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Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#161

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #116
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #55

Thank the gods for JetBrains. I love their software. Excellent business model, I get to keep the software I bought when the license expires. Never forced to continually pay for something you don't see value in updating. I think that's one of the key factors which drives them to continue to improve their products. If future version of their products wasn't vastly improved over the previous then people wouldn't upgrade…

It is interesting that they initially offered subscription model without unexpirable license. But because of community backlash they changed it and people seem to be happy with the outcome. Listen to your users.

I feel like you are understating the backlash they faced. I came back from a vacation the day after they announced it and checked here, /r/programming, and a few other developer-focused forums including their own site and it was like the world was on fire. There were very few people who supported the change or were even indifferent. It seemed like the entire community united against it. JetBrains really didn't have a choice but to listen. And thankfully they did; their products are invaluable to us at this point.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#162

Post by MildestMind »

helge9210 wrote: post #131

>The Prague-based startup This is Czech company as much as Luxsoft is Swiss or Telegram is from UAE. Using JetBrains tools you potentially give Russia/FSB access to your source code and open yourself to a possibility of getting backdoor inserted into binaries during compilation.

Right and that's reason why all these companies not based in Russia.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#163

Post by brodouevencode »

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).)

This is a great point. Every time a new tool comes out (Atom, VSCode, etc.) I find myself eventually going back to IntelliJ because 1) it just works 2) the customer service is great 3) reasonably priced and 4) it works _with everything_ and _on everything_.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#164

Post by baron_harkonnen »

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 about in detail is doing something nearly everyone would agree is unethical, and a fairly large amount are doing things that are down right illegal spared only by the fact that they aren't big enough to warrant prosecution or even investigation.

Perpetual lip service is always paid to the notion that "we're a user focused company". While the mental gymnastics performed to convince everyone onboard that this is the case are fun to watch, it tragic to see nearly all good projects slowly devolving into ways of tricking the users... and in most cases still losing money.

All of the private money companies with no plans of acquisition I've worked for are all amazingly sane by contrast, and create genuinely good products. They have to, because they need to make more money then they spend to survive and are fine if the happy place for that to happen is 30 employees.

In some cases, if that product is really amazing, they become companies like Jetbrains.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#165

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

drKarl wrote: post #144
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

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…

> It's definitely faster than Python, Ruby, PHP and many other kids on the block...

I don't know why, but I got a good laugh from that statement. Those "kids" are all the same age or older than Java; PHP, Ruby, and Java were introduced within a few months of each other in 95 and Python dates back to 91.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#167

Post by OJFord »

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?

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.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#168

Post by freakynit »

Started using jetbrains ide around 7-8 years back. Couldn't leave. Tried vscode, netbeans, Atom, eclipse(2nd chance), online ide's, just nothing comes even distant close to jetbrains ide. Can't even think of coding in java without this. This thing just works. Very well deserved valuations.

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#169

Post by dmitriid »

cooervo wrote: post #89

Since their HQ is in Russia is no one else concerned that their IDE may be subject to Russian spying? I mean, I'm currently reading the book Sandworm. And it is known in the cybersecurity world that Russia coerces or intimidates companies and devs to work for them as spies.

Which is, undoubtedly, so much worse than the spying by US companies?

Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

#170

Post by shay_ker »

What do Jetbrains customers mostly use?

From my understanding, it's mostly Intellij and GoLand, and some PyCharm. At least two of the three are languages that are every difficult to be productive in with Sublime or Vim alone.

I guess PyCharm allows you to stop thinking about whitespace? In seriousness, not trying to start another holy war.

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