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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#251

Post by golergka »

syngrog66 wrote: post #250
golergka wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also one of the best IT employers in Moscow and St Petersburg, and guys working there create a lot of value for IT community both local, and russian-speaking in general. You don't even have to work there to feel the impact on the whole programming culture here.

Moscow and St Petersberg... that is interesting. I'm a fan of their tools as well, but it is good to learn the Russian angle and take it into account.

Well, it is a Russian company (although not legally, for obvious reasons). Kotlin is named after an island just of the coast of St Petersburg, for example.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#252

Post by avl999 »

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

Folks who still think that Java is a bad language either from the perspective of developer ergonomics or performance probably haven't programmed in it since the Java 4 days and still think of the language as the language of Enterprise Java Beans, Java Applets and hundreds of lines of XML. It is not that language anymore. Modern Java is blisteringly fast(and has been for a while) and almost the same level as C# in terms of developers ergonomics

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#253

Post by vbezhenar »

nightski wrote: post #198
csharptwdec19 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You'll get bugfixes (all .Z releases in X.Y.Z scheme).

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#254

Post by threedots »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #231
ardy42 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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 po…

Co-founders? Why are they co-founding? Profit sharing? That's an excellent way to devolve into squabbling about who gets what. VC also protects against that: the money is for the company, and it's illegal to siphon it out of the company. Unfortunately in practice your suggestion tends to become "You're working for yourself, alone." And sure, I love the idea of a one-person company. Lots of talented devs can sell, if…

I am a cofounder of a non-VC backed startup. We work together because (1) we're friends (2) like working together (3) have complimentary skillsets. We split the equity 50/50 and receive the same salary. We've been doing it several years and we've never had even a single conversation on the topic, we just assumed from the beginning it was an even split and that's how we went about it.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#255

Post by bostik »

UncleMeat wrote: post #205
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.

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?

> Why is it that this argument only seems to apply to software?

Maybe because software has a unique property: a practically zero marginal ("reproduction") cost. Hence software, and services that depend only on software are suitable for the rocket-fuel injection strategy VCs so heavily rely on.

Make no mistake - good software is damn expensive to create, but once it's ready for delivery, creating and selling additional copies (or serving more clients) costs practically nothing.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#256

Post by mamcx »

Jestar342 wrote: post #103

The thing that most impresses me about JetBrains' products, after the very real "This was made by developers" feel to them, and the excellent community interaction, and the regular and plentiful updates.. is the price. They don't price gouge their users. They could double their prices and still have plenty of sales (but I guess they'd probably lose a lot of personal licenses.) I'm sure they have actually done the num…

I wish the owners of Delphi go this route instead of whatever them do.

This could have make Delphi far more popular than its now, I not cause a exodus of talent...

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#257

Post by varispeed »

Sometimes I used to think that the rich used to lobby governments to create more regulation, so that creating any new business in a space they have their own players would be extremely expensive and thus warrant the need of VC capital to even start. On the other hand when I see how companies abuse their position I can see that the regulation is very much needed. Now there seems to be a disconnect between how smaller businesses are regulated and how big business is essentially left to do as they please as they become too big to fail. How or what is at fault? Is it possible to have a level playing field so that smaller businesses can compete on the same level as big guys and gals?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#258

Post by devmor »

drKarl wrote: post #144
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

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 would seriously contest the speed of Java compared to modern PHP. The JIT puts PHP at near-C performance levels with competently written code. Which shouldn't be surprising if you realize PHP is largely a "wrapper" around C.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#259

Post by est31 »

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…

Is this lifestyle business stigma a real thing? Or just something the VC lobby put out there? Personally I think anyone leading a business should deserve respect, as running one is hard.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#260

Post by brundolf »

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 don't think it's a coincidence that Jetbrains has created a beloved product without the help of VC money

I don't think the surprise is that they made a good product without VC, I think the surprise is that they made ten figures off the back of nothing but a good product

...which should tell us something about the industry

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