Jon Oringer's last company failed. In the early days of the Internet, Oringer built a pop-up blocker for web browsers. We take for granted now that only rarely do unwanted web pages launch themselves on our screens. That's because all the major browsers now include a pop-up blocker. And that's why Oringer went out of business. The software he built and sold became irrelevant overnight when Microsoft added the feature directly into Internet Explorer, the dominant browser at the time.

But Oringer didn't shut down empty-handed. His marketing efforts had depended on stock images that he either had to license or create himself. It was a time consuming process not made easy by the existing photography agencies. 

"I knew that their was some sort of problem here with getting these images to creatives," said Oringer. In response, he created Shutterstock, a stock photo company. "I went out and over the course of year shot over 30,000 images, put them up on a website and created a subscription." He thought, if he was having this problem, then others must be too.

"Everything around me became some image that someone could use in a business to sell something else," he said. Eleven years and 400 million sold photos later, Shutterstock is a public company worth more than $2.5 billion dollars and one of the most successful on New York's technology scene. 

Charlie Herman, host of WNYC's Money Talking sat down with Oringer to discuss how to foster start-up worthy creativity in a company with more than 500 employees, why venture capital is the wrong way to measure success and whether activity on Shutterstock can be used to predict the next big news story.