I loved Unsplash as a product, I loved it’s impact, I loved it’s mission.
Unsplash started as a Tumblr blog, and grew like weed into something fantastic. High quality, royalty free stock photography, diven by community.
As soon as we discovered Unsplash we started using their images for our blogs. It solved a painful issue for content creators’ elegantly, namely how to find non-cheesy, unique imagery that was royalty free.
I realised just how important a product Unsplash was when one of my companies received a legal shakedown from a copyright agency working on behalf of a $5 Billion US media company. We had used an image owned by this media company unintentionally, found through google images. It was a cropped picture of a painting, used on a blog post back in 2013. We had already removed the image from the blog, but using Wayback Machine, this agency still sent a legal threat: pay $1500 to settle or see in you in New York court. It felt like legal extortion. It was infuriating but we paid and learned our lesson.
When I had the opportunity to invest in Unsplash in 2018 I was an immediate yes. I loved being able to back a company that had dreamed of a better way for content creators to to create. Their product was fantastic, and their library of content was growing rapidly. Also their API strategy made sense, we had plans to integrate the Unsplash image library directly into SmartrMail’s email composer (similar to Medium above).
I was suprised when they sold to Getty in 2021, but also completely understood it from the founders’ and teams’ perspectives. The amount was confidential but it was a good uplift multiple from raise valuation. They’d never did the “huge VC Series A/B/C” route, and without mountains of VC cash, running lean can wear you down. In my opinion, compared to what they had raised, the exit was a very good number.
“Thank you for your belief in us. I know we didn’t follow the typical path to creating a company but you helped us make something that shook an entire industry.” — Mikael Cho, Co-founder & CEO of Unsplash
From an investment perspective it was a good outcome, but I was glad just to be a part of the ride. Thanks Mikael and team for building such a cool thing.
