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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#441

Post by hycaria »

vips7L wrote: post #146
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…

Java in VSCode works completely fine even with annotations, its the Eclipse language server. You should really give it another shot. In fact for all of my use cases it performs better than IntelliJ because it isn't trying to be 200 different tools at one time. With JDK 15 and ZGC my project only uses 250mb of ram for the language server where IntelliJ pushes over 4GB.

Java support has been much much better for the last year in vscode.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#442

Post by no_wizard »

codethief wrote: post #373
GordonS wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JetBrains is one of my favourite ever companies! A few years back I switched from Visual Studio + ReSharper to Rider, and haven't looked back - it's such a fantastic, fully-featured, stable product. I have a personal license that let's me use ReSharper, Rider, dotCover, dotMemory (love this!), dotTrace. Some of the best money I've ever spent, and I happily renew year on year. I also love the pricing model that reduce…

> it's such a […] stable product Am I using a different IDE? I'm dealing with bugs in their refactoring engine almost every day (at least in Python and TypeScript); I need to invalidate the cache every other week because something something is not working; it's 2020 and I still can't configure my IDE deterministically through text files (which regularly results in situations where building the project works fine for…

You may just need to tweak your cache & RAM settings. I had similar issues here, and I just juiced the RAM to 4096 (that's 4 GB, a number I chose arbitrarily). Haven't had an issue since.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#443

Post by phendrenad2 »

spamizbad wrote: post #414

On Earth 2 where Jetbrains took VC money there's an ambitious product manager pushing his team to finish a built-in music player (along with 2 gigs of royalty-free lofi beats) as the issue logs backs up with angry customer complaints about poor language server integrations, crashing, and general slowness.

As if VCs would ever invest in something as unsexy as an IDE. Hoe are you going to blitzscale an IDE?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#444

Post by randomsearch »

hinkley wrote: post #380
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).)

I strongly believe their single user license was responsible for a lot of their success. One of the dynamics that has made open source such a juggernaut is a consequence of the 'give a man a little power': Those with the purse strings making strategic decisions for the company without considering the benefits of buying a piece of software. "I won't pay for that." could be answered with "That's okay, it's free!" Jetbr…

Seconded. Love the fact that they don’t get petty about different machines etc.

I started using their free versions for non-commercial projects and have paid for commercial use.

It’s really worth trying JetBrains, even if you’re a vim/emacs devotee... I’d say I’m at least 10x productive in IntelliJ compared to other editors, for example, after coding Java for 20+ years. I’ve watched programmers I consider way above me in ability move so slowly compared to hopping around / refactoring / debugging in JBs.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#445

Post by bigbubba »

syngrog66 wrote: post #250
golergka wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also one of the best IT employers in Moscow and St Petersburg, and guys working there create a lot of value for IT community both local, and russian-speaking in general. You don't even have to work there to feel the impact on the whole programming culture here.

Moscow and St Petersberg... that is interesting. I'm a fan of their tools as well, but it is good to learn the Russian angle and take it into account.

The 'Russian angle'? What's this, other Russians have done things you dislike, so you pre judge these other Russians?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#446

Post by randomsearch »

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.

I suppose the obvious answer to that is - and what do you think the second best IDEs for Java, Python, and JavaScript are? Because the longevity of SaaS defines its value and JetBrains has zero rivals and a very big moat (a polished product beyond any other IDE I’ve used).

You’d assume surviving 10 years is guaranteed and a sale is almost certain. Whoever buys JetBrains (ms, Amazon, google, one of the three for certain) will pay through the nose.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#447

Post by phendrenad2 »

cryptica wrote: post #244

This is a huge achievement because "without VC help" literally means "All VCs and all their corporate friends actively working to destroy you". Maybe they succeeded because they got things going a long time ago. I doubt they would succeed if they started only a couple of years ago. They would have been crushed by the VC-corporate complex.

Who's trying to destroy JetBrains? Who's even competing with them?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#448

Post by drKarl »

jcelerier wrote: post #382
drKarl wrote: 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…

> Now it's actually really fast, it goes neck to neck with C++. yet every time I try a Jetbrains IDE every action seems to take 10x the time to be processed than it takes in QtCreator

Once it's finished indexing things it feels darn instant to me. What hardware do you use? Also which programming language? I've used IntelliJ with Java, Scala, Kotlin, Groovy, Markdown, and many file types and it's really snappy.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#450

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

avl999 wrote: post #252
victor106 wrote: post #95

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

Folks who still think that Java is a bad language either from the perspective of developer ergonomics or performance probably haven't programmed in it since the Java 4 days and still think of the language as the language of Enterprise Java Beans, Java Applets and hundreds of lines of XML. It is not that language anymore. Modern Java is blisteringly fast(and has been for a while) and almost the same level as C# in ter…

These days, though, I feel like Java the language should die in favor of Kotlin (also invented by Jetbrains). I feel like with Kotlin you get all of the goodness of Java (and especially the JVM) without so much of the verbose "cruftiness" that is a result of Java the language being 25 years old (wow now I feel old!)
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