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
TBF, Jetbrains IDEs do feel sluggish at least on macOS compared to the alternatives (like Xcode or VSCode) on my mid-2014 13" MBP. I don't know if the JVM has performance problems specific to macOS which would explain why big UI applications feel so laggy, or whether other systems with more recent CPUs simply have more reserves to hide the lower UI performance though (the latter is probably more likely).
Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
341–350 of 530 posts
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#342Earlier 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…
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#343if 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…
And in the main, JetBrains actually seem to pay attention to what customers ask for in their online feedback site.
I'm looking to get into either Go or Rust soon, and I'll definitely be using GoLand/CLion.
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
I think it's great for enterprise form-fill-in applications. It's a complete widget set for doing in the browser what GUI apps from 20 years ago had in Java (for example)
I have no interest whatsoever in writing web applications by using multiple components from multiple sources. I want to use a single toolkit. ExtJS satisfies my requirements. The tooling is awkward, but I've learned how to use it.
examples
"web desktop" https://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.1/extjs-build/examples/des...
widget library (classic) https://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.1/extjs-build/examples/bui...
Please shout (email in profile) if you need any help. Good luck!
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
https://electrek.co/2020/10/30/tesla-tsla-market-share-globa...
However they are not selling more EVs than everyone else in every market, which isn't a bad thing IMO. A smaller piece of a bigger pie is what they seem to be shooting for.
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From the page above The bottomline: PHP 8 is still slower than PHP 7.
This is a realistic comparison of running Magento on php7 vs php8.
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#348I 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…
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#349Earlier 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.
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
PG is a VC. He isn't a god of entrepreneurship. Why is it that this argument only seems to apply to software and not to all of the other kinds of businesses out there?
> Why is it that this argument only seems to apply to software? Maybe because software has a unique property: a practically zero marginal ("reproduction") cost. Hence software, and services that depend only on software are suitable for the rocket-fuel injection strategy VCs so heavily rely on. Make no mistake - good software is damn expensive to create, but once it's ready for delivery, creating and selling additiona…
There was a good article on HN recently about 500 year old Japanese family owned businesses. Most hypergrowth software probably doesn't live five. Isn't it interesting that most of the software that actually has lived decades looks more like it's made by people like that rather than VC fuelled companies?