IPO
A hard-tier problem at 53% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Greedy, Sorting. Reported in interviews at WinZO and 6 others.
IPO is a hard array problem that shows up across WinZO, Docusign, Salesforce, and other companies you've probably heard of. You get a capital amount and two arrays: costs to launch projects and the profit each one returns. The catch: you can only launch a project if you have enough capital, and launching one increases your capital for the next project. Most candidates miss the greedy pattern on first read and burn time on a wrong DP approach. If this problem hits your live assessment and you blank on the sequencing trick, StealthCoder surfaces a working solution in seconds, invisible to the proctor.
Companies that ask "IPO"
IPO is the kind of problem that decides whether you pass. StealthCoder reads the problem on screen and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Invisible to screen share. The proctor sees nothing. Made by an Amazon engineer who watched the leaked-problem repo become an industry secret. He decided you should have it too.
Get StealthCoderThe core insight is that you don't need the global maximum profit per project. Instead, greedily launch the cheapest projects you can afford, reinvest the profit, then launch the next cheapest. This is a sorting and greedy problem wearing an optimization hat. A heap tracks available projects by profit once you've unlocked them by capital. The algorithm: sort projects by cost, use a max heap for profits, and iterate: move all affordable projects into the heap, pop the max profit, reinvest, repeat. The trap is trying to optimize globally or overthinking capital thresholds. Candidates who see the heap-plus-greedy pattern finish in minutes. Those who treat it as a DP problem or try to pick projects out of order waste 30+ minutes and still get it wrong. This is exactly the kind of problem where you need the pattern, not just coding ability.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
IPO recycles across companies for a reason. It's hard-tier, and most candidates blank under the timer. StealthCoder is the hedge: an AI overlay invisible during screen share. It reads the problem and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Made by an Amazon engineer who watched the leaked-problem repo become an industry secret. He decided you should have it too. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
IPO interview FAQ
How hard is IPO really? Is a 53% acceptance rate just bad luck?+
53% acceptance means half the candidates code something that doesn't work or timeout. Most failures are wrong ordering logic or implementing greedy incorrectly. If you know sorting plus max heap, you're in the top half immediately. It's hard conceptually, not implementationally.
Do I need to know the trick beforehand, or can I figure it out in an interview?+
Figuring it out cold is possible but risky under time pressure. The insight is that you should do cheapest-first (greedy by cost) and profit-maximize per round (greedy by profit). Most people either miss one or both. Seeing it in advance saves 20 minutes of fumbling.
What's the relationship between the Array, Greedy, Sorting, and Heap topics?+
Sorting structures the input by cost. Greedy picks the next best move at each step. Array holds projects. Heap efficiently tracks the best profit among unlocked projects. You need all four: sort projects, use a heap for max profits, apply greedy selection, store in arrays.
Is this still asked at Salesforce and Docusign or is it dated?+
Recent reports confirm Salesforce and Docusign still ask it. Companies like Stackline, PhonePe, and Gameskraft ask it too. It's a stable problem because it tests real greedy optimization thinking, not just pattern matching.
What's the most common mistake that tanks submissions?+
Not sorting projects by cost first, then trying to pick projects in some other order. Or sorting right but forgetting to use a max heap to track available profits. Both lead to suboptimal or wrong capital sequences and fail test cases silently.
Want the actual problem statement? View "IPO" on LeetCode →