The founder and CEO of iStockphoto, Bruce Livingstone, has resigned just two years after his company merged with Getty Images.
Having served as the senior vice president of consumer markets for Getty since 2007, Livingstone wrote in a letter to the company that he is going to take time off to, spend time with [his] family‚ and figure out what to do next.
Livingstone founded the free micro-stock imagery company in 2000 and had immediate success running the site. In 2001, iStockphoto became one of the first micro-stock agencies to charge small fees for image use. iStockphoto was acquired by Getty in 2006 for $50 million and has since launched international sites and added video footage, making the company three times larger than its nearest competitor, Shutterstock.com.
Livingstone was succeeded in April by Kelly Thompson, the former COO for iStockphoto. Prior to becoming COO, Thompson created CopySpace, an advanced image search engine that allows designers to locate images by the amount of empty space in an image.