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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#191

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

c06n wrote: post #85
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.

Jetbrains is mostly Russian. Their main development center is in St. Petersburg (Kotlin is actually a name of the island in St. Petersburg archipelago).

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#192

Post by vonmoltke »

ajdegol wrote: post #44
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…

I'm a big fan and user of PyCharm for many years, but we all know that when my fan starts going and the laptop wants to take off, we can guarantee that PyCharm is indexing ;)

PyCharm is fine for me. IntelliJ, on the other hand, will periodically freeze my work Macbook when trying to reindex parts of our monorepo[1]. Makes me wish I wasn't forced to use a laptop... or a monorepo.

[1] Note, just a handful of top-level targets comprising 2%-3% of the whole repo. Indexing the entire monorepo at once is a non-starter.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#193

Post by karmajunkie »

i keep going back to emacs/vim for coding, but jetbrains in one of the few bigger vendors about whom i’ve got nothing bad to say, ever. i love their tools, just prefer the terminal. one of my teammates did get me to convert from psql to datagrip for most of my data work. that alone is a testament to the quality of the tools!

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#194

Post by sillysaurusx »

katbyte wrote: post #183
sillysaurusx wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg wrote a rebuttal to this in 2008: http://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html It seems generally correct, i.e. VC works because the alternative sucks.

Seems jet brains managed so there is an alternative that doesn’t suck?

That's a bit like saying "This person won the lottery, so therefore..."

Sure, it's possible. But having met a few founders, their lifestyle from taking VC money seems far preferable to the bootstrap approach. It's true that you have to grow, but if you have growth, then nothing else matters. And if you don't, then you're one of the most employable people in the entire world.

A shocking number of people, somehow, end up in insane amounts of debt by trying to start their own companies. And you're sort of forced to. An example: one of our family members had a lucrative pole barn business. (Apparently in the midwest, lots of people wanted pole barns built, or something.) But in order to pay his employees to go construct the pole barns, he needed loans, leveraged against the future income from the construction project.

Then 2008 hit. Poof! Contracts all went poof. And he was left holding the bag.

So, if you need employees, and you're bootstrapped, how exactly are you going to pay an engineer roughly $130k per year? (Remember, the fully-loaded cost of an employee is much higher than their salary.) Loans must be so quite tempting.

And sure, LLCs are designed to mitigate personal risk. But that implies you can find someone willing to risk loaning to you.

I'm not saying that VC is great, just that it fills a need.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#195

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

dhd415 wrote: post #68
KptMarchewa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TeamCity, known as TeamShitty in my previous company.

Saying that TeamCity is their worst product sounds like a back-handed compliment to me. It's certainly not a perfect product, but I've been in multiple jobs where they migrated the CI system (including one that did ~25k builds/day) to TeamCity and it was a significant improvement in scalability and manageability over Jenkins, Travis, and some other Windows-only CI system.

To be fair anything is a significant improvement over manageability of Jenkins.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#196

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#197

Post by lfowles »

malux85 wrote: post #100
risyachka wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And their pricing model is great. All products subscription stars $250 but after 2 years its only $150!

I know it's mental. Their yearly cost pays for itself in productivity boost in like 1-2 days. It's such good value ...

One of the few tools I gladly pay for a yearly subscription even if I only get a few weeks use out of it.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#198

Post by nightski »

csharptwdec19 wrote: post #137
vbezhenar wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting that they initially offered subscription model without unexpirable license. But because of community backlash they changed it and people seem to be happy with the outcome. Listen to your users.

> It is interesting that they initially offered subscription model without unexpirable license. I wasn't even aware they ever did licenses that 'fully expire' but I'm glad they have their current model.

Current model still isn't perfect as you only get the version that existed when your sub starts not when it ends. So if your sub expires you actually have to downgrade the product to an old version.

Before if you bought a major point release you would get all minor point releases as upgrades. Now you don't even get any bug fixes that occurred since your sub started.

I love their products though.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#199

Post by yashap »

einrealist wrote: post #151

Jetbrains is one of the few tool vendors that do not have to aggressively market their way into our tech stacks. That alone is a key indication of how good and useful their products are. Great that this is rewarded. I really hope that they will stay this way and grow organically rather than with force. (Long-term user/customer here. I am using IntelliJ since like version 2 (with some gaps).)

Agreed, they’re definitely a “stand on the strength of our products” company. IntelliJ IDEA is not just the best IDE I’ve ever used, it’s one of the best software products I’ve used, period.

Also, they’ve got a great open source license program! https://www.jetbrains.com/community/opensource/#support

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#200

Post by welearnednothng »

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…

I ran (self-hosted) TeamCity at a division of Disney for years with hundreds of projects across teams with lots of complex dependencies. To this day (though I haven't kept up as much in recent years), it's far and away the most powerful CI system I've ever used. Rock solid stability, to boot. And it's only become better and better over the years.

Does that mean it's right for every job? Not at all. Sometimes you just need simple and accessible. Things like CircleCI or Travis or Heroku's CI. But not Jenkins. I put Jenkins into the same category as TeamCity, and it falls far short.

If you've outgrown some of the other options and need really powerful CI, I can't recommend TeamCity enough.

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