Behind the Scenes with Libris: The Mission and Culture Driving Our Team

In this video series, we’re taking you behind the scenes with Libris by PhotoShelter. Meet Senior Manager of Client Services Farah Visslailli, Libris Product Architect Peter Krogh, PhotoShelter co-founder and VP of Network Operations Jeffrey Arnold, and now, our CEO, Andrew Fingerman. We hope you enjoy getting to know our team!

Here at Libris, we love building products that make a difference in your lives. Knowing that we’re making your jobs easier makes our jobs more rewarding. According to our annual survey, every single one of us is proud to be a part of this team.

When Andrew Fingerman took over as the CEO of PhotoShelter, building a team of happy employees and fostering the culture the founders had created was a top priority.

“This included a really strong feeling of self starter in all of our employees, chasing after technical opportunities very aggressively, and keeping that flame alive, which was a love of photography,” he says.

We asked Andrew to give us his perspective on the Libris mission, the future of how PhotoShelter photographers and Libris clients can work together, and the team that makes the magic happen.

10 Things You Might Not Know About the Libris Mission & Culture

1. Many of our team members started in one position and grew up with the company, moving from client services to product, administration to sales, customers to product managers and more!
2. PhotoShelter team members have a love for photos and videos. We have sports photographers, music photographers, editorial photographers, travel photographers, wedding photographers and more, in positions all over the company.
3. When Andrew talks about how much content marketers are sourcing, managing and sharing photos and videos, and how difficult it’s becoming to do all of this, he likes to call it the “content apocalypse.”
4. Despite the fact that we’ve grown from 10 to 20 to now 50 people over 11 years, PhotoShelter continues to feel like a startup, because our product team maintains a fast pace of innovation on both PhotoShelter and Libris, and they regularly release new features that solve our clients’ problems.
5. PhotoShelter photographers can send content directly from their single user PhotoShelter accounts to their clients’ Libris accounts. We see this as the beginning of an exciting future where both products are highly integrated.
6. PhotoShelter has a crew of people from all over the company who brew beer in the office. Once a month, we invite PhotoShelter photographers to come talk to us about their work and enjoy the beer made by our team members. But “Photos and Beer Night” is more than just a fun tradition – it’s one of the ways innovation is stimulated at PhotoShelter – because making beer connects team members from every department, and getting together to enjoy it with our clients gives us a window into how people use our products.
7. In 2015, PhotoShelter was named one of Inc. Magazine’s 5,000 fastest growing companies.
8. Every year when we survey the team, 100% say they’re proud to work at PhotoShelter. In 2015, Internet Week named PhotoShelter as the company with the happiest employees in NYC tech.
9. We go to great lengths to understand how our clients use our products, which means we also get a window into their amazing jobs, like when we do interviews for Libris case studies, or when Andrew got to shadow Arizona Cardinals photographer Gene Lower on the sidelines.
10. We use our own products on a daily basis. For example, the Libris marketing team has a Libris account we use to store, organize and share our photos and videos, like the one at the top of this post, and the professional photographers on our team use PhotoShelter to run their businesses. We may also be creating a gallery of outtakes for a blooper reel…