Alex Reynolds, Shutterstock

All right, welcome to the first episode of Breaking Changes. I’m pretty stoked today to have my first guest to kick this off. It is Alex Reynolds, he’s a VP/GM of Platform Solutions at Shutterstock. Alex and I have been talking for a while because we are partnering around Postman and stock API stuff, but as we were preparing this show, thinking about the focus that we wanted Breaking Changes to be all about when it comes to not just the technology of the APIs but more importantly the business of APIs, he kind of hit on all the notes in this previous call that we had done. So I was like, we’ve got to get Alex on for the first show because this is kind of setting the stage for everything. So with that said, welcome Alex. Tell the audience a little bit about who you are and what Shutterstock is.

Absolutely. I am honored to be here for the genesis episode of Breaking Changes, so thanks so much for having me. Excited to get into this. So I’m Alex Reynolds, I am VP of a team called Platform Solutions at Shutterstock. If you’re not familiar with Shutterstock, a lot of people think about the company selling images on the internet, but essentially we’re a creative platform offering services, tools, and content to help folks create any kind of project, from Hollywood movies to an ad for a hair salon. And I lead the team Platform Solutions, which is all about making that content, the technology, and tools available on other platforms that are off of our owned and operated first-party platforms.

So what was the catalyst for APIs at Shutterstock? What was that origin moment to do this, and why? What was the business imperative, and who was at the table when that conversation went on?

Absolutely. So like any overnight success, it’s years in the making. The first API that we put out as a public API was about 10 years ago at this point, and back then it was really a proof of concept with one of our smaller brands. We had no idea at the time if APIs were going to be a thing, public APIs, if there was going to be interest from platforms. And this predates me, right? So there were a lot of smart people at Shutterstock who were thinking about building this out, and the impact was pretty phenomenal early on. We saw a lot of interest from some significant platforms, and very quickly we started working with Facebook in an exclusive partnership. That was really the main catalyst in the beginning to say, okay, there could be something here, this could be a major business and one of the key growth drivers for the company going forward.

So what would that early team look like? How big of a team was it that set this off? Maybe if it’s before your time you don’t know the exact makeup, but generally, what’s the makeup?

Yeah, totally. So when I started at Shutterstock, I joined the business development or strategic partnerships team, and that API was just one piece of what that team did. So we wanted to do a marketing partnership with West Elm to have our content available and to build brand awareness, or if we were thinking about new markets to enter or new types of offerings to build by partner, all of that sat with this strategic partnerships team, and API was just one component of that. So it wasn’t even a full-time team. We’re talking about a handful of people, no dedicated developers in the beginning. And eventually we wanted to say, okay, this should be a focus area where we have dedicated folks, we have a dedicated team, because of the opportunity. So it really went from a part-time, almost like an experiment, to being a major growth driver.

So who are the consumers of the API, and who are the consumers who moved it from that hobby into something that became something that would have a real business impact, that changed things?

Yeah, essentially we’re targeting anywhere on the internet where there’s an upload image button, or now an upload video button. We want our content library to be there. So when I joined back in 2015, we maybe had 100 API partners in total, again as a part-time thing, and today we have over 8,000 partners that are live and integrated with our API. And it’s everything from ad builders, website builders, email builders, to things like print-on-demand companies helping SMBs print business cards, mugs, swag, anything that they need. So it’s really evolved over time, especially as our products and services have evolved. So when we add video, or we add music, or we add an editor product, then all of a sudden the world of partners that we can work with just expands dramatically, and what we can do with each partner expands as well.

And this isn’t really like the “you can build a mobile app that’s all Shutterstock catalog or Shutterstock API” or build a web app. This is really about Shutterstock being baked into other platforms seamlessly via your API, so that your resources are available there and you have accessibility to customers on those platforms as well.

Yeah, absolutely. If you think about the customer journey for a lot of the end users of Shutterstock content, they’re not just going to our website to download an image and then admire it or keep it on their computer. They’re doing something with that image. There’s a much larger customer story and customer journey both before they need the content from us and then after they need the content from us. And so by embedding our experience, our search, our preview, our license directly within these other platforms, we’re arming all of the users of those platforms, the hundreds of millions of users, with the building blocks for the projects that they need. And ultimately that ends up being a win for all parties. It’s great for the platforms, they have this much more engaging experience. It’s great for the end users of the platforms, because they have all the content they need to build exactly what they’re looking for. And then it’s great for Shutterstock.

Well, that gives you a lot more than just “hey, someone built an app and I can see how they use our API.” You have access and visibility into other people’s business workflows. And so it’s kind of shifting. It’s not just application view, it’s what makes their actual business work, and work across multiple platforms.

Yeah, absolutely. We’re helping to drive the business outcomes that they care about. So it’s all about, okay, a Wix or Facebook, what are you looking to do, what does success look like for you, how are your users going to win, and what isn’t happening today, and then how do we ultimately team up and partner? And this is where the strategic partnerships origin is helpful, and basically say, how do we get together to solve problems for your users and ultimately drive the business outcomes that you care about?

Yeah, I think that’s the enabling part. There’s a phrase we use in the space, API economy, a lot, and I would say not a lot of people really have a clear vision or definition of what that means. It’s just like, it’s a cool thing to say with APIs. But what you just described, it’s not just “hey, Shutterstock has an API, people come and build apps.” It’s Shutterstock, Wix, Facebook, Twitter, all these places have APIs and we’re all able to partner in the most meaningful ways for our customers. And that’s the enabler of APIs. That’s what I see Shutterstock is enabling. It’s kind of like how Twilio enabled the Uber and the parts of the sharing economy because of voice and SMS, and you guys are doing the same when it comes to, I mean, all of our business gets done online, you guys are ensuring that you’re a seamless part of that economy that unfolds in new ways, new business workflows that people are trying to accomplish. So does this feed into what new APIs and what new resources you guys are going to do based upon what people’s business workflows and needs are in this way?

