
Jetbrains: The unicorn Silicon Valley doesn't like to talk about - pdeva1
http://movingfulcrum.com/jetbrains-the-unicorn-silicon-valley-doesnt-like-to-talk-about/
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nostrademons
There are a bunch of these "quiet unicorns" sitting around, getting little SV
press but lots of money and lots of impact.

Another one that often sticks out for me is WordPress. I remember running some
analyses over the whole web (first within Google as a side-effect of some work
I was doing there, and then after I left Google with the Common Crawl corpus)
that indicated that roughly 10% of the web is Wordpress. That's _billions_ of
sites. As a proportion of content created, they're bigger than Facebook and
bigger than Twitter. But because they're privately held and have taken no
outside capital, they have zero incentive to publicize this. I've heard of
people becoming millionaires _writing WordPress plugins_ \- not even working
for them, but just contributing to the ecosystem.

GitHub was in this category until they took VC from a16z, as well, and
Atlassian before they went public. I sometimes wonder how many of the "little"
sites I use routinely (eg. bahiker, PadMapper, Paletton) secretly generate
huge revenues. When formerly-unfunded-but-widely-trafficked sites like
PlentyOfFish or Imgur get valuation events, they're often stupidly high (eg.
$575M for PlentyOfFish and $200M+ for Imgur).

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tryitnow
From an investor perspective this reminds me of the type of company Warren
Buffet would invest in (if he invested in tech). Steady, focused, easily
understood. Highly useful product.

The only thing I quibble with is the knock against enterprise sales. Jetbrains
may not need that, but some enterprise software does, especially if it's
complex software touching a lot of non-technical stakeholders, not something a
user can just download and get started with himself.

I think the "no sales" model works well with strong products sold to technical
users who can figure it out on their own (and in fact prefer to figure it out
on their own).

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cmarschner
And it sits in Prague, Czech Republic.

~~~
ceasarby
Head office there, right.

But main development happens in St. Petersburg and Moscow, co-founders are
Russian as well.

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helmut_hed
I certainly like Jetbrains, but is it a "unicorn"? I doubt it has a billion
dollar valuation - not least because it is a private company.

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reality_czech
Jetbrains is pretty much the opposite of a unicorn. It's small and probably
won't grow much more (even if they get 100% of the dev tools market, the
market is not that big), self-funded, and profitable. Intellij is a quality
code editor, and surely better than Eclipse, but the next Google, this ain't.

There are a lot of small businesses selling software. For example, FogBugz,
Coverity, Synplify, etc. etc. You don't hear a lot about them because...
honestly they're not that interesting compared to companies that are trying to
take over the world or go out in a flaming wreck. Would you rather read about
some middle class dude carefully building his small business, or about the
offensive comments an Uber exec made during a drunken stupor in SF?

~~~
norswap
Well if you believe tech is the future, and they own infrastructure, they own
the future.

Bit of a dramatic formulation, but they do or will wield significant
influence, even though they'll probably never be within the sight of the
general public.

