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It's wild to me that Jetbrains has been making so many top-tier IDEs, languages, runtimes and other developer products for 25 years now and is valued at maybe $

• OtomotO 2y ago
  The power of hype. The same was true for Web3, Crypto, Machine Learning...
  • SJC_Hacker 2y ago
    Was crypto really hype? BTC has been around for almost 15 years now, and has been on a bumpy rise up to multiples of its value
    • dgfitz 2y ago
      Ever heard that saying about finding the sucker at a poker table?
      • raincole 2y ago
        I did. The first time I heard people describe crypto as such, Bitcoin was at $5000.
        • dgfitz 2y ago
          The first time I bought bitcoin it was under a dollar a coin. When I realized it actually had zero real value I got out. What actual value does bitcoin have? As an example, gold can be used to make high fidelity cabling.
          • int_19h 2y ago
            If price of gold was according to its "actual value", it wouldn't be $3300/oz right now. Nor would anyone hold it if they expected its price to ever get down to such "actual value". Bitcoin really isn't any different in that regard - it has value because people are willing to trade it. Although it does have practical uses, as well - black markets, for example.
          • immibis 2y ago
            The actual value of bitcoin is that you can use it to buy illegal counter-cultural things like drugs, fake IDs, etc. Except you can't, because more anonymous cryptocurrencies were invented and the markets migrated to those. Now Bitcoin is mostly used for more "serious", "wall-streety" crimes, like bypassing international sanctions. Either one can hold up the value of an investment asset.
    • paxys 2y ago
      The only good investment in crypto has been to buy and hold BTC. So while it has worked well as an asset (like gold or paintings or baseball cards), the crypto industry itself – thousands of startups in the space, all the altcoins, blockchains, smart contracts, web3, NFTs, ICOs, DeFi, "stable" coins – have all either fizzled out or just been outright fraud.
  • FergusArgyll 2y ago
    I don't know how anyone can still say Crypto was "hype". Sure the vast majority of it is but USDC alone market cap is north of 60 Billion, there is nothing speculative about USDC. You can't make money by someone else losing etc etc. Tether stablecoin is ~150 Billion. Just those two, means the value of Crypto minus rug pulls, scams or anything else is over 200 Billion - more than the value of OpenAI
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • rOOb85 2y ago
      I for a while was completely into crypto and really hoped it would replace a few mega corporations and enable easy convenient transactions… but that never happened. I can’t buy groceries or pay rent with any crypto. Infact In fact I regret spending the crypto I did have on the very few things or places I could spend it. Crypto(at least imo) went from something new and exciting and limitless to now being only something you buy and then hope the value goes up. It’s useless as anything else. It’s now all snake oil salespeople trying to pump up some shitty crypto that has 0 new features and was created to pump and dump.
      • FergusArgyll 2y ago
        Stablecoins can't go up. That's my point
• atemerev 2y ago
  Well, that's the difference between being in Silicon Valley and not being there.
  • oytis 2y ago
    Isn't this criterion just a bit irrational for people entrusted with investing billions of dollars?
    • atemerev 2y ago
      People entrusted with investing billions of dollars are very much not rational, as we can observe every day. Additionally, network effects and experience input and VC concentration in Silicon Valley are very real and very rational. For VCs, why go anywhere else if the best of the world are flocking towards you already? This might change in the near future, but I doubt it.
      • hyperhopper 2y ago
        > For VCs, why go anywhere else if the best of the world are flocking towards you already? Very false. A lot of the best in the world have no intention of ever living in silicon valley. In my circles people dread even a week long trip there.
• ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  Because the products being good isn't what investors look for. Investors look for good business. And, assuming they can actually make it work, putting together AI coding apps that get software "engineers" to outsource enough of their thinking to a machine that they can then jack the price through the ceiling on and make bank via enterprise billing is incredibly good business. However that is a load bearing if.
• TiredOfLife 2y ago
  Cursor is 2 and Windsurf is 3 years old.
  • miroljub 2y ago
    Those are not even IDEs. They are just forks of a fork.
    • TiredOfLife 2y ago
      Which ide VS Code is a fork of?
      • paxys 2y ago
        Not a direct fork but VS Code was built on the foundation of Atom, and heavily inspired by it. People generally consider VS Code to be the successor of Atom, especially after Microsoft bought out the creator of Atom/Electron (Github) and shut down the project.