Yeah, just to touch on the point that you made, this is one of the fastest growing parts of the company for us, but the revenue that we’re helping our partners drive and the engagement that we’re helping them drive is significantly higher rates, order of magnitude higher. So in the last year we powered hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for our partners, and by unlocking value for them, what they give back to us, whether that’s revenue or engagement, it’s kind of a fraction of the value that we’re unlocking for them. So it’s really fulfilling that we’re part of this overall economy where we’re able to say, okay, how do we ultimately make this the best user experience as possible? And you work with a lot of product owners, right? At the end of the day, they’re our partners, and they want their products, their babies, to be the most amazing experience. And so if we can help fill those gaps and be part of that, it’s a great feeling.

Well, I think in the world of API management, for the last decade I’ve been trying to justify the value of why you should have APIs. Someone will come along and build the killer mobile app or the web app. I had to stretch pretty hard sometimes to demonstrate the value, but this brings it much closer to the actual business motions that they depend on and that they get and understand on a daily basis. And it’s not just “oh, us having APIs,” because I’m sure your partners have to have APIs, but this just really opens it up to something that’s more real and tangible, I think, to business leaders, the people who we have to convince that APIs matter. And it really makes the argument. I want every API that I depend on to partner with Shutterstock at this level, because that’s really where the API economy kind of kicks in, kind of like how the sharing economy kicked in during COVID in new and interesting ways for food delivery. I can see Shutterstock being kind of key to just the visual experience of the world around us in new and interesting ways, because you guys are seamlessly woven in with all the platforms that I depend on for my business. That’s pretty powerful, I love that.

Yeah. So you should come work with us.

Yeah, I know. I mean, this, I’m really trying to get to this next API economy thing, because I’ve been using that phrase in kind of hollow, empty ways for years, and that’s the spark that when I first heard you describing this, I was like, yeah, this is the business of APIs, but it’s not that same API management vendor-driven business of APIs that I’ve been preaching for the last decade. It’s much more tangible, I would say, to the C-suite and leadership.

So let’s unpack that a little bit, actually. One key aspect of API management for the last decade has been a kind of freemium tier, being able to craft different API levels and provide access tiers for different types of consumers to kick the tires and understand what’s possible. What’s the role of a free tier in the Shutterstock APIs? Is that relevant, does that play a role?

So historically, not as much. We are actually about to launch a broader free offering. So anyone can go to our developer portal and they can sign up for the API and play around with it and test it, but you’re not getting a lot of content to be able to use in a product. So this, we’ve gone back and forth on this over the years, but we’re about to launch a new product where anybody can come in and use a certain amount of images for free to get up and running. So we really want to enable new developers, new projects who may not know their need for content, get them up and running, make sure they have those building blocks, and then be able to grow with them as they grow. But historically we’ve been very much a partnership-driven team. So we have a bunch of consultative folks who are thinking about all the different places where we can be, understanding the new opportunities, new verticals, and really talking to a lot of product folks, a lot of biz dev and partnerships folks, and a lot of executives to understand how can we plug into those platforms and what the value could be.

Well, it seems like historically one of the concepts of why you have a premium tier is people can kick the tires and a certain percentage are going to turn into paid customers, and then you have visibility into their API consumption. But taking this to the next level, you guys have visibility into business workflows at companies across multiple industries. And so when it comes to API management, the historical thing is it’s a concept called service composition, where you say, well, I have these APIs and this group can use it for this, here’s my premium tier, here’s my pro tier, and here’s how much they can use. It really sounds like, so what is the role of API management in helping you guys make sense of this as it’s growing? Because opening up a free tier means you’re opening up that visibility that you guys have into people’s workflows, letting them figure things out. How does API management help you guys make sense of that, and then, I guess, not to use a marketing term, but push them to the bottom of the funnel, get people moving forward and doing meaningful things?

Yeah, I mean, honestly we’re figuring all that out as we go, but API management is going to be critical because we need to understand what our users and what our customers are doing. And so understanding, I think Facebook has this, something along the lines of if you friended a certain number of people in your first 10 days or so, then you were going to be a user for life, you were an active user at that point. So we’re still figuring out what are those trigger points. Is it using a certain number of images, is it a certain number of calls in a certain period of time? How do we think about that, and how do we move folks along? And we’re going to trial and learn, but I think of API management as the visibility layer. So without that, we’re completely blind, and we would have our SDRs, BDRs kind of going out there and calling on these people blindly. But there’s a much better way to do that, and understanding what is the intent of these users. Because at the end of the day, we’re going to have a bunch of folks who are just going to want to use the free tier, and that’s fine. We want to build a community of developers, a community of companies that are accessing our content, and if they stay there forever, that’s fine. If they need us in three or four years, that’s fine as well too. But ultimately we want to try to remove as many of the friction points for getting people to sign up. And if you’re deciding to embed an API into your platform, that’s a big commitment. It’s not necessarily a ton of development resources, but you’re signaling that you’re comfortable having this be a part of your product or your baby. If that API goes down or if you have problems, then you’re ultimately on the hook for that. No one’s going to go to the API provider and say it’s their fault. They’re going to come to you as a platform and say, I can’t access my content or this experience, and it’s your fault. And so it is a big commitment, and really helping folks along that journey is important to us.

