State? Keeping a single source of truth which changes every 1/100th second while millions of users are doing something to change that state?
If you're breaking ground, awesome, you're doing something truly revolutionary. Would you be wowed if I built a Shopify clone off of Stripe and Squarespace? Or an app and site that performed ridesharing while simply talking to Uber or Tesla's backend? Probably not.
Ahh! There! Perfect example. I eagerly await the video, with baited breath, of a presentation from the team at Tesla rolling out autonomous driving using Nvidia's deep learning chipset. But if you build another Kayak, Hipmunk, etc, I do give you credit for grinding away on it if its a successful business. Grinding away on a business day after day for years is fucking hard. I'd just argue its not revolutionary or breaking new ground.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_Corporation
Disclaimer: Satisfied HotelTonight app user.
Which is totally fine and not a prerequisite for a business or tech business
This sounds pretty similar to how they describe it, actually:
"Elasticsearch came to our attention…" [... another thing ...] "Pretty much on the lines of what FriendFeed did..."
So basically they reimplemented what other people had done and written about. So (especially at this level of detail) not particularly useful compared to the existing resources they talk about having seen themselves. Later they talk about a big win being "introducing caching." This is all pretty well known stuff, at least in certain circles. And yes, other companies do things in different ways - scaling a single-source-of-truth schema'd database vs going schemaless and horizontal is a source of active debate - but they do talk about these ways.
(Though, something I've also seen personally: if you staff your startup with fresh 20-something grads, you're gonna have to rediscover it... but that's another discussion?)