IPO

Problem

LeetCode will start its IPO soon. To maximize its total capital, it can finish at most k distinct projects before the IPO. Each project has a pure profit and a minimum capital required. Given k, w (initial capital), and two arrays profits and capital, return the maximized total capital after finishing at most k distinct projects.

Examples

The brute-force approach

At each step, scan all unfinished projects, filter to those you can afford, pick the one with the highest profit, add its profit to w. Repeat up to k times.

for _ in range(k):
    best = max((p for c,p in zip(capital,profits) if c <= w and not done),
               default=None)
    if best is None: break
    w += best
    mark best as done

O(k × n) — each of the k rounds scans all n projects.

Spotting the pattern

This is a Two Heaps problem. The key question to ask yourself:

At each step, which projects become available, and among those, which should you always pick?

Answering that is where it clicks, and it's exactly what the guided walkthrough below builds with you: the pattern reasoning, a progressive hint ladder that never spoils the answer, a row-by-row dry run, the optimized solution, and an in-browser editor to run your code against real test cases.