The lobby of the Empire State building is as spectacular as the view from the top, a marble and gold homage to the 1930s. Stepping out of the art deco elevator and into the 21st-floor offices of Shutterstock, an online marketplace for stock imagery, feels incongruous, like fast-forwarding 80 years.

帝国大厦(Empire State Building)大厅的壮观程度绝不亚于大厦顶层风光，整个大厅就像以大理石和黄金向20世纪30年代致敬。步出装饰派艺术风格的电梯，走入网络库存照片市场Shutterstock在21层的办公室，让人产生一种不适应之感，就像时光快进了80年。

The glamour is gone, replaced by minimalist white walls and glass cubicles. Everyone is wearing jeans and casual shirts apart from one male employee, dressed in a pink tutu for a party later that evening (it is, to be fair, fancy dress).

室内装修一改华丽风格，代之以简约的白墙和玻璃隔间。每个人都是休闲衬衫配牛仔裤，只有一位男性员工除外。由于当晚要参加一个聚会，他穿了一条粉红色的芭蕾舞裙，平心而论，这确实是奇装异服。

Like many chief executives, Jon Oringer has a corner office, but the only thing he could conceivably sit behind is a drum-kit. Welcome to start-up land.

与许多首席执行官一样，乔恩•奥林杰(Jon Oringer)的办公室也在角落，但他看上去唯一能让人想到的职业就是鼓手。欢迎来到创新王国。

Yet Shutterstock, founded by Mr Oringer in 2003, is in some ways the antithesis of a tech start-up. It is in New York, not Silicon Valley. It has made a profit from day one. And it has never taken money from a venture capitalist.

但奥林杰于2003年创建的Shutterstock在某些方面完全不像科技创新公司。它的总部在纽约而不在硅谷，它从第一天就开始盈利，而且它从没接受过风险资本家的投资。

“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,” he says.

奥林杰说：“接受风投的问题在于，如果你从某人那儿获取了500万美元投资，感觉可能很棒，你可能觉得他们认可了你的商业模式。但他们给20个人都投了500万美元，希望其中一个能大获成功。他们并不真正在乎成功的是不是你。”

Instead Mr Oringer, now 40, “bootstrapped” his business with his own savings. “If you’re sitting there with your own money from your own bank account, it’s live or die by that cash. You’re going to do whatever it takes.”

于是奥林杰（现年40岁）用自己的积蓄“自力更生”地办起了公司。“如果你花的是自己银行账户里自己的存款，死活就那些钱。你只能全力以赴。”

Today Shutterstock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of $2.6bn. Mr Oringer still owns close to half the company, making him one of the first paper billionaires in “Silicon Alley”.

Shutterstock已在纽交所(NYSE)上市，现在市值26亿美元。奥林杰仍拥有公司近一半股权，令他成为“硅巷”(Silicon Alley)首批账面上的亿万富翁之一。

Shutterstock was his 11th start-up, borne out of a frustration he experienced building the others: a lack of affordable stock imagery. “The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images . . . and they were very expensive.” A picture would cost $1,000 and could be used only in the US, he says. “The internet didn’t work that way.”

Shutterstock是奥林杰的第11次创业，它的诞生源于奥林杰在之前创业中所遭遇过的挫折：买不起图片。“营销的最佳方式是发电子邮件和打横幅广告，但我需要图片……而图片非常贵。”一张图片的价格为1000美元，而且仅限在美国使用。他说：“这在互联网上行不通。”

So he bought a digital SLR camera “for a thousand bucks” and shot 30,000 images. “From the minute I woke up the camera was around my neck and I would shoot everything – my breakfast, coffee, computer – whatever was around me would become an image.

于是他“花1000块美金”买了台数码单反相机，然后拍了3万张相片。“我从起床那刻起，脖子上就挂着照相机。我什么都拍，我的早餐、咖啡、电脑……我把身边的一切都拍成相片。

“I got enough shots that people started to download them – big agencies I recognised – and realised I was on to something. Even with my bad photos I was selling subscriptions for $39 a month or something.

“我的照片多到人们开始下载，其中不乏知名广告公司，于是我意识到自己干出了名堂。我拍的照片很烂，但即便这些烂照片每个月订阅费都能要价39美元左右。

“That’s when I decided to stop taking pictures myself and to see how many people I could get to contribute. The photographers started pouring in. I basically put up a page and said: ‘I’m making this amount of money shooting photos, and you can too’.”

“从那时起我决定不再自己拍照，开始调查自己能找到多少名图片投稿者。摄影师蜂拥而来。我所做的只是创建了一个页面，告诉大家：‘我拍照片赚了这么多钱，你也能’。”

Now the images are provided by 70,000 professional and amateur photographers, and the subscriptions have gone up to $250, with about 30 per cent of revenues going back to the people taking the photos.

现在Shutterstock有7万名专业及业余摄影师提供图片，订阅费也涨到250美元，约30%的收入归照片拍摄者所有。

Once they have paid their subscription, a typical customer can download around 750 images a month. The company reported net income of $5.3m on revenues of $83.7m in its most recent quarter.

客户完成订阅支付后，每月一般可以下载约750张图像。Shutterstock在上一季度财报中公布其收入为8370万美元，净利润为530万美元。

Once a photographer submits their image it is checked for quality and decency before being uploaded to the site – but the company has a light-touch approach when it comes to turning photos away on the grounds of taste (there are images that would make some people blush).

