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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#201

Post by GVIrish »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #194
katbyte wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah but all the successful VC funded startup stories are a form of survivorship bias too. The whole idea of venture capital is to fund many companies that will fail with the hope of finding the one unicorn that will make up for all the losses. A lottery just the same.

It's true that if you're taking out loans to fund your bootstrapped company you could be left holding the bag. But it's also true that you can build an IT startup without taking a lot of big loans for capital expenditures. You only grow when you're making money, so it's a slower path, but for some businesses it may make more sense.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#203

Post by Taek »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #164

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…

Profitability isn't necessarily important to the strategy of a VC company. Everything is about the exit, and most exits are either acquisitions or IPOs. Neither type of exit mandates profitability, and both care capable of offloading to a greater fool.

A strong trend I've personally noticed with VC backed companies and something I'm highly wary of for our own company is the way it inevitably turns companies evil. I would highlight Google and Cloudflare as two examples, but the general trend seems to be that VC pressure inevitably forces you to hire 'better' people who invariably steer the company to being more focused on profit and power rather than on some intrinsic mission.

Actual mission focused companies like Mozilla only seem to succeed if they stay private and stay away from VC.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#204

Post by ckosidows »

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).)

Hopping on the IntelliJ love train. I've been using it for the last five years. It is the one piece of software I still get excited about. Heck they've even made fonts interesting.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#205

Post by UncleMeat »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #171
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #164

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…

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.

PG is a VC. He isn't a god of entrepreneurship.

Why is it that this argument only seems to apply to software and not to all of the other kinds of businesses out there?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#206

Post by NonEUCitizen »

cooervo wrote: post #89

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.

Somehow McCarthyism is acceptable in woke America.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#207

Post by lima »

vonmoltke wrote: post #192
ajdegol wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sounds very debuggable - PyCharm is basically the same product as IntelliJ + Python plugin. There's no difference in how it handles project indexing, so it's probably a specific IntelliJ plugin or functionality causing the freezes.

There's a built-in CPU profiler, but given that you're a paying customer, just contact their support and they'll help you figure it out.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#209

Post by edoceo »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #194
katbyte wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or, don't start a business with a loan. If you're gonna bootstrap (the "right" way) then step zero is have 12mo runway of your own capital and step one is start a business

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#210

Post by tpetry »

brabel wrote: post #79
asdojasdosadsa wrote: post #32

A year using IntelliJ for React/Node and still trying to find my way around the IDE (IntelliJ). It seems powerful as is, but I feel like I'm not using it to the full extent Any tips?

I can't find it right now, but there's a video from a conference where one of the IntelliJ developers show how to work with it productively... it really changed how I use it and made me much better at it. One of the things that struck me the most was that you shouldn't use tabs... They are very inefficient at navigating between files... Use the file switcher (Cmd+E on Mac) to switch between recent files, or type sear…

That sounds really interesting. If anybody finds it, i would happy to learn better how to use their products.
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