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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#351

Post by hardwaregeek »

IntelliJ (and the rest of the JetBrains editors) is the only editor I've found with legitimately good emacs keybindings. They're not perfect but they're so much better than the VSCode or Sublime ones. They feel like bindings written by someone who actually uses and likes emacs.

JetBrains genuinely feels like a company run by people who love programming languages and love tooling. How many companies would actively fund a homotopy type theory group^[1]?

[1]: https://research.jetbrains.org/groups/group-for-dependent-ty...

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#352

Post by rory »

allendoerfer wrote: post #323
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.

Norways GDP per capita is higher than Californias.

Disposable income seems like the more relevant number here, and in that California is higher ~(48k vs 38k USD, although numbers are a bit stale).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#353

Post by dumbfoundded »

jmondi wrote: post #307
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…

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.

Yes, but at least most VCs try to do it with an exit. Private Equity is far worse IMO

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#354

Post by The_rationalist »

singularity2001 wrote: post #21
manojlds wrote: post #3

Ok so everyone knows and loves JetBrains. What's their worst product so far?

I'd say Android Studio and the whole gradle mess

Gradle with kotlin script is elegant and order of magnitude more powerful than npm & ci

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#355

Post by The_rationalist »

izacus wrote: post #63
manojlds wrote: post #3

Ok so everyone knows and loves JetBrains. What's their worst product so far?

YouTrack... I've never used a more confusing and feature lacking bug tracking system. And I've used both JIRA and BugZilla in professional capacity :)

Interesting, what are some of the best features/designs from those systems that you find lacking in github/gitlab?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#356

Post by signal11 »

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…

> That's a bit like saying "This person won the lottery, so therefore..."

Caveat: I love Jetbrains, and am a happy subscriber.

However, as the parent commenter says, it's important to realise that Jetbrains has been lucky as well. Java dev tools suffered from poor performance and poor UX for the longest time.

Eclipse, despite its early promise (SWT and native widgets) has much 'rougher' UX compared to IDEA. But I remain surprised how much better even simply typing feels on IDEA, and how good the refactoring tools are. (The latest Eclipse has improved a lot in the refactoring dept, though.)

Java's combination of openness and poor dev tools definitely helped Jetbrains a lot and gave them a cachet in the marketplace that helped them as they expanded into other languages. That said, I've also used their Microsoft VS addins and those were very good too, but they likely would have made much less money if they were a Microsoft-only shop.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#357

Post by The_rationalist »

jordanab wrote: post #91
Aeolun wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datagrip. I honestly still cannot understand why their database product does not show the encoding/collation for fields in mysql (and has no way to do it either).

I disagree. I use it daily as my tool to manage data in MySQL, Postgress, Sql server and Db2 databases, and it's probably one of my favorite JetBrains tools. As a Linux user there aren't that many good options available, and I am very grateful that they added this product to their line.

Why/when use datagrip instead of just the database view from intellij idea?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#358

Post by avarun »

elliekelly wrote: post #155
tekkk wrote: post #143

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 reads that they raised no external funding whatsoever? It sounds strange now but I suspect for most of history this was true of businesses large and small. I wonder when external funding became "the rule" for successful companies rather than the exception?

This is false. How could the common person have possibly had the capital to start their own business without external funding prior to the 20th century? No, they all had to rely on bank loans, which were arbitrary and capricious, as well as required collateral that made it a very risky proposition to start a company. Venture Capital by comparison is a miracle of the modern world, allowing you to start businesses risk-free.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#359

Post by dumbfoundded »

Baeocystin wrote: post #277
est31 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this lifestyle business stigma a real thing? Or just something the VC lobby put out there? Personally I think anyone leading a business should deserve respect, as running one is hard.

It is, at least in the Valley amongst the get-rich-fast crowd, which is not a small portion of the people working here. There are a lot of things I don't like about the tech culture in the bay area, and this everything-but-unicorns-is-trash attitude is close to the top of the list.

It's certainly part of the culture but when you make 6-figures a month as a bootstrapped founder, those arrogant a-holes quickly quiet themselves. Most of the fellow bootstrapped founders I've met are pretty decent people and there are a lot of them. I found the old money east coast elite to be much more annoying and far less interesting.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#360

Post by artspb »

Toutouxc wrote: post #266
artspb wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find all locations at the website [1], there are Russian cities among them. I believe it's pretty much transparent. [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/company/

I mean transparent about what is really their HQ.

What do you mean by "really?" HQ is and always was in Prague, that's it. https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/#headquarters-int...
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