Jetbrains: The unicorn Silicon Valley doesn't like to talk about

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).

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).

And it sits in Prague, Czech Republic.

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.

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?