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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#141

Post by cataphract »

rocketpastsix wrote: post #123

as a PHP developer, PhpStorm is fantastic, and knowing that JetBrains hired one of the most active and prominent PHP Core developers to let him continue working on the language is fantastic. Happy to pay for these apps because of that.

It's not exactly clear to me why they hired Nikita Popov, but I'm glad he gets such free rein. I was involved with PHP runtime development in the beginning of the 2010s and saw as he, as a teenager in high-school, progressed so quickly from fixing some bugs to being arguably the person most advancing the language and the implementation (the other being Zeev, who's been around forever, but he's more focused on the implementation).

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#142

Post by globular-toast »

victor106 wrote: post #95

It’s rare these to read stories of software billionaires and think it’s well deserved. This is one of those rare cases. Also, IntelliJ runs on Java, for all the bashing that Java gets on HN, it’s an example of how “what technology you pick is less important than your focus on user experience”. It’s amazing that their products are so performant on Java

Back in the 90s Java was slower and used a load more memory. But the competition was C/C++ apps with native GUIs. Nowadays with the likes of Electron as competition Java apps are fast with low memory usage.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#143

Post by tekkk »

It reads that they raised no external funding whatsoever? Is that true? If so, how? Did they just code an app and start immediately selling it, working another jobs until it become enough profitable to support them full-time? It sounds quite implausible that they did not receive any funding, but I guess it could be true. Very impressive achievement nonetheless.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#144

Post by drKarl »

victor106 wrote: post #95

It’s rare these to read stories of software billionaires and think it’s well deserved. This is one of those rare cases. Also, IntelliJ runs on Java, for all the bashing that Java gets on HN, it’s an example of how “what technology you pick is less important than your focus on user experience”. It’s amazing that their products are so performant on Java

That is actually a misconception. You may have this mental classification of Java as a slow language if you looked at its performance 20 years ago. Now it's actually really fast, it goes neck to neck with C++. Sure, Rust or Go or C (or definitely assembler) might be faster in some workloads, but Java is definitely very very fast nowadays. It uses a lot of memory because of the way Garbage Collection works, but it is fast. It's definitely faster than Python, Ruby, PHP and many other kids on the block...

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#145

Post by adambyrtek »

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.

Why does it have to be in the USA? You can IPO at other stock exchanges. For example, CD Projekt Red, the game studio that developed the Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077, is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (Poland) and valued at ~$10bln (although the stock price has been really volatile recently).

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#146

Post by vips7L »

tuyguntn wrote: post #19

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 V…

Java in VSCode works completely fine even with annotations, its the Eclipse language server. You should really give it another shot.

In fact for all of my use cases it performs better than IntelliJ because it isn't trying to be 200 different tools at one time. With JDK 15 and ZGC my project only uses 250mb of ram for the language server where IntelliJ pushes over 4GB.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#147

Post by jcfrei »

helge9210 wrote: post #131

>The Prague-based startup This is Czech company as much as Luxsoft is Swiss or Telegram is from UAE. Using JetBrains tools you potentially give Russia/FSB access to your source code and open yourself to a possibility of getting backdoor inserted into binaries during compilation.

Do you have any evidence to back these allegations?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#148

Post by wpietri »

arpa wrote: post #30
tuyguntn wrote: post #19

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 V…

I just bought a personal IDE licence a few days ago. JetBrains makes one of the best IDEs I've ever used, and I consider that 100€ well spent.

Yup! Martin Fowler mentioned them because they were one of the first people making automated refactoring tools. That sold me on their IDE, and I've been a happy user ever since 2001. Thee days I have the personal version of their all-you-can-eat license and it has always been worth the money.

I'm delighted that their smarts and dedication in building a high-quality, user-focused product has paid off in a big way for them.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#149

Post by golergka »

tuyguntn wrote: post #19

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 V…

They're also one of the best IT employers in Moscow and St Petersburg, and guys working there create a lot of value for IT community both local, and russian-speaking in general. You don't even have to work there to feel the impact on the whole programming culture here.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#150

Post by holtalanm »

krisgenre wrote: post #126
Jestar342 wrote: post #103

The thing that most impresses me about JetBrains' products, after the very real "This was made by developers" feel to them, and the excellent community interaction, and the regular and plentiful updates.. is the price. They don't price gouge their users. They could double their prices and still have plenty of sales (but I guess they'd probably lose a lot of personal licenses.) I'm sure they have actually done the num…

.. and IntelliJ Ultimate has plugins that brings all the features of all of their IDEs(PHP, GO, Android, RUST, JS...) except CLion.

Does IntelliJ Ultimate include their C# functionality from Rider, as well? I used to use IntelliJ Ultimate, but I don't remember it including C# support.
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