An interview with Jim Chou, CTO of Shutterstock

Part 5 in a series of CTO interviews

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with CTOs from very different digital media companies to understand how they think about the role, what they have in common and where they differ in approach. You can read earlier interviews with the CTOs of Vice, Salon, Digg and Hearst here.

Next up is Jim Chou, CTO of Shutterstock. I met Jim in Shutterstock’s superb new offices in the Empire State Building. I refer you to this great article in The Economist for a primer on Shutterstock’s business, but it should be pointed out that Shutterstock is one of New York’s most successful digital media startups. Launched in 2003 by founder and CEO Jon Oringer, the company stands at a nearly $3 billion market cap today and has its home in one of the most famous New York addresses.

1)We hear all the time that the pace of technological change has sped up. How has that changed the job of the CTO, particularly in digital media?

Being CTO is a pressure cooker job. You have the responsibility to keep everything running and be on the forefront of looking out for emerging technologies, while at the same time watching your competition so that you can ensure you are ahead. But, the role hasn’t changed that much. Technology cycles tend to repeat themselves over time. As Steve Jobs put it, you want to go where the hockey puck is going- not to follow, but to lead. So you have to watch out for the emerging trends and capabilities that will come forth. From that perspective you are constantly on the lookout, working the organization to prepare for the future.

No one person can be fully abreast of every single technological change or how it impacts the various facets of the business. So you want to be on the forefront, defining what the trends are, but also enabling and setting a culture that can bubble up innovations. You want to foster that: by getting people to participate in events such as hackathons, making it routine to try things and fail quickly. These are aspects of the culture you want to embed to allow people to be on the forefront on your behalf.

At the same time, you have to identify the crucial areas so that you can be sure someone is covering them. Whether it’s emerging mobile, big data, machine learning — you want to be sure that the areas that are important to your business are being watched. Timing is important, in terms of the technology cycle. Google Glass is a good example. It’s at an early stage for many applications including imaging and videos. When is it time to jump in? The CTO has a lot of influence in the timing of adoption, and when you double down.

2) You must get a thousand pitches from vendors a year, each promising you a new software or widget that will change your business. How do you filter, how do you sort, and what types of things stand out? How much do you buy vs build?

It comes down to a core set of capabilities. As an example, storage is a very important piece of our business- we have over 37 million images and 1.7M videos. We keep a close eye on the key players in the storage industry, both vendors and open-source. We line up those strategic relationships which includes emerging players — for example OpenStack. Our VP of Operations delivered a keynote at their conference in Hong Kong recently. We make sure we are evolving with our partners, helping align what we want and what they are offering.

We mostly build our own technology at Shutterstock. This approach is in part our agile model of iteration and customization. We gain a lot of momentum from this approach, versus going to a large vendor and picking up a package and doing a multi-quarter integration. We feel we can gain a lot more by getting something out there that is “good enough,” and then continue to develop it.

3) What types of time horizons are you working with when thinking of how to incorporate new technologies into the business? What technologies do you think stand the most chance to change your business in the next 3-5 years?

Similar to many organizations, our tech plan goes out three years. In this era of rapid change and disruption, three years out is already too long. We look for long term trends. For example, an important trend for Shutterstock is the notion of the camera. We have evolved from the big SLRs to smartphones that have great optic and automated functions. In the future it will get even better- the functionality and the connectivity. In a few years, instead of being a professional photographer by occupation, almost everyone can be a very good photographer. If you start to add augmented reality- information on top of images- you can start to see there is a profound effect in layered content. A photographer may differentiate by what they capture in meta data. You have to think about a lot of things that you’ll need to support these trends — what does it mean for the technology platform, taking in a lot more dense images, processing them on a real time basis.

Data is critical for us. We have the largest amount of behavioral data in our industry. We ingest over a terabyte of analytic data into our environment on a daily basis. What that means is that we have the ability to understand and use that data to benefit our customers with new features that they have not been able to use in past. That’s something we envision- the volume of information will grow exponentially over the next few years. To store that sea of data and be able to process it on a real time basis- that is not a trivial technological exercise. You see it in companies like Netflix- in their recommendations. We have the same point of view for data. When you have 37 million images, how do you find that one you are looking for? When you have millions of video clips, how do you find that one scene you are looking for? Companies like YouTube are also trying to solve that problem.

In areas where we see opportunities for high reward, we are early adopters. In areas where we see stasis, we are not early adopters. In databases, for instance- we are not early adopters. We allow the dust to settle before we make decisions. But in areas like emerging mobile and advanced search we would be early adopters.

4) How do you personally keep up to date on the latest?

Most CTOs are gadget freaks. We are constantly playing and tinkering with technologies that we could use in the future; experimentation is part of our genetic makeup. Early adoption is really in my blood. I worked at Apple for six years- trying new products and giving feedback. We’re always trying different things- except the CTO today is doing more tinkering through the people that work for them, less on their own. Leveraging my networks, the industry, the community to bubble up key useful learnings from others and using that to synthesize into a technology strategy- CTOs need to be plugged in to what the ‘group’ thinks to make sure they have the latest information or can get it very easily.

5) When you think about the broader organization, how do you help the average employee improve their technological acumen, and raise the overall mean?

We only hire the best talent- if the newcomer is not someone you can learn something from, they should not be hired. The reason an engineer gets hired here is that we are constantly looking for people who can bring something new to the table. Every year we are seeing more and more ‘awesomeness’ coming in to the organization.

We foster innovation by allowing people to explore. We host a company wide hackathon, for instance- people can team up with others and incubate great ideas they have been thinking about. We also host a “CodeRage” hackathon quarterly. We have a lot of great innovations that have been introduced into our products as a result of these events. We have a translation product that was a hackathon project; that is now in our contributor site, up and running. We even have marketing hacks — one called “Stories,” for instance, that became a marketing campaign that allowed contributors to tell their stories as photographers or videographers contributing to Shutterstock.

We encourage our people to tie in to the community- to the open source community, to tech meetups- so we continuously learn from our peers. Having the best talent and keeping in touch with what’s going on in the tech community is key to Shutterstock’s success.

Justin Hendrix is Executive Director of NYC Media Lab. Reach him at justin [dot] hendrix [at] nycmedialab [dot] org or follow him on Twitter @justinhendrix.