I'd like to understand how these guys make money, I've used the free version of IntelliJ for years and never required anymore than this! Does people actually buy licenses ?
Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
281–290 of 530 posts
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hmm. You're dodging the question: Why would a cofounder want to start a company with you? No handwaving. > People cofound to get rich. Can your company offer that to your cofounder? I don't know. Why did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak start Apple together? I feel like you're laboring under a very limited model of how and why companies are founded and how people behave.
The model happens to be aligned with how and why people actually start companies. It's not my model. You have to come up with a persuasive answer to "Why should I work as hard as I can on this company, rather than go work for Google?" That question is in fact so hard that it (possibly) almost killed YC in the crib, back in '08. No one wants to work for a startup when they can get paid far more and live an easier life…
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Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#283It’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
And for those who weren't happy with Java, JetBrains also gave us Kotlin, which fixes many of Java's problems without overshooting into the FP space.
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen this firsthand. I was a finance major fifteen years ago and for the last ten years I have run a completely bootstrapped agency. If you have to live off your own revenues, it means you don't do any premature scaling... You have to focus on the needs of your customers to reach the next level. VC backed companies have to reach the VC exit goals which means they are forced to scale immediately even if things…
From first-hand experience, however, bootstrapped companies often don't have a ton of cash in the bank. They can quickly fail if there's an adverse event (COVID, for example). You can also get crushed by well-funded competitors who can innovate faster than you due to larger team sizes, salaries, etc.
> You can also get crushed by well-funded competitors who can innovate faster than you due to larger team sizes, salaries, etc.
Which is why VCs are evil and need to be crushed. Ironic, I know, posting this here
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#285Isn't JetBrains a Russian company that moved their HQ to Prague due to fear of Russian government?
No, not due to fear. It's just somewhat easier to sell their products using a EU based legal entity. Another example would be Yandex, registered in the Nethelands. JetBrains main dev offices are in St Petersburg, Moscow, Novosibirsk.
I've never met JetBrains dev who wasn't Russian, and I've met a few (all really smart).
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#286I 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…
I have seen this firsthand. I was a finance major fifteen years ago and for the last ten years I have run a completely bootstrapped agency. If you have to live off your own revenues, it means you don't do any premature scaling... You have to focus on the needs of your customers to reach the next level. VC backed companies have to reach the VC exit goals which means they are forced to scale immediately even if things…
My personal and vicarious experiences with VC's have been that they are very much a mixed bag, and choosing to work with them in general is a necessary evil depending on the type of company you want to build. For my future startup attempts, if I can help it I will not work with VC's.
And if I have to work with VC's, then I will have a strong preference for working with VC partners who are former operators. The investor having substantial experience in the trenches (such as former founders) makes a massive difference in the productivity of the founder/investor working relationship.
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#287Earlier 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…
>It's definitely faster than Python, Ruby, PHP and many other kids on the block... I would seriously contest the speed of Java compared to modern PHP. The JIT puts PHP at near-C performance levels with competently written code. Which shouldn't be surprising if you realize PHP is largely a "wrapper" around C.
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
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hmm. You're dodging the question: Why would a cofounder want to start a company with you? No handwaving. > People cofound to get rich. Can your company offer that to your cofounder? I don't know. Why did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak start Apple together? I feel like you're laboring under a very limited model of how and why companies are founded and how people behave.
The model happens to be aligned with how and why people actually start companies. It's not my model. You have to come up with a persuasive answer to "Why should I work as hard as I can on this company, rather than go work for Google?" That question is in fact so hard that it (possibly) almost killed YC in the crib, back in '08. No one wants to work for a startup when they can get paid far more and live an easier life…
> The model happens to be aligned with how and why people actually start companies. It's not my model.
That someone else created the model and you believe it doesn't mean it's true.
> You have to come up with a persuasive answer to "Why should I work as hard as I can on this company, rather than go work for Google?" That question is in fact so hard that it (possibly) almost killed YC in the crib, back in '08. No one wants to work for a startup when they can get paid far more and live an easier life.
Actually, I don't. Honestly, you seem kind of set in your thinking, and I don't think it's worth the effort to try to figure out how to persuade you out of your misconceptions. There are counterexamples even in this subthread that falsify your model. It's up to you to either be open to them or not.
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#289One of the best purchases I ever made was JetBrain's all products package about 6 or 7 years ago. The prices for their products keep going up, but I was grandfathered in at about $150.
Re: Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help
#290I 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…
>>>
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. As an anecdotal point of one, I can confirm that literally none of that is true for the startup I am working for, and we are doing quite well.
Of course, it probably helps that our founders have actual industry and startup experience, and are not pushover adult children like you might find on the Silicon Valley hbo show.