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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#291

Post by everythingswan »

auganov wrote: post #273
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…

A company that makes it to a few dozen employees without much financing is already extremely successful. You're very unlikely to ever work for a poorly run company without financing - they can't hire.

Some SMB's that I have met over the years are great at pretending they don't have money when hiring but are very profitable. I think that fits the "bad company, no financing" and is worth mentioning.

This thread is interesting because we're talking about success for different people. Success for the founder? The money? The employees? The answers are relative to the stakeholder we're talking about.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#292

Post by renewiltord »

rcardo11 wrote: post #281

I'd like to understand how these guys make money, I've used the free version of IntelliJ for years and never required anymore than this! Does people actually buy licenses ?

Yeah, they are cheap (for US professionals, at least). I've subscribed to their products for over half a decade now and have it on auto-renew without thinking.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#293

Post by trotFunky »

rcardo11 wrote: post #281

I'd like to understand how these guys make money, I've used the free version of IntelliJ for years and never required anymore than this! Does people actually buy licenses ?

Some of the language specific IDEs do not have a free (community) version like CLion for C/C++ or Rider for C#/.NET/Unity (and Unreal Engine in the near future) and bring a lot to the table for those languages.

I am a heavy user of CLion and enjoyed my education license while I was in engineering school, I will happily buy a personal license when it expires !

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#294

Post by renewiltord »

brentm wrote: post #180
tekkk wrote: post #143

It reads that they raised no external funding whatsoever? Is that true? If so, how? Did they just code an app and start immediately selling it, working another jobs until it become enough profitable to support them full-time? It sounds quite implausible that they did not receive any funding, but I guess it could be true. Very impressive achievement nonetheless.

It looks like they started by selling a Java tool called IntelliJ Renamer. Likely just bootstrapped that and then reinvested the profits. They only switched over to the SaaS model maybe five or six years ago, before that you'd buy one copy the application and then buy a newer version when you felt like it. Now you're basically buying a new copy every year no matter what, just like everything else.

No, their current licensing thing becomes the other one after a year. For instance if I stopped paying I'd have IntelliJ IDEA 2019 forever.

There was a huge controversy when they switched and the backlash made them re-evaluate to this which I think is a fair license.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#296

Post by renewiltord »

shay_ker wrote: post #275
brentm wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RubyMine & WebStorm are both great products.

sure, i'm wondering how many people pay for them though

Everyone I know who pays for them just buys the "All Products" pack. The loyalty discount just makes it a no-brainer.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#298

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

#299

Post by closeparen »

My company’s codebase is rapidly becoming too much to compile or even index locally. The official solution is to develop in cloud VMs. I expect I will be on of the last holdouts using my MacBook Pro as a space heater: you will pry the Jetbrains IDEs out of my cold dead hands.

I just hope they get strong client/server support at some point.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#300

Post by fgonzag »

rcardo11 wrote: post #281

I'd like to understand how these guys make money, I've used the free version of IntelliJ for years and never required anymore than this! Does people actually buy licenses ?

I've had a personal all tool license since they switched to the licensing model. 150 / yr is reasonable for me to be able to use their tools on my personal projects, and also not having to pester my bosses about getting a license whenever I change jobs.
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