Shutterstock CEO and founder Jon Oringer, center, and Squarespace CEO and founder, Anthony Casalena, … [+]
Taking your startup public isn’t a requirement to building a billion-dollar business — maybe, ever.
Shutterstock CEO Jon Oringer and Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena, who each started their companies with about $30,000, shared some of what they’ve learned with an audience of young entrepreneurs at Forbes’ 30 Under Summit on Monday in Detroit. IPOs were one area where the two weren’t entirely in agreement, at least in terms of timing.
“If you’re able to do it, eventually it’s going to happen. If you’re successful, you’re going to be out, but it’s an intimidating process,” Oringer said. “I was sitting there in 2012 saying ‘it would be nice to have that kind of instrument for my employees. It would be good to have kind of transparency for the enterprise customers that we are trying to build the business into.’ And we just kind of went for it.”
Seven years later his view is a bit more mixed.
“It is not the most fun thing to be public, but it gives you a lot of optionality as to how you’re going to build a business for the better. There have been moments where I wish I could go back, but it is what it is,” he said. “I say do it as soon as possible.”
Shutterstock shares rose 4.8% to $38.08 in New York Stock Exchange trading on Monday, boosting its market cap to $1.34 billion. Shares are up 72% from their debut in 2012 date, but half of what they were at their 2014 peak.
Squarespace, privately valued at more than $1 billion and a member of the Forbes Cloud 100, hasn’t gone down that path yet and Casalena isn’t sure it needs to anytime soon.
“We’re at a size where we could be public, with about half a billion in revenue this year, a little bit over 1,000 employees and profitable these days,” he said. “For us, because there’s isn’t an immediate need to raise more capital for the business … just making sure that we do that at the right time where we really feel like our business model is going to be valuable. And we’ve got some control over our growth rate and profit margin.”
Should the stars align, “hopefully we’ll be in charge of a public company, but otherwise, there’s no rush to raise capital or anything like that.”
On the marketing front, both CEOs said their companies are benefiting from social media and personality-driven promotion.
“People have always followed and cared about certain kinds of personalities, whether a personality is a radio host, whether that person is a TV host or they’re on YouTube, they have their own podcast, their Instagram,” said Casalena, whose company is particularly reliant on podcaster marketing. “We’ve always partnered with people we felt were aligned with the brand and that authentically liked our product and we thought to help promote it.”
Shutterstock sparked its own social media influencer excitement this year by using stock video and photographic imagery to recreate a multi-million dollar video that promoted the disastrous Fyre Festival, Oringer said. Led mainly by Instagram influencers, the company’s $3,000 video quickly went viral.
“We weren’t really trying to do anything that dramatic but this thing spread virally in amazing way. We kind of realized that at that moment that marketing is completely different and the people that were promoting this thing, the influencers that you’re talking about are kind of helping us propagate this message,” he said. “It was a wake-up call.”