        • make3 2y ago
          and Atom is an electron clone of Sublime Text
          • shagie 2y ago
            The history is slightly different... Atom was an editor made by GitHub that competed with Sublime. After creating Atom, GitHub pulled the editor guts out of it and initially called it "Atom Shell". https://github.com/mapbox/atom-shell https://github.com/mapbox/atom-shell This then had a name change of Atom Shell to Electron to decouple Electron from Atom (the editor). https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron Microsoft built several key tools on top of Electron (VSCode being the relevant one here) and became very interested in maintaining control of it... and so bought GitHub when it was up for sale. Eventually, Atom was sunsetted. https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/sunsetting-atom/ https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/sunsetting-at... > Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years, though we’ve conducted maintenance and security updates during this period to ensure we’re being good stewards of the project and product. As new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, Atom community involvement has declined significantly. As a result, we’ve decided to sunset Atom so we can focus on enhancing the developer experience in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces. > This is a tough goodbye. It’s worth reflecting that Atom has served as the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for the creation of thousands of apps, including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and our very own GitHub Desktop. However, reliability, security, and performance are core to GitHub, and in order to best serve the developer community, we are archiving Atom to prioritize technologies that enable the future of software development.
• keepamovin 2y ago
  Aw shit, I guess I should stop doing actual products and just go where the fad is. That's what the "smart money" does, I guess. I mean, isn't it smart to pursue maximal profit? Max payoff - you can use it to fund other things!!!
  • ujkhsjkdhf234 2y ago
    You're being sarcastic but yes. If your intention is to take large sums of cash from investors and run off with a fat check then that is exactly what you should do.
    • keepamovin 2y ago
      No I'm actually not being sarcastic. I know it might sound like that - it's hard to grok tone from text and I'm not particularly concerned. But I'm seriously considering it, I mean -- the goal of most startups is to solve (as PG puts it) "the money problem". So what am I doing building products, when I could be chasing these fads and possibly banking huge? I mean, that's smart, right? I'm not being sarcastic at all. I feel I need to reiterate that because you got it wrong.
      • nine_k 2y ago
        If enough of the market participants act stupid, or at least in predictably irrational ways, it may be profitable to capitalize on that behavior. If you look at previous fads, all the way to be dotcom boom of late 1990s, this very approach seemed to work well for a number of buzzword-compliant pre-revenue "businesses", and their founders / owners. There was a crash after that, but the wisest were able to shield some of the money from it.
        • keepamovin 2y ago
          I think there’s that side to it, it may be correct to swoop in and profit, if you can outsmart them. But then there’s another side where the fad has real value and the people investing have money because they’re smart and they recognize the value. And you have to be to make value in the fad. But on some level, it’s also stupid to pursue the fad because it’s so hyper competitive and effect of luck is going to be magnified.
• homebrewer 2y ago
  Integrate it over time and you'll get a different result: JetBrains will still be with us 20 years from now, while these "AI" startups will go the way of NFTs and blockchain long before that.
  • hbn 2y ago
    But their founders ran off with a fat paycheck so the system worked as intended
    • asadm 2y ago
      Life is like that, some are more blessed than others in some metric. You gotta make your own lemonade.
  • riku_iki 2y ago
    I (and many others) use LLM for coding tasks multiple times a day, its very unlikely they will go the way of NFTs.
    • Eggpants 2y ago
      Then your “code” is riddled with bugs. Coding by Statistics will only end in tears.
      • riku_iki 2y ago
        I didn't say I blindly trust generated code, it needs to be read through and covered by tests, but tasks like generate boilerplate code for some lib I never used before and which would take time to locate and read through documentation now are 10x faster. There is huge utility in LLM outside generating complete working code.
      • asdsadasdasd123 2y ago
        This is just cope. We've rolled out cursor company wide with no noticeable uptick in bugs.
    • 2y ago
• scialex 2y ago
  They are hoping that those companies will become like synopsys and able to sell per seat subscriptions to their software for huge amounts. That or they just drank the Kool aid
• lvass 2y ago
  This is the norm. The gaming industry glaringly works that way since it came into existence. There are a lot of privately owned companies creating awesome stuff that stay awesome until/if they decide to IPO or sellout to a public company. Public company owners mostly have terrible incentives and time preference which makes everything turn to shit.
• varispeed 2y ago
  Are these IDEs really top tier though? I found them slow and laggy. Switching to even something like VS Code was night and day difference. I have PTSD from accidentally opening CLion or PyCharm. Fans starts spinning and there is dozens of seconds wait to close this thing down.
