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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#321

Post by thraway2020 »

malux85 wrote: post #238
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'm curious, what are the illegal (and the highly unethical) ones doing? Dont need to name the companies, but what sort of activities are you seeing?

I can really relate to the parent comment. I have worked at two VC-funded startups, one which was an "uber of x" and the other is a IoT consumer electronics startup.

The former was unethical in the way it treated the workers (I mean independent contractors). The higher ups treated the app/company as a beautiful product that would save the world (or the yuppies at least), but rarely acknowledged the actual workers who made the cogs spin, and was more focused on Growth and branding than actually treating people well.

Something I always think about is the dark pattern they had in the app which would only ask you to rate/review on Yelp/app stores if you had given a 5 star rating to the job. They also hacked Yelp to show the Yelp option to people they determined were most likely to leave a good Yelp review. If you have a good product/service that you believe in, you shouldn't need to do this type of thing. Oh, and of course the company was not following the labor/insurance laws in the states where it worked and had several cease and desist orders they ignored.

The hardware startup had like 20% RMA rates because of components would fail over and over. They used VC money to subsidize the returns/repairs instead of fixing the problem. They would prefer to ship more crappy products instead of fewer good products. Not so much illegal (hard to be when selling electronics, yay regulations), but unethical in that they would ship so much garbage despite being "customer obsessed." They operated more like a software company than a hardware company. It's easy to remotely fix software, but hardware is a very different beast and that was something they didn't want to admit.

Compared to my current company, a 30 person electronics firm that has already been acquired and never did too much VC nonsense. We are profitable and sell a good product (1% RMA) that customers enjoy. Instead of "moving fast and breaking things" (a slogan I feel the first two companies embody), we work hard to get things just right before shipping the product so that we never get any returned merchandise but get lots of return customers.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#322

Post by RobAley »

victor106 wrote: post #287
devmor wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r19&hw=... Vertx framework which is based on Java is at 8th position and PHP is 18th. But the larger point is performance is only one aspect while considering which programming lang. or framework to use

I think you've proved your second point by getting your first wrong. The benchmarks posted are for a stack including PHP, not PHP itself (and not the fastest stack with e.g. pgsql). Also, I don't think thosd benchmarks use php 8, which is the first version with the jit that the post above referred to.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#323

Post by allendoerfer »

sharpneli wrote: post #305
est31 wrote: 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.

Norways GDP per capita is higher than Californias.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#324

Post by rusticpenn »

gjvc wrote: post #127
DerDangDerDang wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They worked out that every personal licensee is an advocate, if not an outright evangelist for their product.

Upvote 100x; I completely agree. As a counter-example look at Sencha, who have long alienated developers using their ExtJS toolkit, and this has deepened since the takeover by Idera.

is the EXTjs tookit any good?. I am in a project where I am forced to use EXTJS classic ( coming from React).

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#326

Post by webmaven »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #194
katbyte wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems jet brains managed so there is an alternative that doesn’t suck?

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…

> But in order to pay his employees to go construct the pole barns, he needed loans, leveraged against the future income from the construction project.

Rather than collateralized loans, a better financial instrument might have been factoring (selling the receivable outright, typically for 90-95¢ on the dollar), plus having a reasonable penalty clause in the contract.

This isn't a criticism. Hardly anyone outside of the fashion industry (that has long waits, like net-90, for payment after eventual delivery) or heavy industry (that has expensive equipment that can be amortized long-term) seems to know about factoring.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#327

Post by rusticpenn »

dangoor wrote: post #181

> The Prague-based startup, whose programming language last year became Google’s preferred development tool for Android, is worth about $7 billion, Am I the only one bothered by articles describing companies like Jetbrains as a startup? The definition that Google gives from Oxford Languages is: "a newly established business." Investopedia says "The term startup refers to a company in the first stages of operations."…

Compared to other startups like AT&T, IBM etc, Jetbrains is a relatively new startup.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#328

Post by jillesvangurp »

jansan wrote: post #248
einrealist wrote: post #151

Jetbrains is one of the few tool vendors that do not have to aggressively market their way into our tech stacks. That alone is a key indication of how good and useful their products are. Great that this is rewarded. I really hope that they will stay this way and grow organically rather than with force. (Long-term user/customer here. I am using IntelliJ since like version 2 (with some gaps).)

