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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#451

Post by pvorb »

nightski wrote: post #198
csharptwdec19 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is interesting that they initially offered subscription model without unexpirable license. I wasn't even aware they ever did licenses that 'fully expire' but I'm glad they have their current model.

Current model still isn't perfect as you only get the version that existed when your sub starts not when it ends. So if your sub expires you actually have to downgrade the product to an old version. Before if you bought a major point release you would get all minor point releases as upgrades. Now you don't even get any bug fixes that occurred since your sub started. I love their products though.

Well, I think it's fair. If there was no subscription model, this would be the same as buying the version that was available at the time of your purchase. Everything that gets released after that is only a teaser that nags you to continue your subscription. You don't need to update.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#453

Post by wokwokwok »

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’re working with dynamic languages; it’s a hard problem.

The jetbrains tools do a pretty great job with typescript and when you use annotations in pycharm.... or anything where the types can be rigorously determined; but, obviously, it’s not perfect when the type system says “anything is fine”.

As for building the project; Python just totally sucks at reproducible builds. I don’t think pycharm can fix the entire packaging ecosystem.

So, fair... it’s not perfect; but compared to what? Have you used tools with better support, better stability? Better tooling?

It’s a pretty high bar to clear to say the editor isn’t completely perfect.

Yeah yeah, it uses Java, it eats your ram and the cpu can go crazy, sometimes you need to reset the cache or delete your entire .idea folder.

Eh.

I also wish it was better at some things, but I still love it; what’s the alternative? Visual studio? Hahaha~~~~

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#454

Post by OJFord »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #364
OJFord wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bank loans used to be more significant and commonplace though. And probably historically it would be (even) more likely to be significantly self-funded as opposed to being all but unfunded and 'bootstrapping', that's my impression anyway.

Bank loans are still used for many more conventional small businesses.

Absolutely; I didn't say 'banks used to give loans', just that they used to be more significant (number and magnitude) lenders to businesses; not just high street butchers and the like, but what we would today call a 'start-up' too.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#455

Post by auganov »

everythingswan wrote: post #291
auganov wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company that makes it to a few dozen employees without much financing is already extremely successful. You're very unlikely to ever work for a poorly run company without financing - they can't hire.

Some SMB's that I have met over the years are great at pretending they don't have money when hiring but are very profitable. I think that fits the "bad company, no financing" and is worth mentioning. This thread is interesting because we're talking about success for different people. Success for the founder? The money? The employees? The answers are relative to the stakeholder we're talking about.

Success as a product company relative to others. I'm talking about simple selection bias.

A no-financing company with a decent head count is probably in the top 1 percentile among peers. Chances are they're delivering real value.

A VC backed startup hiring a bunch of people is perfectly average. The top 1% for startups would probably be post-IPO/exit/very-late-stage.

So it seems perfectly normal to me a VC backed startup in most cases will look like a total trainwreck compared to a bootstrapped company of the same size.

The vast majority of bootstrapped companies die before they even had a chance to hire anybody. Unlikely you'd ever have to deal with them.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#456

Post by pishpash »

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.

JetBrains makes your machine sound like a jet with the CPU fan, that's for sure.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#457

Post by pishpash »

vonmoltke wrote: post #192
ajdegol wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big fan and user of PyCharm for many years, but we all know that when my fan starts going and the laptop wants to take off, we can guarantee that PyCharm is indexing ;)

PyCharm is fine for me. IntelliJ, on the other hand, will periodically freeze my work Macbook when trying to reindex parts of our monorepo[1]. Makes me wish I wasn't forced to use a laptop... or a monorepo. [1] Note, just a handful of top-level targets comprising 2%-3% of the whole repo. Indexing the entire monorepo at once is a non-starter.

That and laggy keystrokes are really a productivity killer, but maybe for some people it's a worthwhile tradeoff. Not for me. I'm of the opinion that tools should get out of the way and be almost invisible.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#458

Post by stephenhuey »

wokwokwok wrote: post #453
codethief wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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’re working with dynamic languages; it’s a hard problem. The jetbrains tools do a pretty great job with typescript and when you use annotations in pycharm.... or anything where the types can be rigorously determined; but, obviously, it’s not perfect when the type system says “anything is fine”. As for building the project; Python just totally sucks at reproducible builds. I don’t think pycharm can fix the entire p…

And I remember how impressed I was many years ago when I first tried their Rubymine. So magical it made Ruby feel almost like a typed language! :)

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#459

Post by kantspel »

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.

what are you insinuating hahaha

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#460

Post by codethief »

wokwokwok wrote: post #453
codethief wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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’re working with dynamic languages; it’s a hard problem. The jetbrains tools do a pretty great job with typescript and when you use annotations in pycharm.... or anything where the types can be rigorously determined; but, obviously, it’s not perfect when the type system says “anything is fine”. As for building the project; Python just totally sucks at reproducible builds. I don’t think pycharm can fix the entire p…

> You’re working with dynamic languages; it’s a hard problem.

It's not that hard a problem. At least TypeScript is statically typed and in Python we're using type annotations everywhere. Besides, the bugs I was talking about mostly concern imports (I move file.py from A/ to B/ and PyCharm forgets to update `import A.file` to `import B.file`), and renamings (PyCharm suddenly renames some random variable deep inside dependencies like Tensorflow, too, so I end up having to re-setup my entire Python environment afterwards).

The thing is: Those auto-suggestions for imports work totally fine and code navigation via Ctrl+click works fine, too. So PyCharm does interpret the import statements correctly and I'm at a loss as to why the refactoring doesn't work then, too. Maybe auto-completion and refactoring are two completely separate systems?

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