Hi Everyone!

Hope you’re all having a fantastic weekend!

Tech Dive

No tech dive for today unfortunately! Here’s the schedule for future tech dives

• Tuesday - API Design

Stay tuned!

Interview Question

Given a string s, return the longest palindromic substring in s. A palindromic substring is a substring that is a palindrome.

Example

Input - “programming”

Output - “mm”

Input - “quastor”

Output - “q”

Input - “racecarfun”

Output - “racecar”

Here’s the question in LeetCode.

We’ll send a detailed solution tomorrow, so make sure you move our emails to primary, so you don’t miss them!

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Industry News

Andreessen Horowitz announces new funds. The VC firm now manages $16.5 billion dollars.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has now closed a pair of funds totaling $4.5 billion dollars. The first fund is a $1.3 billion dollar early-stage fund focused on consumer, enterprise and fintech. The second fund is a $3.2 billion dollar growth-stage fund.

$16.5 billion dollars is a massive AUM for a venture capital fund, especially one that was founded just 11 years ago. It’s another sign of the massive interest in technology startups from asset managers. Lower interest rates have only driven further demand, and we’re seeing the ripple effects with massive valuations for startups.

Andreessen Horowitz was founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Marc was the founder of Netscape and was the most prominent tech entrepreneur of the 1990s. Netscape kicked off the 90s Dot Com Boom when they IPO’d in 1995.

If you’re interested in learning more about the 90s tech boom and Netscape, check out Valley of the Boom. It’s a fantastic TV miniseries on Andressen, Netscape and the first Browser Wars.

Crypto startup Chainalysis raises $100 million dollars at a $1 billion dollar valuation

Chainalysis is a blockchain analysis company that provides compliance and investigation software for enterprises/governments that work with cryptocurrencies. AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer) are bedrock regulations in the financial services industry, and implementing these can be difficult with crypto. Chainalysis analyzes the blockchains for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to help customers reduce fraud and identify suspicious actors. The company helped the US Department of Justice track down more than $1 billion dollars worth of crypto.

Chainalysis made $8 million dollars in revenue in 2018, and revenue has been doubling every year since (it’s also expected to double in 2021 and 2022). The company now has 350 customers and has 200 employees. It’s expecting to double headcount over the next year, with a large fraction of new hires being Software Engineers with experience in blockchain and crypto.

Chainalysis was founded by Michael Gronager. Gronager started Chainalysis in 2014 when institutional interest in cryptocurrency started growing. Prior to that, Gronager was co-founder and COO of Kraken, the 4th largest cryptocurrency exchange.

If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to reply to this email!

Best,

Arpan