  • not_kurt_godel 2y ago
    As someone with decades of software engineering under my belt, my opinion is they are the best IDEs out there by a comfortable margin. It's possible the issue you're encountering when accidentally opening them is due to index updates which would occur disproportionately often on startup for people who otherwise never use them. Other than that, performance is more than satisfactory 90+% of the time in my experience.
    • the__alchemist 2y ago
      You can have both, no? best IDEs by a comfortable margin, and also lament the fans screaming and waits... That's my experience with Jetbrains!
      • not_kurt_godel 2y ago
        That's what I would have said about Eclipse about 15 years ago. I rarely have performance issues with Jetbrains IDEs, and even rarer still that they bog down the whole machine. Get a properly specced computer (32+GB RAM, 10+ core chip) if you don't already have one. Also try adjusting memory settings - https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/increasing-memory-heap.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/increasing-memory-heap.h...
  • Maxatar 2y ago
    That's just it. In my company there are basically three sets of developers. The very experienced ones prefer vim/emacs. The experienced ones tend to like these more established IDEs, and the younger developers absolutely hate these IDEs and find them to be slow and bloated. I can't really comment on whether they are good or not since from my perspective I see people who are productive and unproductive using both of these tools, so to me it just looks like mostly a matter of preference. But newer developers don't seem to like these established IDEs and see them as you said: big, slow and laggy.
• colechristensen 2y ago
  Nobody is going to acquire JetBrains at a crazy premium to remove a competitor or to stay a competitor themselves. OpenAI/Microsoft/Google/Meta will. The valuations are based on trillionish dollar companies fighting over startups. Honestly it's a little odd JetBrains doesn't seem to be chasing this fad much at all.
  • nwatson 2y ago
    Jetbrains has "AI Assistant" and "Junie" (the latter is much like "Claude Code"). Junie is a great AI coding assistant, seems to be on par with Claude Code (and can use Anthropic models e.g. Claude Sonnet, or other models). Also, Claude Desktop can be configured to serve Jetbrains MCP Server, which will let Claude Desktop (or any other coding AI/LLM) connect and control Jetbrains IDEs, including changing project configuration, listing / finding files, editing files, looking at VCS diffs. So I believe Jetbrains is addressing the AI coding assistant market, they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should be ... feature-wise I think Jetbrains IDEs + AI integrations will be as good, in the long term, as other systems. At least I hope so, because I can't let go of PyCharm, Webstorm, IntelliJ IDEA, Goland, et al
    • paxys 2y ago
      > they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should be Jetbrains isn't a silicon valley startup and isn't raising money, so no VC is going to make a 10x return by hyping them. That sadly usually means that you are shut out from the conversation no matter how good your product is.
      • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        See further: Aider.
      • skeeter2020 2y ago
        They are a big company that has taken a lot of investment over the years. They make good stuff and their audience (a lot of them developers) LOVE the product - willing to pay their own money for them. Rather than complain that they're shut out of the system we all apparently don't like, shouldn't we celebrate that they're making it with an alternative approach?
• SJC_Hacker 2y ago
  The thought is if AI turns out to be what its billed as, you won't need IDEs. It would be like investing in a horse-and-buggy whip manufacturers around the turn of the century.
  • nine_k 2y ago
    The fun thing is that JetBrains do have AI, and it's pretty good. They can't invest in AI the amounts that Microsoft can, of course.
    • falleng0d 2y ago
      You can use Copilot and a bunch of new Agents such as augment and firebender which are very good. In the worst case you’ll still be able to use AI tooling similar or equal to what you have in VS code. Even Windsurf has an JetBrains plugin.
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    Well in that case you won’t need tools like Cursor either. Just vibe code away and never look at the source it’s generating.
• duped 2y ago
  People love to crap on VC but it's a great transfer of wealth from the rich that have so much money they can give it to other people to gamble for them by paying people to drop out of school to build things that will never make a return on investment. \s
  • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    From pension funds and insurance companies, you mean?
• tomjen3 2y ago
  I have stopped using Jetbrains to switch to Windsurf. Their "mere wrapper" is that good.
  • regularjack 2y ago
    JetBrains AI now does essentially the same thing as Windsurf and Cursor. My prediction: JeBrains IDEs will be around in 5 years, Windsurf and Cursor won't.
