☕ $100 billion dollar dev tool...
A company that builds a tool for developers is said to be valued at up to $100 billion dollars (more than doubling it's last valuation).
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Tech Dive
No tech dive for today unfortunately! Here’s the schedule for future tech dives
Coming soon - Database Sharding in Practice
Our last tech dive was on APIs!
Industry News
Stripe is looking to fundraise at a valuation as high as $100 billion dollars
Stripe is a developer tools company that was founded in 2011 with the original name of /dev/payments/. Yep. That’s the original name they picked.
The company’s main product is an API that developers can use to add payment processing to their websites and mobile applications. Companies as large as Lyft and DoorDash depend on Stripe for payments although the API is just as accessible for a solo developer.
The company also builds anti-fraud tools, billing products and point of sale services ( available for physical businesses to collect payments).
Stripe’s new valuation will more than double their previous valuation of $36 billion dollars. This makes them one of the most valuable private companies out there.
The crazy part?
Their previous valuation was done in April. Their valuation has more than doubled in a couple of months.
The company also has a pretty fascinating origin story. Patrick Collison (the CEO and Founder of Stripe) grew up in Ireland. While in Ireland (and still a teenager), he came across a blog post from Paul Graham on Lisp. Collision then cold emailed Graham and ended up meeting him in San Francisco.
This meeting is one factor that led to Patrick Collison’s interest in startups, and his later acceptance into YCombinator.
You can read more about Stripe’s origin story here.
Facebook acquires Kustomer for $1 Billion Dollars.
Kustomer is a startup that offers a Customer Service CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) platform for businesses. They use AI and ML to allow customer service representatives to automatically send simple responses to customers and to automate tasks like contextualizing customer requests ( does the customer just want a refund? Or does the customer need technical support?).
Facebook has now acquired the company in a deal price that was around $1 billion dollars. Currently, plans for what the company wants to do with Kustomer are unclear, but it’s obvious that Facebook is trying to expand their offerings for businesses and encourage more businesses to invest more in building a social presence on Facebook.
Interview Question
You are given an m x n board of characters and an array of words.
Return all the words from the array that appear on the board.
Words must be constructed from letters of sequentially adjacent cells, where adjacent cells are either horizontally or vertically aligned. You cannot repeat letters.
Here’s the question in LeetCode.
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Previous Solution
As a refresher, here’s the previous question
Given two strings s and t, determine if they are isomorphic.
Two strings are isomorphic if the characters in s and be replaced to get t.
All occurrences of a character must be replaced with another character while preserving the order of characters. No two characters may map to the same character but a character may map to itself.
Here’s the question in LeetCode.
Solution
In order to solve this question, we have to attempt to create a mapping that maps all the characters in s to t (and vice-versa).
If we can do this successfully, then we return True. Otherwise, False.
We can create the mapping iteratively. We just iterate through both strings and create the mapping as we go. If we come across a character that breaks our mapping, we automatically know that a mapping is not possible and we can return False.
Here’s a link to the REPL with Python 3 code.
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Best,
Arpan