I mean, you touched on a big differentiation than I’ve seen with a lot of vendors who employed API management over the last decade, which is, you put out an API, you put API management in front of it, you create free, pro, team and enterprise tiers, you charge for usage, and then you report on errors, you meet your SLA, and that’s how you generate revenue. But where I feel, that probably network 10, 20% of the use cases, but for the other 80% I always try to convince folks that API management is about understanding value exchange that’s occurring. And that’s what you just touched on, and this is something that requires more empathy, and you touched on that as well, empathy with your consumers and what they’re trying to accomplish, rather than just putting up a resource and “use it, do whatever you want with it, and I’m going to make money.” You guys actually care about what people are doing, you’re trying to understand that, and you’re using the API management layer to really segment and break things out into different access levels and usage limits. But you’re going to use it to iterate over time and adapt as you need based upon your customers’ needs, it sounds like.

Totally. We’ve been iterating since the beginning with this kind of thing. So it’s very much just understanding what sticks, where are the needs, and then really using the data to inform how we make decisions going forward.

So do you guys see this as something, this velocity, is the intent behind this to fend off competition so that you guys can move faster and do more interesting things? Is that the goal for freemium, or no, just APIs and API management, being able to iterate like this based upon the needs of your customers? Do you feel like this is going to give you what you need to stay ahead?

Totally. It’s a major point of differentiator for us. The API allows us to reach our users anywhere that they are in the world. We have two million customers globally at Shutterstock, but if we think about some of the major platforms that we’re integrated into, Facebook, Google, Wix, Microsoft, they have hundreds of millions if not billions of users, depending upon which parts of the platforms that we’re talking about. So the scale and the reach is just orders of magnitude larger than the customers that we have coming to our platform every day. So the ability to reach all these users where they are in the wild, some of them may not have Shutterstock accounts, many of them may not have even heard of Shutterstock, so their first exposure to our offering is within a product that they use day in and day out. And then once we do one integration with a platform like a Facebook or a Microsoft or an Arc.com, then we’re pumping our content as we get new content, as we get new offerings, through that API, and as those platforms grow we’re able to reach their users. So we benefit from that scale and they benefit from having the integration directly within their platform.

So this isn’t just about growing your API ecosystem, this is about combining your ecosystem and making that ecosystem part of other people’s ecosystems and widening that as well, as much as you can. So talk me through, like, one of these partners, how do you convince them to build on the API? The freemium is clearly a part of it, but how do you incentivize them to invest the time and energy in doing this and get up and going?

Yeah, it’s tough. At the end of the day it’s not a sale, it’s not a quick conversation, or sometimes it can be, but in general they are making a commitment to integrate technology that can take eight to twelve weeks from that initial scoping conversation all the way through. So ultimately we’re convincing, we have to convince a team to put us on their roadmap, and roadmaps are incredibly busy and incredibly crowded. And so to dedicate those sprints to actually doing this, you have to believe or you have to know that there’s going to be real value for your end users and your end customers. It has to solve a major pain point. And so we spend a lot of time talking to product owners, talking to strategic partnerships folks, biz dev folks, and executives, kind of the three major stakeholders, to really help them understand how this is going to be beneficial. And we have some good examples that we can point to, so the conversations are easier today than they might have been maybe five or six years ago. But it still is taking a little bit of that leap of faith to know, okay, by doing this work I am going to unlock value, I’m going to make sure that my users are spending more time on our platform, they’re not leaving to go off into other workflows, they’re going to increase their campaign completion rates, their campaign performance rates, and they’re ultimately going to have a better experience, which is going to make them a more loyal customer or more loyal user.

Yeah, more professional, seamless, ready-to-go experience that they have to invest less resources in. To get the content, you guys have done all that hard work to have the content that’s going to make the impact, they can focus on what they do well with their business.

Yeah, no, definitely.

So how, where you’re at in this journey, how are your customers evolving? What’s the most stark way that their evolution or change, once you get them over that hump and you get them baked in, how do their needs or what they’re asking for as a partner change and evolve?

Yeah, it’s a great question. I thought originally you were asking about the evolution over time that we’ve seen, and I would just say briefly on that that when we first started having these conversations, a lot of folks were less familiar with APIs, and we’re seeing more and more companies understand the value, they’ve integrated APIs either internally or externally, and they’re a lot more comfortable having those conversations. So we’re doing less of explaining up front. In terms of how they’ve evolved once they get the API in, once we have that one touch point, then all of a sudden how we can expand the relationship very quickly. So we have a lot of partners that will start with image, and they’ll start with maybe a smaller subsection of our library, and then very quickly within a month, two months, three months, they’ll say, well, how do we expand on this? We’re getting a lot of great feedback from our users, they love it, so how do we add more, how do we add different types of content, what are the other products and services that we can integrate into to provide this to more users and increase the scope? So it is kind of tough to get over that initial hump, but once we do, it’s kind of all downhill from there, and it’s really rewarding to see that evolution over time.

So I know Shutterstock is photos and videos, but what else are you guys offering that’s kind of part of this evolution of your platform, but also of your consumers’ needs? What other types of resources?

Yep. So definitely evolving on the asset types: images, footage, music, we have editorial content, we recently purchased a company called TurboSquid that does 3D content, so 3D models and 2D versions of 3D models. We acquired a company called Amper that does AI-generated music. So if you think about the platforms that we’re integrated into, every time we add a new asset type, we can offer them more and more types of content for different needs. And then something like 3D, the world of partners that we can integrate into does expand. But beyond just content, we want to make sure that we’re providing more value along that customer journey and that value chain that I was talking about earlier. And so things like image editing, footage editing, understanding the workflow tools that our customers need, and then creating APIs, creating SDKs that will allow us to expose those offerings to customers.

