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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#211

>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.

Right and that's reason why all these companies not based in Russia.

The sanctions for (Crimea, MH17, chemical weapons attack in Britain ans so on) are the reason these companies are not based in Russia.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#212

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.

Have you entertained the idea that both could suck?

This is probably it. There are some companies that just can't be bootstrapped, the up-front cost is too high. There are some that would suffer from the high-growth demands of VC. If you've got a plan that starts with high-fixed costs that over time becomes low-fixed cost at scale, then VC is probably the best way to go. If you've identified low-hanging fruit to solve problems for people, bootstrapping makes the most sense.

Any arguments for or against seem to imply either way is a one-sized fits all solution. It's not.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#213

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.

I don't see the rebuttal.

The article seems to be only about what the best way of selling your company is (whether or not you technically sell).

There isn't even anything in it about just running your own company indefinitely.

And the article does not mention "user" or "good software" once, staying only within an economical framework ("how to get rich") - which is literally the point of GP.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#214

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.

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?

Also as humans we are myopic and can only understand everything as a relation to us. His tweet (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1129897694984646657) about how you don't need to be rich to run a startup invariably shows that as humans we are poor at judging almost anything out of our current circle of understanding.

The major major thing that makes a startup successful in almost all cases is money. With enough wind even chickens can fly.

There are millions of brilliant people all over the world whose ideas we never see because they never had their opportunity or funding to bring their ideas to life.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#216

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…

I have seen this firsthand. I was a finance major fifteen years ago and for the last ten years I have run a completely bootstrapped agency. If you have to live off your own revenues, it means you don't do any premature scaling... You have to focus on the needs of your customers to reach the next level. VC backed companies have to reach the VC exit goals which means they are forced to scale immediately even if things…

Care to tell us more about your experience with Vistage?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#217

>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.

That’s the first time I am reading these allegations. Do you have sources backing up your claim or is it just expected to be “common knowledge”?

In Russia anyone rich enough is either part of FSB or gets an offer one can't refuse (for example, see Sysoev/NGINX).

Owners of the company are not dead.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#218

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…

Some people get a bit weirded out about the multiple IDE situation (mostly folks whose current day to day is VS Code with extensions).

Usually that goes away when you get them to try some of the IDEs, the experience is second to none (as far as IDEs that work extremely well out of the box go).

The amount of times I've got praised for writing neat C# code that was Resharper doing its magic :P

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#219
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's definitely faster than Python, Ruby, PHP and many other kids on the block... I don't know why, but I got a good laugh from that statement. Those "kids" are all the same age or older than Java; PHP, Ruby, and Java were introduced within a few months of each other in 95 and Python dates back to 91.

I know, I didn't say "kids" implying these languages were new, it was just a manner of speaking.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#220
Congratulations to them and to all Jetbrains employees. They managed to do two really hard things which most developers flirt with at some time or another.

1. Create a new editor/IDE that's actually better not just different. I think everyone has had shower thoughts about making a better IDE and many have tried and failed. Jetbrains succeeded.

2. Creating a useful abstraction. IntelliJ was a great Java IDE but what's truly impressive is how they've been able to repeat the formula for almost any language out there. Everything from Go to JavaScript has a great Jetbrains IDE. They seem to have somewhat solved the general problem, which is normally a folly but in this case the key to a multibillion dollar company.

So again, congratulations!

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