I don't think it's a coincidence that Jetbrains has created a beloved product without the help of VC money. The longer I work in tech the more I see VC money as poison to good products. Because VC funded startups are forced to grow fast or die a lot of good, profitable, user focused ideas are trashed because they won't lead to rapid enough expansion. Virtually every VC startup I've worked closely with or learned abou…
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
TBF, Jetbrains IDEs do feel sluggish at least on macOS compared to the alternatives (like Xcode or VSCode) on my mid-2014 13" MBP. I don't know if the JVM has performance problems specific to macOS which would explain why big UI applications feel so laggy, or whether other systems with more recent CPUs simply have more reserves to hide the lower UI performance though (the latter is probably more likely).
As a counterpoint, for a project of decently large size on my 2019 MBP, IntelliJ is snappy and a delight to work with, while Xcode takes up 30 GB of space, takes minutes to boot up, and gives me syntax highlighting and autocompletion about as reliably as a broken clock tells time.
I think the total discount on the ‘all products’ pack is now 40% after two years of usage, so I’m paying 15/month for literally all my IDE’s Pretty good deal if you ask me. Now if only I could do remote development like in VSCode.
> Now if only I could do remote development like in VSCode. We are working on it, stay tuned :)
Game changer for me and has been one of the reasons to switch to VS. I would love to see it in Jetbrains products :)
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.
Not taking VC cash is a more traditional take on things here in the US, too. The VC cash/investment money chase is really only a thing in tech circles, and a few other niche areas. The vast majority of businesses simply build "organically" (and most die doing it).
What do Jetbrains customers mostly use? From my understanding, it's mostly Intellij and GoLand, and some PyCharm. At least two of the three are languages that are every difficult to be productive in with Sublime or Vim alone. I guess PyCharm allows you to stop thinking about whitespace? In seriousness, not trying to start another holy war.
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
>"...Tesla is an American company (rather than South African)"
Difference being that Tesla does not keep their core team in South Africa.
$7B valuation on only $200M in EBITDA, let alone profits?
If they aren’t thinking of selling now in this silly market for that ridiculous valuation I admire how centered they are on things more important than money, such as building and owning your own ideas.
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
TBF, Jetbrains IDEs do feel sluggish at least on macOS compared to the alternatives (like Xcode or VSCode) on my mid-2014 13" MBP. I don't know if the JVM has performance problems specific to macOS which would explain why big UI applications feel so laggy, or whether other systems with more recent CPUs simply have more reserves to hide the lower UI performance though (the latter is probably more likely).
Almost always when a JB IDE is being reported as sluggish the problem is you're running out of heap space. Go to Help | Change Memory Settings and give it some more, see if that helps.
But I did come here to note that Jetbrains are as much billionaires (on paper) as the Theranos founders were when the press was fawning over Elizabeth Holmes as the youngest "self-made" billionaire. I'm not comparing the companies. Just there's a big difference between paper billionaire and hard asset billionaire.
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.
It looks like they started by selling a Java tool called IntelliJ Renamer. Likely just bootstrapped that and then reinvested the profits.
They only switched over to the SaaS model maybe five or six years ago, before that you'd buy one copy the application and then buy a newer version when you felt like it. Now you're basically buying a new copy every year no matter what, just like everything else.