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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

bloomberg.com

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#11

Post by ce4 »

xwdv wrote: post #4

I don’t get it though, why not just go public now and get tons of money? The IPO may never fetch as high of a price as it would now, even if the company gets more valuable in the future.

Well, there's values that differ by countries. I've seen a few old family run businesses being sold off to US VCs and things didnt turn out well often:

- customers got screwed over

- same with employees

- quality "optimizations"

- financial engineering

- founder's longterm values abondoned for quarterly gains

Not taking VC cash is a more traditional take on things elsewhere.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#12

Post by marcinzm »

BossingAround wrote: post #6

Isn't JetBrains a Russian company that moved their HQ to Prague due to fear of Russian government?

Based on Wikipedia it was founded in the Czech Republic by three Russians in 2000 which makes it a Czech company just as much as Tesla is an American company (rather than South African).

edit: Fixed founding date, coffee hasn't kicked in yet

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#13

Post by pdpi »

nojs wrote: post #2

What a great story. Profitable company, great product, simple and honest business model and no VC funding.

It's also pretty consumer-friendly. Every year I get an email from them around November reminding me my subscription will renew in February, and then a couple more reminders along the way.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#15

Post by ce4 »

ce4 wrote: post #11
xwdv wrote: post #4

I don’t get it though, why not just go public now and get tons of money? The IPO may never fetch as high of a price as it would now, even if the company gets more valuable in the future.

Well, there's values that differ by countries. I've seen a few old family run businesses being sold off to US VCs and things didnt turn out well often: - customers got screwed over - same with employees - quality "optimizations" - financial engineering - founder's longterm values abondoned for quarterly gains Not taking VC cash is a more traditional take on things elsewhere.

Stuff like this:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remi...

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#16

Post by domano »

xwdv wrote: post #4

I don’t get it though, why not just go public now and get tons of money? The IPO may never fetch as high of a price as it would now, even if the company gets more valuable in the future.

Why would they? It seems that they have enough resources for the things they want to do, so why risk it?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#17

Post by saberdancer »

emteycz wrote: post #5
xwdv wrote: post #4

I don’t get it though, why not just go public now and get tons of money? The IPO may never fetch as high of a price as it would now, even if the company gets more valuable in the future.

It's not easy for a Czech company to do IPO in the USA. It's not worth it here.

They could find an investor willing to buy them out. Doesn't have to be an IPO.

Still, if you are happy with the amount of money you have and you have a business you enjoy running, why sell? This is probably their view of it.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#19

Post by tuyguntn »

if JetBrains people are reading this, I want to say THANK YOU! You saved lots of developer time with IDE, then Kotlin language. I use Golang, Python and Database IDEs, and they are really nice and time saving, can't imagine how much time you guys saved to Java developers where everything is reflection based annotations and deep level of abstract class/interface implementations. (last time when I worked with Java in VSCode, it was almost useless for autocomplete, because too many things rely on annotation based code generation)

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#20

Post by koevet »

Happy for Jetbrains, I have been using their products for years and they did increase my productivity.

Lately most of their producuts are suffering of atrocious performance issues, both on osx and linux [1], I hope that they manage to sort them out, because lots of people are now reverting to older versions.

1. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2732

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