Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help • Hacker News Board

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#331

Post by cwp » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

LukeShu wrote: post #278

vonmoltke wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> if your company is … not seeking rapid growth, … then it isn't a real "startup" Isn't that the definition of a "startup"? If you're not seeking/expecting rapid growth, isn't it just a "small business". There's nothing wrong with that, not everything has to be a "startup". (Wiktionary tells me "A new company or organization or business venture designed for rapid growth", but Merriam-Webster Collegiate 11th ed tells…

I would distinguish between growth-at-all-costs and a scalable business. Both are startups, but VCs only invest in the former. Jetbrains is a good example of the latter.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#332

Post by FpUser » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

tuankiet65 wrote: post #232

FpUser wrote: post #189

I tried to use their CLion IDE for C++ development but had numerous problem preventing me from working. The company was responsive and tried to help me, no complaints in this department, but I lost my patience pretty fast as I was not willing to invest significant time into making things work that should've worked right out of the box.

Do you mind sharing your experience? My experience with Clion has been great so far, but I understand that Clion is somewhat opinionated on the project structure (for example, only CMake support), so it might not work well with existing projects.

Problems with crashing while debugging, inability to debug, etc. Do not remember details as it was more than a year ago and as I've said I was not willing to spend much time on that.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#333

Post by ymolodtsov » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #177

$7B valuation on only $200M in EBITDA, let alone profits? If they aren’t thinking of selling now in this silly market for that ridiculous valuation I admire how centered they are on things more important than money, such as building and owning your own ideas.

That's not a really high multiple for a software subscription business.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#334

Post by Taek » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #227

Taek wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profitability isn't necessarily important to the strategy of a VC company. Everything is about the exit, and most exits are either acquisitions or IPOs. Neither type of exit mandates profitability, and both care capable of offloading to a greater fool. A strong trend I've personally noticed with VC backed companies and something I'm highly wary of for our own company is the way it inevitably turns companies evil. I w…

Google had limited VC investment - a 25m round before IPO. Arguably they turned evil much later so to me the link to “VC corruption” is more specious. Re cloudflare, can you please help me understand what they’ve been doing that you see as evil? Given how Mozilla constantly struggles to stay afloat (and effectively depends on the generosity of Google as the single revenue source), I don’t know that’s an example to po…

I would argue that being a public company has the same pressure as being VC funded only much stronger.

Cloudflare is increasingly pushing their position as the world's biggest man-in-the-middle, and things like their new secure DNS are making the situation worse.

They've started taking opinionated stances and making deplatforming decisions instead of being neutral infrastructure and I think this is going to get a lot worse.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Post by content_sesh » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

usrusr wrote: post #78

pdpi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also pretty consumer-friendly. Every year I get an email from them around November reminding me my subscription will renew in February, and then a couple more reminders along the way.

The “subscription but keep forever on cancel, sans updates" licence model is just so much more honest than pretending that purchases would be one-time investments and so much less of a risk for the buyer than a hard-stop subscription. I think it's also good for the product, the right balance between the failure modes of being able to milk existing subscribers even without maintenance for the hard subscription and cha…

The perpetual license fallback saved me when my license expired. Due to the US holidays it took our purchasing department a week or two to renew my license. In the mean time I was able to fall back to an older version, and upgrade once my new license came through. It was very easy and straightforward to do in both directions.

So I agree, it's a very honest business model.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#336

Post by idsout » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

boarnoah wrote: post #218

tuyguntn wrote: post #19

if JetBrains people are reading this, I want to say THANK YOU! You saved lots of developer time with IDE, then Kotlin language. I use Golang, Python and Database IDEs, and they are really nice and time saving, can't imagine how much time you guys saved to Java developers where everything is reflection based annotations and deep level of abstract class/interface implementations. (last time when I worked with Java in V…

Some people get a bit weirded out about the multiple IDE situation (mostly folks whose current day to day is VS Code with extensions). Usually that goes away when you get them to try some of the IDEs, the experience is second to none (as far as IDEs that work extremely well out of the box go). The amount of times I've got praised for writing neat C# code that was Resharper doing its magic :P

I was one of those people up until around a couple years ago. Now I don't even know what I thought was such a big deal. The Jetbrains Toolbox makes it really simple to launch and update the individual IDEs.

My employer pays for the ultimate license, but I will absolutely pay for it once I move on.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#337

Post by est31 » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #329

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…

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 car…

Good point about the data being noisy, wasn't aware of that. If we take an entire year the core of my statement still holds, although more weakly. Tesla is a competitor, but not market leader. Other cars sell way better. Check the image at the bottom of this article: https://insideevs.com/news/452441/norway-plugin-car-sales-oc...

3.2k Tesla model 3's sold in 2020, but it's only at #6, with #1 to #5 each selling more than that, like e.g. ID.3 with 4.4k vehicles.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#338

Post by ASalazarMX » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

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…

VC is like visiting sports clubs, finding the best candidates, and overdosing them on steroids. VC hopes the ones that survive will become profitable enough to pay for the ones that it killed.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#339

Post by justsomeuser » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

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."…

According to lord PG, Start up = Growth

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#340

Post by sharpneli » Fri, Dec 18, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #320

sharpneli wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Good point. So they simply were not able to ramp up faster than it took for the existing manufacturers to start catching up and leveraging their scale better.