And not to forget that their strongest competitors were Eclipse, backed by IBM, and NetBeans, backed by Sun Microsystems. To stand your ground against two enterprise backed open source alternatives as a startup without outside money is quite impressive.

Yes, it's sad but true; IBM ran eclipse into the ground over the last ten years and they gradually lost the mindshare they had 15-20 years ago when they were best in class and Intellij was a new kid on the block. That's on IBM. They completely mismanaged this project for a decade plus. They failed to keep up with a changing market and instead focused on irrelevant stuff not related to the core use case of, you know, developing stuff on the JVM. I was able to get away with using it doing Java until about 2016. Then I joined a bog standard Spring Boot + gradle project and it just couldn't do anything with it. I had no choice but to switch to Intellij.

Eclipse is still there but I can't use it for the vast majority of projects I work on these days. Kotlin support is a joke. Gradle support never worked properly for me (though in fairness, I stopped trying 3 years ago).

But Eclipse was a great IDE once upon a time. I still miss incremental compilation that actually works consistently and is actually incremental & fast. That's a trick that Intellij never even came close to doing. Intellij fakes it with inconsistent & super flaky caching (hence the top level menu item with the name: "invalidate caches"). And then they still manage being about 2 orders of magnitudes slower (about 100x: 10s vs 50-100ms). Anything over a second would be an order of magnitude already because the Eclipse incremental java compiler really is that fast. I've never seen intellij launch a test faster than 5 seconds; even for a 1 line change in a class that is not depended on by anything (i.e. the work is: compile 1 class), like a test. Incremental in Eclipse used to mean: it's compiled & ready to run by the time your finger reaches the next key on the keyboard: you can't type faster than it compiles incrementally and the test runs in process so there is no jvm startup overhead. Error markers would update in real time and be typically gone within a second or so of fixing the problem.

Even today, Intellij never gets even remotely close to that. But it works and does the job and Eclipse just stopped even being able to make sense of the projects I threw at it a few years ago which makes the whole performance argument irrelevant. My biggest gripe with Intellij is actually just the endless amount of time I seem to wait for it to index, rebuild, and stop lying about the compilation state of my projects. I just can't trust it either way. It says it's fine and it's not or the other way around. Either way, I always have to double and triple check it more or less continuously and it is sucking up non trivial amounts of my day.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#329

Post by Tuna-Fish »

est31 wrote: post #279
Justsignedup wrote: post #246

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…

Tesla's monthly sales in any specific (non-US) market are completely meaningless, because total demand greatly exceeds supply, and supply is not evenly distributed. That is, there are months where individual European markets get thousands of Model 3's, and there are months where those same markets get a handful, if any. This means that both the "OMG Tesla sales grew 15005% in market X!" and "LOL Tesla only sold 3 cars in market X!" are completely meaningless non-news from which you cannot derive any information.

Just to drive the point home, new registrations of Tesla cars in Norway by month in the past 8 months: April: 44 May: 8 June: 568 July: 348 August: 33 September: 1439 October: 95 November: 326

No, Teslas did not suddenly become hugely more popular during September and then immediately lose a lot of their popularity in the month after. It's just that in September, a lot more cars were allocated to Norway, and so a lot of the people on the waiting list finally got theirs. During the other months, those cars went to other European countries.

Tesla is still ridiculously supply-limited compared to the amount of cars they could sell, if they only had the cars. Whether they succeed or not depends mostly on how fast they can scale their production.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#330

Post by ska »

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…

I think there are cases that are clearly "a new small business" vs "a startup". In between there is some fuzziness.

Obviously you don't need to have or be pursuing VC money to be called a startup, but there is probably truth in the idea that startups are inherently unstable. You may not be growing exponentially, but you are spending down money in pursuit or definition of a stable business model that doesn't currently quite work yet, or a different way to exit that unstable phase.

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