    • tomjen3 2y ago
      True, in the sense that VIM and Emacs both edit files.
    • senordevnyc 2y ago
      I hope you mean Junie, because their old AI assistant is shit. And Junie isn’t available for all the JetBrains IDEs yet. But overall I hope you’re right, I really want great agentic coding in PHPStorm.
• emsign 2y ago
  That's called dumb money, because greed lowers the IQ.
• dismalaf 2y ago
  It's the difference between bootstrapped companies and VC backed or public ones. Bootstrapped companies don't have any growth expectations whereas the funded ones do and are priced based entirely on speculation.
• csallen 2y ago
  Some relevant and timeless facts: - Generating revenue from customers is about more than just creating a great product. You also have to reach lots of customers and convince them of your value. Many naive idealists think only product matters (or should matter), and neglect distribution. But most people eventually come to understand that both are necessary, and that this is practically a law of physics, not something to moralize about. (FWIW JetBrains is quite good generating revenue, and I'm fairly certain their revenue dwarfs that of Cursor and Windsurf.) - Whoever is paying you is your customer, no matter what alternative word we use for it. If you're an employee, your customer is your "employer." If you're being acquired, your customer is your "acquirer." - In most cases, acquirers are playing the role of investor. Investors value returns. If you want to provide value for an acquirer, then, you need to convince them of the future value of your business should it be acquired. That's usually best done through growth trajectories. - It's perfectly valid to continue generating revenue year after year without being acquired for eye-watering sums. It's a waste of your emotional energy to become jealous or indignant when others get acquired or succeed with less work. Good for them, just keep doing you. That also goes for the rest of us in the peanut gallery. We don't need to attack recent successes to defend the honor of our favorite incumbents.
  • echelon 2y ago
    This should be nailed to the wall. Almost everyone here is providing business value in service of these rules of the universe. Those who aren't in cost centers probably need to reflect on this reality more.
  • gizmo686 2y ago
    When analyzing the value of a young, pre revenue company, one of the things you want to look it is how established comparable companies are valued. For AI coding assistants, the field is too young to do that directly. However, they are competing in the space of "developer productivity tool for writing code". That space is an established market that is currently dominated by IDEs. Seeing young companies which are pre-revenue, which are competing for an unproven yet crowded sub market (AI coding assistant) out value an established incumbent in the larger space does not compute. Add to this the fact that there is very little moat for AI coding assistants. Assuming the market as a whole proves itself, there is a very good chance that the winners will be the established incumbent IDEs who can add AI assistance as a feature in their established products. All of that is to say, current AI valuations in this space look a lot like a bubble.
• pacetherace 2y ago
  That's pretty much the comparison between Tesla and old-time car manufacturers. Most people who are trading Tesla stock don't even look at other car stocks.
• giancarlostoro 2y ago
  What kills me more is originally when they released Kotlin, and I saw Kotlin Native, I assumed they would go all in on Kotlin Native, and allow you to produce fully native JRE based apps (JRE based in the sense that it can take full advantage of those libraries the JRE provides, or any plain old Java Object) and produce native and highly performant binaries. It seems .NET already has a really mature AOT, I'm really hoping .NETs AOT reaches the point where all .NET code can be AOT'd someday. I feel like Kotlin could do so much more, but its stuck in standstill. There's even some language features that are still missing such as Inline Classes, Pattern Matching, and even Reflection, all things that Java supports directly.
  • ternaryoperator 2y ago
    Programming languages are high-cost, low-revenue beasts. When Kotlin was first released, JB was hoping it would replace Java in the enterprise. And as the sole providers of Kotlin tools, they'd have a greatly expanded market. Kotlin did not replace Java, except on Android. So JB now has a beast they have to feed without an enterprise revenue stream. They do get secondary benefits: they use it internally, etc. We examined Kotlin in detail for a CLI app and based on conversations with Kotlin developers concluded that it was not sufficient of a Java replacement for us to evaluate further. For those in a similar situation, the greatly increased cadence of Java releases has probably permanently foreclosed Kotlin-qua-enterprise language.
    • giancarlostoro 1y ago
      Which is a shame, I was looking forward to Kotlin Native being a rich ecosystem. I don't know that it gets much attention, and the language feels frozen in time.
  • raincole 2y ago
    The irony is that there are a lot of "XYZ Native" solution, such as Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Xaramin, etc. But somehow only React Native, something based on a web framework, seems to reach the critical mass.
