Corner Office: Jon Oringer: Jon Oringer of Shutterstock, on the Power of the Hackathon

Q. Did you show an entrepreneurial streak at a young age?

A. In high school, I used to teach guitar and fix computers by the hour. I was looking for some way to make some cash, so I actually learned how to play guitar in order to try to teach it. It turned out to be a pretty good business for a 15-year-old who had to get dropped off to his job by his mom.

I actually liked playing the guitar, but I started to realize that I could charge more to fix people’s computers, so I moved on to that. It was kind of fun just to try to figure out how to make money. It was a good challenge. As I started college, I started to build software products that I could sell to people over the Web.

Q. And you’ve started how many companies?

A. It’s hard to say because they all kind of blend into one another, but it’s probably around 10, and a lot of them were just me, before I started Shutterstock.

Q. So your company now has about 250 employees. Tell me how you evolved as a manager.

A. It’s interesting, because I never had a boss before I started this company. I had never worked in an office. I didn’t know about politics and how to build culture. I didn’t know what culture was. So as I started to hire people, I was looking for the skills I knew I needed to build the product I wanted to build. I didn’t think about a lot of the rest of the stuff. I figured managing people was obvious — I’d tell someone what they needed to do and they’d do what I wanted. It turns out that’s not the case. It was frustrating at first.

Q. As the company grew, were there certain break points you noticed when the culture shifted?

A. At around 50 employees, you get to the point where you can’t see what’s going on all the time. So you start to have weekly check-ins, and you have days that go by without knowing exactly what’s going on. But you need to be sure that everyone is kind of moving in the right direction and thinking about things the right way.

Q. So what’s different or unusual about your culture today?

A. We have a bunch of agile teams that work on different components of the company. At the end of every two-week period, they show everyone else what’s been done. It’s a good way for the whole company to see how we’re progressing.

We also do daily stand-ups for each team. People quickly say what they’ve done and what they’re going to do next. And by keeping these teams small, they can also be self-starting and entrepreneurial.

The whole thing is designed so that meetings are minimized and people can get back to work and push stuff out quickly and then report back to the team. It’s like this daily heartbeat of updates to make sure everybody’s moving forward.

Q. What else do you do in terms of culture?

A. We have hackathons, which are pretty fun. A lot of people get really excited about them, and they can build whatever they want for the company — it could be crazy, practical, whatever. We actually wind up implementing a lot of those things throughout the year. It pushes a lot of thinking. It’s pretty amazing what people can get done in 24 hours. Sometimes we talk about a new product feature and it can take three months to build. Then someone will prototype it overnight.

Q. And why is that?

A. Sometimes as a company you tend to overthink things. If you just sit down and try to do it, it turns out to maybe be easier than setting up meeting after meeting to get it done. So it’s a good reset point for us every year to remind us, “Yeah, we can just get things done quickly.”

Q. How do you hire? What are you looking for?

A. We look for people who are entrepreneurial, who can think in ways that will extend the product in the right direction. We look for people who are “growth hackers.” I’m not sure who came up with that term, but it makes sense to us. It’s the kind of person who can build features and products that market themselves.

Q. So how do you find growth hackers?

A. It’s difficult. I’ll usually show them something that we’ve built and ask them what they can do to improve on it. I’m looking for what their thinking patterns are in terms of whether they can figure out a way to make a particular feature grow in a way that it perpetuates itself.

They also have to be able to mesh with others in the organization. You want people who will push the thinking but not cause trouble. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a feeling you get. It’s easy to find people who will be disruptive thinkers who are reckless, but it’s hard to find disruptive thinkers who are productive. We try every day to make each dollar we spend go one penny further than it did yesterday. That’s the kind of person I’m looking for.

Q. How do you tell if they’re going to fit in to the culture?

A. If you start to challenge them, what happens? Do they come back hard at you? They have to be open to having their thoughts challenged. They have to be open to the fact that maybe they’re not right.

Q. And if hiring were like speed dating and you only had like five minutes to ask one or two questions, what would they be?

A. In your day-to-day job functions, how will you take risk? Like I said before, we want to make that dollar go one penny further every day. I’m not looking for you to double the dollar. I don’t even want a 25 percent return because on a day-to-day basis that’s too much volatility. I want a 1 percent return daily. If the risks are small enough, they can kind of do them on their own without getting themselves into too much trouble. If they are taking fewer but bigger risks, that’s a problem. So I would be looking for how they do that.

Q. What else?

A. If you were going to start your own company right now, and you had to go make one dollar on the Web, what would you do?