Speak a little bit, you mentioned it briefly, that as far as how customers evolve, they’ve gotten more API-savvy. So how do you sell the concept of APIs to your partners, so that they continue not just consuming your APIs but having APIs? How do you make this sale that APIs are a critical part of their business? Is it just by demonstrating this value?

Yeah, I mean, we show them what this looks like in platforms that we have, and we share some of the outcomes. At the end of the day these platforms are all looking to do more, right? Whether that’s more customers or more ad dollars, or unlock more creators on their platform to innovate and build. No matter what the platform’s goals are, they’re always trying to do more. And so if we can show them how, by integrating an API, by having more value on the platform, how that can unlock the outcomes they care about, then they get it. They understand that they do this work up front, and then they’re really just making the overall value of their platform much larger and much more expansive. And I think you touched on an excellent point earlier, that when you’re a platform, if you’re a print-on-demand company, you help small businesses. We work with a company called Gelato, based in EMEA, and they’re working with tons of small businesses to help unlock local printing. So they want to make sure that if you need to print any kind of project, you can have something that’s local, it’ll be delivered quickly, an excellent company. And they’re now creating an API program where they’re offering their print services via API to anyone that wants to sign up. And so for them, what their superpower, what they do incredibly well, is unlocking the local printing for SMBs. So for us with the partnership, we’re helping to check that box around content. They’re never going to go out and be the best content company, or it wouldn’t make sense for them to go out there and build up a library of content to build this two-sided marketplace. But they can leverage all the work that we’ve done, the API that we’ve built, the contributor community that we have, plug that in not only to their platform but into their API, and now all of a sudden they have this incredible additional service that really complements what they’re good at and just enables their end users, those SMBs, to accomplish what they’re looking for.

So it’s APIs all the way down essentially, where you’ve got APIs plugged into APIs plugged into APIs, but it’s almost like Lego blocks that really allow folks to innovate quickly. And, back to the API economy example, I would say that is the API economy there. It’s not that everyone builds an API and is the next Facebook, it’s everyone has an API and is able to plug themselves into this greater series of ecosystems that let them do what they do well, but then it plugs and plays with the rest of this world. You’re going to need to bring in customers, to bring in business. Early on, API management and doing APIs was like, well, you started doing it with websites and affiliate programs, and then mobile happened, but now it’s really web and advertising and marketing campaigns, these are all essential building blocks of businesses for everyone. So talk to me about the end-to-end nature of the building blocks you talked about and helping people not just run a Facebook campaign or run something on their website, but how does it help them do all of it as one end-to-end motion?

What do you mean?

Well, like, so is it much faster for that small print company to be able to stand up their platform and do their offering and advertise and run campaigns, like do it all with your content? Or are they just focusing on one channel, are they just focusing on you enabling theirs, or are they using you for their advertising and marketing and enabling their business?

Okay, I gotcha. Yeah, so there’s definitely companies that we work with where they’re leveraging our content or our offerings in a number of different ways. So imagine somebody builds their website on Wix and they’re using Google Slides or Microsoft’s Office, and so if we’re plugged into all of these different areas, then they’re able to use our content across all those different experiences. And when we talk about our enterprise customers, so far we’ve talked a lot about what we call platform partnerships, which is really accessing new users on other platforms, so finding folks that need our content, our technology, our tools, our services, who are on other platforms. But we have a whole other side of the business which is really focused on enabling our existing customers. So if we have a customer like a Deloitte, for example, they’re going to use tons of tools day in and day out. So they might have a digital asset manager, they might have a content management system, they’re going to create slides in some platform. And so in that example, they might want to access our content via a single sign-on, and so we’ve done all of these integrations into those types of platforms, the DAMs, the CMSs, the SSOs, the productivity tools. And so as a company you can access your one Shutterstock account across all of those different platforms, and you can license something in the DAM that will ultimately end up in the CMS, and you have all the metadata coming through, and it’s a much more automated, streamlined workflow, and just is an incredible experience. It’s much easier to have more seats, to have more visibility, to just enable your employees really to be able to leverage the benefits of Shutterstock as seamlessly as possible.

Yeah, I think that’s really stretching the ecosystem model, I would say. You’ve got Shutterstock’s API ecosystem you’re trying to grow, but elevating to those platform partners where you guys are going to be a seamless part of their experience, but then that Venn diagram overlap with these other enterprise customers who may be using some of your platform partners, may be doing direct integrations with the Shutterstock API, but probably not, you’re just probably going to make their life easier using the tools they’re already dependent on to make their enterprise organization work.

Yep.

So across that spectrum, what’s the bright spot? When it comes to your roadmap, where, what gets you most excited to come to work every day? Right now, when it comes to your roadmap, what’s most exciting?

I mean, for me it’s the people. But about the roadmap, I think some of the things we were talking about around performance is really exciting for me, just the ability to help the end users make informed decisions about what content to use. We have over 300 million images on our platform, which is massive, but at the end of the day what the end users of any platform really want, it’s all about finding the right image. They don’t need 300 million images at any given time, they need the right image in that moment to achieve the outcomes that they care about. And so the smarter that we can be about helping people find the right content, and the more powerful the outcomes that we unlock, it really is like a force multiplier for us in terms of the value that we’re driving. We’re not just saying, hey, you need an image of a yoga studio, here’s 50,000 images. It’s, okay, you’re targeting men between the ages of 24 and 35 and you’re in this region, then this is the image or these are the five images that you should use in order to attract that audience. And I think really in order to get there you need a really powerful workflow experience, so people need to be able to create within your environment so that you can make those recommendations. So the combination of workflow and performance and those performance recommendations is ultimately what gets me the most excited. Because all of that applies to all of the different assets, so every time we add a new asset, we add 3D, workflow and performance can be applied there.