摄影师提交图片后，Shutterstock会先审核图片质量以及内容是否得体，然后才上传到网上。但在依据品位拒绝照片方面（有些图片会令部分人脸红心跳），该公司采取了一种“低干涉”方式。

“Ultimately there’s a fine line there. We don’t want to be censoring. We don’t take stuff that’s beyond a certain level, of course, definitely not anything illegal, but there are different levels of conservatism all around the world when it comes to imagery. So, at some point we have to leave it to the buyer to decide what they’re comfortable with.”

“我们终究还是有界线的。我们不想被封杀。我们不接受超出一定限度的作品，违法的当然也不行。可是世界各地对图片的保守程度不同，所以有些时候我们得让买家自己决定他们是否舒服。”

Asked to name the people he most admires in business, Mr Oringer points to founders who set up their companies, took them public, and have stayed with them ever since: such as Larry Ellison of Oracle and Robert Pera of Ubiquiti Networks. “Those are the kind of companies I look at and think, in 20 years, what could we build here? Before we went public I looked around for founder-run public companies with big stakeholders and studied how they worked.”

当被问及最佩服的商界人物时，奥林杰点到了几名创始人。这些人创建了自己的公司，带领公司上市，且一直对公司不离不弃，如甲骨文(Oracle)的拉里•埃里森(Larry Ellison)，优倍快网络(Ubiquiti Networks)的罗伯特•佩拉(Robert Pera)。“我会观察这类公司，然后思考未来20年我们会发展成什么样？在我们上市前，我环顾了那些由创始人管理的、拥有大利害相关者的上市公司，研究它们如何运行。”

Has he ever been tempted to sell? “We’ve received offers from anyone you could imagine who would want to buy Shutterstock . . . but I just kept thinking that, while that amount of money could be life changing, what was I going to do after? I had a platform. I wanted to build the platform bigger, just like I do today.”

他曾动过出售公司的念头吗？“你能想到的所有可能想收购Shutterstock 的人都向我们提出过报价……但我一直在想，虽然这么多钱能彻底改变我的生活，但之后我该干什么呢？我有个了平台，我想把这个平台建得更大，正如我现在所做的。”

The company went public just over two years ago, a process that has clearly left its scars on Mr Oringer. “I like being public, but the IPO – having to educate a lot of people really quick on your company – is not fun,” he says.

Shutterstock 两年前才上市，但这个过程显然已给奥林杰留下了创伤。他说：“我想要上市，但首次公开发行(IPO)不是闹着玩，你得让一大堆人迅速了解你的公司。”

He describes meeting 100 potential investors in under a fortnight, including lots of sceptical fund managers who had been burnt by many other tech IPOs. “Given what they’ve experienced and what they’ve seen, it’s not easy. Statistically you’re not going to do what you’re saying. It’s a grind to do that from seven in the morning until seven at night for 10 days straight.”

他说自己在不到两周内见了100名潜在投资者，包括大量充满怀疑的基金经理，这些人曾在许多科技公司IPO时吃过苦头。“鉴于他们曾经的遭遇和见闻，说服他们并不容易。他们会用统计数据告诉你，虽然你现在这么讲，但以后你不会这么做的。连着10天从早7点到晚7点不断如此，简直是折磨人。”

Unlike many chief executives of public companies, Mr Oringer spends about 10 per cent of his time on investor relations thanks to a “very capable and good CFO”, allowing him to focus on strategy.

与许多上市公司的首席执行官不同，奥林杰在投资者关系上只花大约10%的时间，这多亏了“优秀能干的财务总监”，让他得以专注于经营策略。

“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.”

“有些人是连续创业者，他们只想转向下一件事。他们只想告别过去，从头开始。我有时也有这种想法，而我们的做法是在Shutterstock内搞开发，我们总是不断地推出新产品。”

A New Yorker born and bred, Mr Oringer grew up in Westchester, a well-to-do suburb, went to college on Long Island and to graduate school at Columbia University.

奥林杰是土生土长的纽约人，他在富人聚集的韦斯切斯特郊区长大，在长岛上的大学，研究生就读于哥伦比亚大学(Columbia University)。

So it is unsurprising that he is an evangelist for the city, and a firm believer that you do not have to go to Silicon Valley to launch a tech start-up.

因此也就不奇怪为何他热爱宣传纽约，以及坚信不必去硅谷也可以开科技公司。

“I like San Francisco, but I don’t think I’d want to work in Palo Alto. It seems like a pretty rough commute. In many ways, I think New York has a lot of things the West Coast doesn’t have,” he says, such as a more international workforce. “When we wanted to translate the site to Japanese in 2005 or 2006, finding bilingual people was very easy.”

他说：“我喜欢旧金山，但我觉得自己不会想在帕洛阿尔托工作。这样子通勤似乎相当辛苦。在很多方面，我认为纽约有许多东西是西海岸所不具备的。”比如更国际化的员工。“在2005年或2006年，当我们想将网站翻译成日文时，很容易就能找到双语人才。”

Before leaving the Empire State building I visit the viewing platform on floor 86. There are about 40 people there – it is a bitterly cold day – but not a single one is looking at the New York cityscape, at least not properly. Instead they are all trying to take the perfect photo, either with their smartphones or a proper camera. Maybe this is not such a strange place for Shutterstock after all.

离开帝国大厦前我去了86楼的观景平台。那天非常冷，观景平台只有40个人左右，但没一个人在看纽约的城市风光，至少没人是在专心欣赏风景。不管是用手机还是用照相机，大家全都在努力拍出完美的相片。或许Shutterstock选址在这里并没有那么奇怪吧。