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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#81

Post by sheepz »

leetrout wrote: post #73

I canceled all my personal jetbrains products a few years ago after meeting some of their team at GopherCon. I vote with my money and I was a 5+ year subscriber up until that point. I visited their booth with same enthusiasm as other posters here and lavished praise on their tooling and talked about how excited I was for their Go IDE and they just stared at me and said “Ok, thanks”. Something so empty and almost a pr…

Perhaps it was run by some introverted developer-types? Or there were some cultural differences at play? The reaction seems a bit excessive and I'm not sure if it characterizes the company as a whole.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#82

Post by syrgian »

mcv wrote: post #34
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.

The cool part is, they don't need to. The founders are in control, not the VCs or other investors, so the company isn't obliged to put generating money over all other concerns. And being billionaires, the founders are probably doing fine. They'd apparently prefer to keep the good thing they've got going than to ruin it by selling it off. There's more in life than getting even more money.

Long term that should net them a lot more money. Having and keeping a true mission will allow them to leave all competitors behind. Because even if competitors can seem strong from time to time (VS Code and Atom recently) they will end up dying because of de-prioritization and leadership without vision (Atom).

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#83

Post by buybackoff »

Their open source free pack is so great, many many thanks to them!

And they kill two birds with one stone. First, they support open source, which is great. Second, they increase conversion and loyal userbase. At my job I had a choice between Visual Studio + Resharper vs Rider, and I was reluctant to move from VS to IntelliJ IDEA based IDE, thinking R# is good enough and gives the same benefits inside a familiar IDE. I was so wrong, after trying Rider at home occasionally and pair coding at job, I gradually migrated. The IDE itself is much better, faster, nicer is big and very small details. Now there is no way back to VS, but that may not have happenned without the access at home. Other tools from the Toolbox are doing the same for other languages. Very smart of them to be so generous. Now even if my free pack is not renewed, I will pay for myself. And for foreseeable future I will generate at least one license at work for them.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#84

Post by hadrien01 »

jansan wrote: post #43
hadrien01 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't been convinced by WebStorm (for Angular and Gatsby/React projects EDIT: with TypeScript). It doesn't feel as magical as IntelliJ or Rider/R#.

I cannot be as magical due to Javascript's dynamic typing. In Java/Kotlin, the IDE can know all about your classes, types, etc., but with Javascript is has to make some guesses. I am using Webstorm for my side project and have to use Visual Studio Code for company work. Webstorm is so much better IMO. Everything feels to well integrated, while Visual Studio Code always feels like a toy to me.

I've used it with TypeScript exclusively. My qualms are more about debugging (VS Code creates a temporary Firefox profile in seconds and that's it; in WebStorm you need to configure Firefox to launch a certain way and then setup the debugger), the absence of refactoring options, framework support, etc.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#85

Post by c06n »

leetrout wrote: post #73

I canceled all my personal jetbrains products a few years ago after meeting some of their team at GopherCon. I vote with my money and I was a 5+ year subscriber up until that point. I visited their booth with same enthusiasm as other posters here and lavished praise on their tooling and talked about how excited I was for their Go IDE and they just stared at me and said “Ok, thanks”. Something so empty and almost a pr…

Could be possibly because they were Czech? The culture is very different from what Americans are used to. Very reserved, very matter-of-fact, no smalltalk.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#86

Post by manyxcxi »

leetrout wrote: post #73

I canceled all my personal jetbrains products a few years ago after meeting some of their team at GopherCon. I vote with my money and I was a 5+ year subscriber up until that point. I visited their booth with same enthusiasm as other posters here and lavished praise on their tooling and talked about how excited I was for their Go IDE and they just stared at me and said “Ok, thanks”. Something so empty and almost a pr…

Not to invalidate the way you feel about that interaction, but putting myself in their shoes- I’m not sure my response would be much better.

Running a booth at a conference is EXHAUSTING. Also, that was your first interaction with them and you were at peak excitement. That might’ve been the thousandth time they had heard similar and their spark may have faded by the time you got there.

I get it though, we feel the way we feel. It sucks when your enthusiasm goes un-matched. I’ve written off companies for interactions a more objective bystander might charitably forgive.

BTW- I’ve got no relation to the company or product. I’m just a happy customer who’s run a booth or two in my day and also felt the same way as you about other companies too.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#87

Post by spyke112 »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #25
manojlds wrote: post #3

Ok so everyone knows and loves JetBrains. What's their worst product so far?

TeamCity, known as TeamShitty in my previous company.

Oh how I have wasted days configuring build and deployment pipelines in TeamCity. Brings back some arguably bad memories!

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#88

Post by that_guy_iain »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #55

Thank the gods for JetBrains. I love their software. Excellent business model, I get to keep the software I bought when the license expires. Never forced to continually pay for something you don't see value in updating. I think that's one of the key factors which drives them to continue to improve their products. If future version of their products wasn't vastly improved over the previous then people wouldn't upgrade…

> Never used any of their TeamCity/Spaces stuff but it looks cool. I can definitely say I'm a fan of their IDEs though. Use them every day.

I looked into the cloud offerings they have, the CI system is way more powerful than what I am using (bitbucket pipelines) and I'm actually pushing the limits of what I can sanely do there, so I may actually move over soon.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#89

Post by cooervo »

Since their HQ is in Russia is no one else concerned that their IDE may be subject to Russian spying?

I mean, I'm currently reading the book Sandworm. And it is known in the cybersecurity world that Russia coerces or intimidates companies and devs to work for them as spies.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#90

Post by neolefty »

bonoboTP wrote: post #36

PyCharm is a no-nonsense, straightforward IDE, that's a pleasure to use. They somehow manage to avoid annoying feature bloat and crapware. No nagging, no bullshit, they are actually creating features that improve workflows instead of features to tick boxes on corporate purchasing department meeting room flipcharts or buzzword bingo. Remarkable and I really hope they don't get bought-and-killed by one of the giants. O…

Same with WebStorm editing JavaScript & TypeScript!

I'm so impressed that JetBrains can put a reliable pseudo-type system on top of dynamic languages like Python and JavaScript.

My co-workers wonder why I don't just use VSCode like everybody else. I mean it's not _bad_, but it's not JetBrains. You will have to pry my all-tools JetBrains license out of my cold dead hands.

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