• Aurornis 2y ago
  The wildest part is that JetBrains has their own AI coding tools and they seem to be very good. They also have a pre-built customer base to sell them to. I do think they have a perception issue with devs whose perspective on their products was crystallized back in the 2010s when they were using some old company laptop with 8GB of RAM when they could feel too heavy. With a modern laptop I just don’t care at all if my IDE takes up a few gigs of RAM. JetBrains also ranks well on things like low-latency input, which surprises a lot of people. They do seem to care about developer experience.
  • 0x1ceb00da 2y ago
    They have such a nice product! But every release comes with almost the same number of bugfixes and new bugs. I wish it was a more stable product and they were more cautious about adding new features. Every new feature comes with the risk of adding more bugs.
    • luckylion 2y ago
      I feel that. I have very mixed feelings about updates of products, and Jetbrains is no exception. It's a mix of "maybe this and that has been improved" and "they probably added a bunch of things I really don't want and have to fight for a day to get rid of". Granted, they're not the worst offenders. When I read that Jira has been updated, I need to work up the courage to look at it because I expect it to just be worse on every level.
    • bandoti 2y ago
      Honestly this is why I use emacs. Editors like VS Code even, while have some conveniences built in, update every five minutes it seems. My workflow is somewhat Byzantine—mostly just use shells and basic tools like find and grep do most of what IDEs do (sure somewhat worse). That and I copy and and paste from my favorite AI chat and that’s it. Paste a code block, or an entire file for context. Like taking notes with a pencil and paper—which helps information uptake—I believe it’s actually important to slow down and take a moment to think.
      • 2y ago
• vel0city 2y ago
  "If you show revenue, people will ask how much and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100x or 1000xer becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue; you're a potential pure play. It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who's worth the most? Companies that lose money." - Russ Hanneman
  • adeptima 2y ago
    this guy .....
    • vel0city 1y ago
      THIS GUY FUCKS!
  • tandr 2y ago
    > And who's worth the most? Companies that lose money. I am failing to see the logic in this, sorry.
    • vel0city 2y ago
      It's a quote from a character from the TV show Silicon Valley. Russ Hanneman is a SV billionaire who made a lot of money putting "radio on the internet". He's intentionally a wild card character acting as if he has enormous business insight while often being at least partially if not fully wrong in his ideas. It's a parody of SV business ventures not having any real plan to make the business profitable, they're just wanting to show crazy growth in metrics like user counts to justify extreme valuations to sell the company and walk away before the music stops. "I don't want to make a little bit of money every day, I want to make a fuck ton of money all at once." The next couple of lines: "Pintrest, Snapchat, no revenue. Amazon has lost money for every fucking quarter for the last 20 fucking years and that Jeff Bezos is the king" https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Russ_Hanneman https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Russ_Hanneman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
• melenaboija 2y ago
  Well, all this is only a small fraction of the two trillions Nvidia has gained in valuation since 2022.
• karolist 2y ago
  I gave them a year of subscriptions before cancelling recently, the devcontainer implementation in their Ultimate versions is laughably bad, bugs upon bugs and tickets where their support staff just bounces it up with "still no fix" messages and customers are finding workarounds, i.e. downgrading docker installs. Remote SSH is terrible too, handles network latency spikes by repeating keystrokes. I remember spending an evening trying to fix something in the integrated shell and giving up, but sadly forgot what. I like what they do with Go though. Anyway, back to nvim here, not for me.
  • symlinkk 2y ago
    +1, the Remote SSH is horrible. Takes forever to connect and is extremely laggy once you have connected. Feels like they’re practically streaming video of the UI back to you instead of VSCode’s Remote SSH which feels indistinguishable from running locally.
    • cempaka 2y ago
      Yeah I'm a big fan of the JetBrains IDEs but I tried it out a few days ago and couldn't even get it to stay connected. Gave up after reading a few recent forum posts about how much trouble people are still having with the feature (which does have a big purple "Beta" label in the IDE at least).
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Not to mention that JetBrains is implementing AI agents into their current products -- if I'm already a user of IntelliJ, PyCharm or CLion, etc., why would I switch to Cursor or Windsurf?
• xnx 2y ago
  This does seem very unfair, but don't believe any of the numbers being used to value these OpenAI acquisitions. If it's not cash, it's just a lottery ticket.
• tekknik 2y ago
  Maybe because I don’t want multiple editors and/or subscriptions. Give me one that does it all.