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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#221

Post by powvans »

malux85 wrote: post #59
arpa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed - JetBrains is one of those companies where their products speak for themselves, and I happily pay every year. Absolutely money well spent.

Yes! My JetBrains Ultimate renews every November and I get a little giddy in anticipation of paying them for another year. It’s just such an amazing value. JetBrains is so good it’s like finding money on the sidewalk.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#222

Post by sillysaurusx »

edoceo wrote: post #209
sillysaurusx wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

$130k to pay a single employee for one year. I don't know about you, but it's extremely difficult for most people to save up that kind of runway.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#223

Post by skybrian »

Taek wrote: post #203
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 w…

Google went public early and with a share structure that insulated the founders from any pressure from the stock market.

Venture capital has nothing to do with what’s happened since.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#225

Post by thrower123 »

boarnoah wrote: post #218
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…

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

The comparison to the bad old days when the IDE answer was always "Install Eclipse and this set of poorly maintained language plugins" is night and day.

The dollar-a-day I spend on the Jetbrains all-products subscription more than pays for itself.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#226

Post by drchopchop »

silexia wrote: post #190
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…

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…

From first-hand experience, however, bootstrapped companies often don't have a ton of cash in the bank. They can quickly fail if there's an adverse event (COVID, for example).

You can also get crushed by well-funded competitors who can innovate faster than you due to larger team sizes, salaries, etc.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#227

Post by vlovich123 »

Taek wrote: post #203
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 w…

Google had limited VC investment - a 25m round before IPO. Arguably they turned evil much later so to me the link to “VC corruption” is more specious.

Re cloudflare, can you please help me understand what they’ve been doing that you see as evil?

Given how Mozilla constantly struggles to stay afloat (and effectively depends on the generosity of Google as the single revenue source), I don’t know that’s an example to point to, especially since they’ve had their own share of “user-hostile” steps (albeit fewer since it’s a smaller company).

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#228

Post by achillean »

vonmoltke wrote: post #187
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…

> 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. I have noticed that, to some people, "VC startup" is almost considered redundant. That is, if your company is not seeking outside investors, not seeking rapid growth, not seeking an "exit", then it isn't a real "startup". So, in addition to what you m…

Completely agree and I experienced much of that on my own journey. Customers would ask whether I'm interested in taking VC or if I wanted to keep it as a "lifestyle business" - not realizing that we were doing more than fine without requiring outside funding. After a while though it nags at you and makes you wonder whether you should take VC because doing so makes building a business formulaic. Bootstrapping a company can feel like you're in uncharted waters in comparison because a lot of articles assume you've taken or want to take VC. And they assume that you want to exit. I wish there were more publicly shared success stories of bootstrapped companies that didn't take funding because there are more of them out there than people realize. And taking things slower can help you validate use cases, flesh out the product and build the type of company that you want. I'm very happy that we never took VC.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#229

Post by ardy42 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #222
edoceo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

$130k to pay a single employee for one year. I don't know about you, but it's extremely difficult for most people to save up that kind of runway.

> $130k to pay a single employee for one year. I don't know about you, but it's extremely difficult for most people to save up that kind of runway.

I think the idea is that step one isn't hiring a subordinate employee; it's having secure enough finances that you (or you and your co-founders) can work for yourself for a time.

Step two is actually working on the business, and step three is growing is revenues to the point where it can sustain you, four is growing them further to the point where they can support an employee, and five is actually hiring that employee and paying them $130k a year.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#230

Post by gruez »

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

>It’s amazing that their products are so performant on Java

It's a total memory hog though.

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