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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#311

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 do Java, Ruby, Go, Clojure, Python, k8s gigs or side projects. For 150EUR/yr I get solid always current workbench with many specialized flavours (IDEA, RubyMine, GoLand, PyCharm) and consistent UX. Moreover there are quality 3rd party plugins available for K8s yamls or Clojure (Cursive).

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#312
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 goes neck to neck with C++. Sure, Rust or Go or C I hate to be that guy but 1) java does not go neck to neck with c++ unless you mean it can be in the same order of magnitude and 2) C++ is not slower than C or Go or Rust Note: by c++ I mean c++ compiled by a decent compiler e.g. gcc/clang/msvc

Yes, out of Rust, C, C++ and Go, the slow one is going to be the one with a GC.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#314
post #308
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] https://europe.autonews.com/sales-segment/europes-no-1-selli...

If you look at the greater european statistics it's not a real electric car market any more, as most vehicles sold have ICE components (either hybrid or solely ICE). Norway is special because of their large market share of BEV cars. They make up 56% of new car sales in Norway while only 7.2% in all of the EU.

So all the EU stat is saying is that Teslas are sold well in the niche of the market that's interested in buying EVs over more established brands. The Norway stat is more representative of what happens when 56% of all newly sold EU cars are purely electric.

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/03/norway-in-november-ev-m...

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2020/09/20200904-acea.html

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#315
Doesn't surprise me. I switched from TextMate to WebStorm 10 years ago. It was like I suddenly had a superpower. I don't code as much nowadays but I still live in DataGrip to do product analytics. I talked to the JetBrains team recently about how I used their to build open source software, and how we use their tools to build America's newest stock exchange at LTSE.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/webstorm/2020/12/interview-with-r...

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#316
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been paying for it for a while and I didn't actually know that. I thought after I stopped paying it would be unlicensed and bricked. Either way though I think the upgrades are probably worth paying for.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#317
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been paying for it for a while and I didn't actually know that. I thought after I stopped paying it would be unlicensed and bricked. Either way though I think the upgrades are probably worth paying for.

If you login and look, they'll say "Perpetual Fallback License for X". That X is what you'll be able to use for life.

And I agree with you on the upgrades.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#318
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe, but we went on a cruise to Norway last summer and every single time we were on the streets we saw at least a few Teslas. It was a game to see who could spot the most Teslas first.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#319
I was using Intellij (usually referred to as IDEA back then) after Visual Cafe, JBuilder had died and Netbeans was shit (and/or still to arrive). Was worried they would be killed by mega-corp sponsored Eclipse. Didn't happen. They really succeeded with a straight-forward pay model (and now subscription model). Congrats to them.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#320
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not a blind spot, it's explicitly part of their company's long-term strategy; Musk's plan from the beginning was to start with a luxury-tier offering (Roadster), and gradually work their way down the price-points as they achieved greater economies of scale.

Musk wrote about this way back in the day (2006):

https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j...

> Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized and this is no less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.

You might criticize their execution for failing to reach the mass-market sedan price-point fast enough (though I think that they have done an impressive job of starting a car company from scratch), but I don't think the "blind spot" claim really holds water.

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