What do Jetbrains customers mostly use? From my understanding, it's mostly Intellij and GoLand, and some PyCharm. At least two of the three are languages that are every difficult to be productive in with Sublime or Vim alone. I guess PyCharm allows you to stop thinking about whitespace? In seriousness, not trying to start another holy war.
Rider is great. You do have VsCode competing in that space, but I still like Rider better as an actual IDE. Though VsCode with vim mode is my default lightweight editor now.
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.
I wouldn't say it is SaaS model. You own a licensed copy pinned at version forever without extra pay and also for offline use. I would rather call it annual upgrade subscription software.
> Hmm. You're dodging the question: Why would a cofounder want to start a company with you? No handwaving. > People cofound to get rich. Can your company offer that to your cofounder? I don't know. Why did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak start Apple together? I feel like you're laboring under a very limited model of how and why companies are founded and how people behave.
The model happens to be aligned with how and why people actually start companies. It's not my model. You have to come up with a persuasive answer to "Why should I work as hard as I can on this company, rather than go work for Google?" That question is in fact so hard that it (possibly) almost killed YC in the crib, back in '08. No one wants to work for a startup when they can get paid far more and live an easier life…
> Why not make the optimal decisions, all else being equal?
Money isn't everything. For a lot of people, it isn't even a top 5 consideration.
The best small companies operate in their direct competitor's blindspot. Stupid example: Tesla. Toyota reverse engineered their car. Can't make a competing product. Not because it is impossible, but because it is not how the entire supply chain / development is set up. It'd take Toyota a major restructuring of the company to be able to compete. That's the idea. It doesn't matter how much cash the other side throws at…
In real electric car markets, other brands than Tesla run the show. In Norway, one of the biggest western electric car markets, Tesla is way at the bottom of sales. Only 95 Teslas were sold in November, while single models of other manufacturers had multitudes of that number in sales. https://insideevs.com/news/452441/norway-plugin-car-sales-oc... I think Tesla's main contribution lies in the past, by being an early…
One can perhaps think of this as Teslas blind spot. People living with California wages don’t necessarily see the difference in prices mattering that much.
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…
The more I work in VC backed companies, the more I realize:
VC's are not there to add value to a business, they are there to suck all the value out of a business.
The best small companies operate in their direct competitor's blindspot. Stupid example: Tesla. Toyota reverse engineered their car. Can't make a competing product. Not because it is impossible, but because it is not how the entire supply chain / development is set up. It'd take Toyota a major restructuring of the company to be able to compete. That's the idea. It doesn't matter how much cash the other side throws at…
In real electric car markets, other brands than Tesla run the show. In Norway, one of the biggest western electric car markets, Tesla is way at the bottom of sales. Only 95 Teslas were sold in November, while single models of other manufacturers had multitudes of that number in sales. https://insideevs.com/news/452441/norway-plugin-car-sales-oc... I think Tesla's main contribution lies in the past, by being an early…
From the article you cite:
> Surprisingly, disappointing results are seen from the two best-selling BEVs in Europe - Renault ZOE (119) and Tesla Model 3 (74).
I found this article [1] with sales figures for Europe. For H1 2020, it was 37k Renault Zoe, 32k Tesla Model 3, 18k VW e-Golf, then 4 in the 11-13k range, and 3 in the 7-8k range.
sure, i'm wondering how many people pay for them though
I know of quite a few developers in Mexico who pay for it out of pocket because of how much they like it and how much it improves their efficiency. I'm talking people on 40-50k salaries top.
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 ter…
Admittedly, Java suffers from the same issue as C#; those ergonomics come from a bad case of kitchen-sink-itis. In your own code it's fine, but it's a hassle going through 8 different paradigms in one legacy codebase.