Yeah, I think people think, your business, they see what you do, they’re an image catalog, well, I can Google for images or I can buy into any stock photos, but understanding that value add on top of it and all that work and intelligence that goes into your APIs, it’s not just an image or a video API, it’s got that performance that’s going to lead you to and save you time. It’s going to increase productivity across your organization to not have to go find photos, deal with licensing, deal with all the things, but then have it help you navigate through, as you said, thousands or hundreds of thousands of photos and find just the right one. Can you talk anything about that area, how do you see the AI/ML space when it comes to this type of performance?

Totally. And I don’t know how much I can get into, but in general, computer vision is a really hot area, and there’s certainly algorithms that we’re building on the back end to be able to make these recommendations. You think about, we have these 300 million images, we have a ton of data around these images, so we have an average of 30 metadata tags for every image about what’s in the actual image, and then we have a ton of search data for intent of what people are looking for. And so there’s ways that we can combine that with other libraries of data around performance and around things like, almost like uniqueness or an aesthetic, and put all that together through a team of computer vision engineers to build out algorithms that will help inform some of these areas. So what can we augment onto our content as enhanced metadata to either visibly or behind the scenes help make decisions? And then, oh by the way, anything that we build internally to help drive those engines can be put in an API, can be exposed in an endpoint, and can unlock similar value to a whole host of developers or other platforms as well.

Interesting. So say I’m a partner, say my specialty is in machine learning, are there opportunities for me to train on your content and then partner when it comes to some of those models, or would you guys see that as a competitive threat?

No, absolutely. We help companies train computer vision algorithms, and again that is an area that is expanding and becoming a bigger and bigger area of focus. And then when we have models, and we will, the intent is to expose those models in some way, because we’re essentially applying it on our data set and our content library, but then there’s a whole host of other content that people are using. So for example in our editor, or in any of our DAM partners, you might use a Shutterstock image but you’re going to combine that with your logo and maybe a few images that you have from your store or your location. And so if we can take the augmentation and the algorithms that we’ve built for our own content and then apply that to a user’s own content, whether it’s uploaded to us or whether it hits an API endpoint, that’s something that will significantly expand the scope of what we’re doing. We’re no longer talking about content licensing, we’re talking about building API endpoints to help augment anybody, any user’s content.

Yeah, no, that’s powerful. Again, touching the future of the API economy piece, because I feel like when you train machine learning models, a little bit that I’ve done, there’s academic video and image sets out there, but you guys have the content, the catalog of these that are more the heartbeat of the actual real world. I think an academic image or video set may be comprehensive to a certain degree, but it’s of a limited time period collection, it’s not like a living, breathing collection like you guys have. So as far as training models, these are images that are actively used in a Facebook campaign or an advertising campaign, so I think the richness and the potential of iteratively training the next generation of models on this is pretty powerful for keeping up with what the demands are and actually what the virtual world is around us. So that’s good that you guys are open to partnering in that, because I see a lot of opportunity for folks to come in and add on layers and then partner with you guys to make it so. I like that.

Just on that point, I think there are definitely data sets that are out there, and a lot of companies, a lot of institutions are training on that, and we’ve seen some pretty significant concerns around those data sets, especially when we talk about diversity and inclusion. There’s a lot of the images that are essentially white men, and then when you’re trying to apply those algorithms outside that area, there can be some major issues. And so there’s definitely an opportunity around diversity and inclusion where we have a very diverse set of content, and we find that that’s an area where we really like to focus, because ultimately we want these algorithms to be more accurate.

I’m going to keep pushing, this show Breaking Changes is API, so of course it’s technical, but I’m going to keep pushing on the business leadership kind of “why APIs matter at the business level,” that’s where we’re going to go. And I’m going to be bringing on other companies, leading brands of similar caliber to Shutterstock. What are some of these areas that we’ve talked about, from API management and freemium, the monetization, value exchange, to the machine learning? I’m going to get you to do my homework for me and help me craft my questions. So if I have to craft questions, say I get Twitter or get any other Wix or other, what sort of questions, what would you want to learn from them about their operations that would help you in your operations?

Totally. I’m always interested in understanding how people structure teams around APIs, especially from a business perspective. You can have a developer platform team that is in charge of your developer site and building out the APIs and the technology, but then who is actually involved from a business perspective, from a strategy perspective, and how does that relate to the outcomes that you’re trying to drive? And what I mean by that is, if ultimately your goals for an API are to increase the reach of your platform, and so maybe it’s not about monetization, it’s about opening up your platform, so allowing folks, if it’s Twitter, allowing folks to have access to certain content that’s on your platform, well then how does that ultimately drive the structure of the team versus if you’re really looking for monetization, you’re trying to drive direct revenue from new customers, what does that look like? Versus maybe a third category of indirect revenue, where you’re supporting your existing customers, you’re making them stickier, you’re helping them, all the things we were talking about earlier, improving their workflow, saving them time, that kind of thing. And I would imagine that on the tech and the product side, my hypothesis would be that it’s similar across use cases, but when it comes to the business side, I would imagine that based on those goals the setup could look very different. And that, as an executive, that might be difficult to navigate. So it’s almost like you need to determine and understand what your outcomes are for your APIs before you think about how you structure the team.

