's you.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Any business that is trying to sell something should be willing to spend a couple dollars for a stock photo to not have ads in it and not distract the user from using the product they're trying to sell.

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