Yeah, and I think that’s one of the big failures I see a lot of companies make in the last decade when it comes to public APIs and API management. They really didn’t have a handle on a lot of the nuance that I think you guys had already. You guys had a handle on the licensing and ownership of your content, I think, before you cracked open the APIs. I think not everyone thought about all of that, or were too worried and didn’t do it because they were worried about cannibalizing their core business model. So it’s definitely one of the areas I’m going to be poking at a lot of companies, trying to understand more about the nuance of those direct revenue opportunities, those indirect ones you talked about, but also the intelligence and the added value that incrementally operating will bring you, and then how does that feed into the machine learning models and stuff like that, I think is relevant. I think the other area that I’m going to be poking at people is the notion of public versus private and partner APIs, trying to get more honest about and understand people’s views on what is public, what is being a public API operator. Because I know companies like Pinterest struggled with that for a while, because they were watching Twitter have challenges. So how do you guys, do you view yourself as a public API operator, or is this just, you know, APIs are essential to your business development, how do you guys see yourself?

Definitely as a public API. There’s endpoints that we don’t expose and that you have to be whitelisted for, so we have tiers and we gate people based on calls and things like that, but ultimately it’s a public API. We want people to be building new projects. I love when we find an app that is using the API in a new way, because it starts to get the creative juices flowing and you say, okay, this is one company using it in this way, how can we expand on that, is this an area where we can double down on? And so I think, of course there’s risk with having things public, and you have to figure out what do you want to expose and where are those thresholds, which we’re talking about earlier. I think it is a bit of trial and error to understand, but in general, to me, having things be public is just a much bigger opportunity, not a lot bigger than private, but it’s a big opportunity, because you never know what people are going to build, and oftentimes you can find a really significant opportunity. Developers are incredible, and we’ve had some pretty amazing apps that have been built over the years.

Yeah, I mean it sounds like you guys are much more outward focused and looking for those opportunities. I think everyone wants them but they’re a little nervous about what people are going to build, and I would say from what I’ve gathered and watched of Shutterstock so far, that API management, that embrace of API management is really key to being comfortable in having a public API. It’s not just about security, it’s about that visibility and awareness you spoke of, of how people are using your API, so you can strike that balance between giving access but not losing control and allowing you guys to keep iterating on your business model. But I think the key piece is you guys have that empathy, you genuinely care about what your customers want to do in their business workflows, but you seem very curious, learning from that too, and evolving and accessing that. And I think that’s a characteristic I don’t see in a lot of enterprises, or they’re not ready, they want to do that but they’re just not quite ready to go there when it comes to being out in the open, being public with their APIs. So what do you think the challenge is?

You’ve been asking me all the questions, I’m going to ask you a question.

Yeah, well, ask away.

In that example, generally, why do you think that is?

I mean, it’s the unknown unknowns of what could happen. It’s from not having a full handle on security, I think, and really worrying that there’s some holes in ways people are going to be able to exploit that you don’t see. But I would say the biggest one is the visibility of the API management has been kept in a technical group, and it’s not shared or implemented or operated by business stakeholders who could then create the reports, the dashboards, and the feedback loop with that awareness and that visibility that you talked about at the API management layer. So if it’s kept siloed within a technical group, it’s not going to have the alignment with business goals, business objectives. It’s not going to be reporting and making people feel warm and fuzzy about what’s going on here. It’s kept off in a distance.

That makes sense, that makes sense. Yeah, I guess maybe people don’t even understand the level of flexibility and control that they could ultimately have over, you know, expose this component but don’t expose this, or allow someone to use this but only up to x number of calls per minute, per hour, per month, per day. And so knowing that you can have such control, it gives comfort that you can introduce things gradually, and if something is being used in a way that you don’t want, you can pull back on that. And we’ve had experiences over the years where, because of the way content has been integrated, someone’s been able to access content or things like that, and we’ve had to work through that with partners and figure out how we can change the integration so that content is not downloadable, for example. So, going back to your point about cannibalization, most of our partnerships we don’t allow people to actually download content or the raw asset from our experience, but sometimes there are ways to make that happen, and so working with partners to really make sure to identify it quickly and then fix it is kind of crucial.

You learn and you adapt. I mean, that’s the core of API management, and until you understand those building blocks and apply them, the rate limits, the service composition, and you feel that you have control at this access layer, I don’t think you’re going to achieve the adaptability that you guys are realizing with it as a biz dev partnership tool. And I’ve done this with groups where they have their API and they’re like, well, our biggest consumers of our APIs are internal groups and other divisions within our enterprise organization, and so we don’t need the billing and rate limiting, we’re not charging people for access. And I’m like, well, do you print out the invoice and send them their usage every month, to show them the value exchange between your department and their department? Do you have a report to show that, hey, these five orgs depend on us for these resources and here’s their consumption? They’re like, no, we thought it was just about selling APIs to the public. And I’m like, well, these are the indirect value exchange that occurs. So I just really feel like the story that API management vendors have told, “build it and they will come, sell your API,” has done more harm than it’s done good, and it’s turned people off from the journey that I think you all have been on, to understand and get control of those knobs and levers so that you’re confident to go, well, we’re going to put this new resource out there that our competitors could totally reverse engineer, but you know what, we know which of our users are our competitors, because we have our finger on our pulse and we know who our partners and consumers are. So there’s a comfort level I think that you guys have achieved that I don’t always see.

Yep, yep.

So let’s kind of move out of the business, I would say, and more into, like, what’s your favorite part of doing all this? Why APIs?

Oh, I mean, building this business has felt like building a startup within Shutterstock. At one point in time the team was two people, like I said we didn’t have dedicated engineers, and now the team’s about 75 folks, we’re all over the world, it’s one of the fastest growing parts of the company, so that’s incredibly energizing and fun. And as far as APIs are concerned, I love the fact that we’re embedding into these other workflows and that it’s really more of a consultative conversation. So when I get on the phone with partners, and I don’t have as many external conversations as I used to, but when I get on those calls, it really feels like you’re in it together, you’re kind of in the trenches and saying, okay, we’ve seen this problem before, we have these 8,000 integrations, we know that there’s value that we can drive, so let’s understand, is this something that’s going to be relevant for a product that you have right now, is it relevant for a product that you’re launching, what are your users telling you? And just really getting into the weeds around how they see their business. I started my career as a consultant, so they’re very used to going into a business, learning about the way they see the world, what their pain points are, who their customers are, and helping and sitting side by side to come up with a solution. And with APIs I feel like I’m able to do that, but it’s not me parachuting into companies to help them from a consulting perspective, it’s really building out this business at Shutterstock but still being able to scratch that itch of going and sitting side by side with a Facebook or Google or a Gelato or a Wix and really understanding who their customers are and what they’re trying to accomplish. So I love having those conversations.

Well, this is what I don’t understand about APIs, because I’ve been evangelizing for the last decade solid, I’m on airplanes, well in the before times I was on airplanes, and people who might not know what they are, when they ask what I do, I’m like, why, I’m API evangelist, and they’re like, oh yeah, I know what APIs are, but they’re business users. There’s this perception that doing APIs is an IT technical game, but everything you just described, it sounds more about the business of it than just the actual hacking and coding and all the technical things. So how do we get more people like you seeing that it’s about the business of APIs?

Yeah, I think it’s already sort of happening, in the sense that people are seeing the power of APIs, but we want it to happen faster. And I just think a lot of people, I think you hit the nail on the head earlier where people hear API and they think technical. And it’s interesting, we have internal tech teams at Shutterstock, we have internal enterprise sales teams. When I talk to our enterprise sales teams, they see me and my team as technical, so they think that we’re engineers, developers, facilitators of technology. And then when I talk to our product teams and our engineers, they call us sales. And we’re kind of sitting at the intersection of both of those areas, where we need to be, I mean, I can’t code, I’m not a product owner or product manager, but we need to be able to have conversations with engineers and product managers, need to be able to think about technology and what the trade-offs are, what the pain points are, and then also be able to have conversations on the business side. But I think really just getting it out there for business folks to understand the leverage that APIs can unlock, when they start to understand what it can do for their business. Literally any company, their customers are using platforms, they just are. And so understanding what those platforms are and really understanding the breadth and depth of those platforms, you can whiteboard it out, write down the top 10, 20 platforms that your customers are using, and you’ll find that those platforms have way more users and engagement, and so being able to partner with them and integrate using APIs will really just unlock that value. I think once executives, once the revenue folks understand the network effects that come from an API program and the reach and the scale and ultimately, I mean it might not be revenue, I talk a lot about revenue but it could be engagement, it could be number of users, whatever the KPI is, whatever you’re trying to increase as a company, you can do that via the power of public APIs.

Yeah, I mean, you summed it up well. The control it gives you over your business, and that agility, that nimbleness that you want to be able to have, that you spoke of earlier when it comes to fending off competitors, everyone wants that, they want to move quick, they want to be able to adapt. And once they see APIs as that ability to redefine your business, not your IT, not your databases, I mean sure you’re doing that, but you’re carving up and, again I think us as developers kind of co-opt and own this, like microservices, microservices is more about people and organizations aligning and doing business and breaking down business than it ever is about the scope of the API. But for some reason it’s still not, business users have trouble getting a handle on it. And so it makes me happy to see how you articulate it and how you’re seeing it across your different groups. What would you say is the thing you’ve learned from all of this that you would share with other people looking to get it and get in the API game and do it at the level that you are? What have you learned along the way that’s the best piece of advice that you could pass along?

Oh man, the best piece of advice…

Or any nickel-and-dime advice, anything. Think back to when you first got this job, what you didn’t know, what you didn’t see, anything you could share.

Yeah, I think it takes longer than you might think initially to set things up. You do need to get those integrations set up up front, so it does require the legwork up front, but once you’ve unlocked those platforms, we have massive integrations that we did seven, eight years ago that have just scaled up tremendously in that time frame, and we’ve grown as they’ve grown. And so it’s, I think it’s really an essential team for any business to build around APIs, because you need to get started now to unlock that value, but it is a snowball effect, and it will just really unlock the value. I keep going back to that, it really is kind of such a sticky integration that once you’ve established those relationships it only grows, it only gets bigger, and it only expands, and it has a compounding effect. So the more you’re doing, the better. I came to Shutterstock to do business development, I didn’t even necessarily know that I was going to be focused on APIs, and so when I look back, I’d worked with APIs previously, but I think the key moment for me was just understanding, wow, we have a handful of these really powerful integrations. The experience before we did the integration, there were these major pain points, people were leaving, they were never coming back, they were stealing content, it was this awful experience for the end user, awful experience for the platform. And by having this integration we were able to drive such business outcomes for the platform, and we’d have these end users coming to us and saying, hey, I just found your image on this platform and now I want it, and this is amazing and I want to be a Shutterstock customer, and hey, this campaign was so much better. And so you were getting these real case studies from the partners and from those end users, and it just became apparent that we had to build this thing out and really turn it into a real business unit at the company.

That seems like kind of the difference between, or the separation between, being a platform, because as you described it, a platform could operate with bad experiences and not be optimal, but still it’s holding up something, it’s a platform for something to be built on, not-so-great experiences, but, and being an ecosystem, because you have, in your integrations with your partners and being out there on other platforms, bringing customers to you, having that visibility out there, having people finding you become customers, but also people find and build and augment and come use your API because they saw you on one of your partners. That’s an ecosystem, because it’s active, it’s alive, it’s not just that it’s revenue, it’s that people are feeding into it, plugging into it, extending it, the reach of it. And that, I feel like, is the key difference between just being a platform, and it’s getting easier and easier to be a platform, I think APIs are essential to turn a platform into an ecosystem, or be a welcome part of other ecosystems, as well as building your own ecosystem. Would you feel that’s a fair assumption?

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.

Because that’s really what I want to get across, and when I first heard you talk about the reach of the APIs, because I’m so tired of telling the “build it and they will come” API story, like create an API and people build apps, that ecosystem play that you guys have achieved. And I’ve gotten tired of content people, people in the content space, locking up value and being really nervous about APIs because it’s a threat to them. And so you guys kind of checked several of the boxes for me that made this a show that I wanted to do with you, or a story I wanted to tell, in that you guys are kind of fearless out there, acknowledging those issues, and API management helps you guys mitigate this, but really kind of taking it to the next level and wanting to grow. So I’m going to try, in our conversations, to bring other platforms that are partners of yours, and maybe not, and then try to cross-pollinate some of the questions and take some of what you’d like to learn and ask Twitter and ask others and see, because I think that ecosystem, we can reinforce it and grow that wider ecosystem play in the API community in the next decade. I think there’s, what I said about the API economy and how the sharing economy, I think our overall digital experience can be realized using you guys as a model. So I don’t have a question in there, I was just kind of showcasing, talking about you guys.

Totally. And maybe that’s a better piece of advice to give out, of like, if you build it they will not necessarily come, and so companies need to build dedicated business teams to focus on APIs and extensibility, because this is only going to become a bigger and more important aspect of every company. As every company builds out an API program, app ecosystems, end users are expecting faster, more streamlined experiences, they’re expecting instantaneous access to anything that they have. And it’s not just an order qualifier, it’s not just something that you need to have in order to check the box and table stakes, it’s an order winner, it’s something that will actually get you out there and winning business, winning deals that you wouldn’t have otherwise had. So I would expect pretty much every company over the next 10 years to have, whether it’s an API team, business team, extensibility team, however you want to frame it and call it, if it’s platform solutions, I’ve seen more and more platform solutions popping up, which has been fun to see. But in general I think that’s going to be the future, because you’re really going to need it, and it does unlock such network effects.

Yeah, yeah, I’ll leave it about that. I think that’s probably a good place to kind of wrap things up today. But I’m excited, I will say I’m excited when you have other guests on, I’m curious to hear their answers to some of these questions, and maybe I’ll have to pop back in and we can see how things have changed over time.

No, I’m really going to go for that, as far as, when we’re done with this episode, I’m going to watch it and I’m going to take notes, and I don’t watch my own videos, I cringe watching myself talk, so I’m going to get over that hump and take notes, and then I’m going to really be connecting the dots. Because I would say, similar to how you guys have created the visibility, created this platform, saw the value of platform partners and the importance of these relationships, and how it’s created visibility for you as far as your API and your business, I want to do that with this show. So I really want to start an ecosystem play for a show, I want to go out and figure out, okay, we’re going to get Twitter on here, talk about their business model, get others, and then we’ll see where we go. I may revisit in six months and want to talk to you again and go, okay, here’s what I learned and here’s what I’m thinking, what are your thoughts on this? And so I’ll definitely be knocking on your door, and then, as me and your team have talked, I would love to figure out what other stories we can pull out of this, because I just don’t feel like this story’s done as far as the business of Shutterstock, the digital experience that you guys are enabling across platforms using APIs. I think we’re just kind of revving up on that, what you touched on with going beyond images and video into 3D content, what we talked about with machine learning and that intelligence and helping people and enabling it end to end across websites and advertising and social campaigns as well as your core products. That’s the API economy stuff that I think entirely new businesses are going to be possible because of that kind of enablement in the next decade. So I feel like I’m going to have you back in nine or ten months, a year, and we’re going to see how I’ve connected the dots with other providers. So I’m going to go through your partner page, and similar to how I built this first episode on our earlier conversations, I think I’m going to keep mining this and see what we can connect. So if you have any other ideas, make sure and bring them back and we’ll have a conversation.

Well, I’m looking forward to the Breaking Changes in-person summit, when that can come back, a year from now, when you have all of these API leaders, get them all in a room and have these conversations face to face.

Okay, but you’re going to have to open up with the first keynote, since you were the first episode too.

Okay, I will gladly do so.

All right, all right, well we’re going to do that, let’s make that happen. Well, Alex, hey, this was a great way to, I would say exactly the tone that I wanted to start the show out on. I couldn’t think of a better guest and a better platform and ecosystem to think about, so I really appreciate you joining.

Yeah, thanks for having me, this was a lot of fun, and you ask great questions, and even just talking about this I’m thinking through things in new ways, and I’m very curious to see some of these new guests and kind of get their take as well, get their perspective.

Great, well, thank you.