Silicon Valley (TV series)

Silicon Valley
Genre	Comedy
Created by	Mike Judge John Altschuler Dave Krinsky
Starring	Thomas Middleditch T. J. Miller Josh Brener Martin Starr Kumail Nanjiani Christopher Evan Welch Amanda Crew Zach Woods Matt Ross Suzanne Cryer Jimmy O. Yang
Opening theme	"Stretch Your Face" by Tobacco
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	3
No. of episodes	28 (list of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Mike Judge Alec Berg John Altschuler Dave Krinsky Michael Rotenberg Tom Lassally
Producer(s)	Jim Kleverweis
Camera setup	Single-camera
Running time	28–30 minutes
Production company(s)	Judgemental Films Altschuler Krinsky Works Alec Berg Inc. 3 Arts Entertainment HBO Entertainment
Release
Original network	HBO
Picture format	HDTV (1080i)
Original release	April 6, 2014 (2014-04-06) – present
External links
Website

Silicon Valley is an American comedy television series created by Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky. The series focuses on six young men who found a startup company in Silicon Valley.^[1][2] The series premiered on April 6, 2014, on HBO.^[3] The first season consisted of eight episodes. HBO renewed the series for a second season,^[4] which premiered on April 12, 2015.^[5] On April 13, 2015, HBO renewed Silicon Valley for a third season,^[6] which premiered on April 24, 2016.^[7] On April 21, 2016, HBO announced it had renewed the series for a fourth season to air in 2017.^[8]

Plot

Season 1

Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) is a shy, reclusive programmer who works at a large internet company called Hooli. He is also developing a music app called Pied Piper in a live-in startup business incubator run by entrepreneur Erlich Bachman (T. J. Miller). After a rocky post-TED elevator pitch of Pied Piper to venture capitalist Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch), Hendricks also shows his work to a pair of programmers at Hooli who mock him. Within hours, however, Hooli executive Donald "Jared" Dunn (Zach Woods) and Gregory's assistant Monica (Amanda Crew) discover that the app contains a revolutionary data compression algorithm. Hooli CEO Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) proposes a US$4 million buy-out of Pied Piper, while Peter Gregory offers a $200,000 investment for 5% ownership in the company, an offer that would result in an equivalent valuation for the company. This leads Belson to increase his offer to $10 million. With encouragement from Monica and the support of Bachman, Hendricks chooses Gregory's offer. He hires the residents of the incubator, except for his friend Nelson "Big Head" Bighetti (Josh Brener), to become the Pied Piper team, along with Dunn, who defects from Hooli.

Hooli works to reverse engineer Pied Piper's algorithm based on the version he demonstrated, developing a copycat product called Nucleus. Gregory and Belson later each learn that Hendricks has been slated to present Pied Piper at TechCrunch Disrupt, a competition for unfunded startups. Belson is confounded by the news, and responds by scheduling the announcement of Nucleus at the event. Hendricks explains to Monica that he meant to withdraw from the competition, but Gregory demands that the company follow through, in large part due to his rivalry with Belson. The countdown to the event means that Pied Piper has to be ready to show in less than eight weeks rather than Gregory's initial plan of five months. The team rushes to produce a feature-rich cloud storage platform based on their compression technology.

At the TechCrunch event, Bachman takes the lead in a dramatic onstage presentation of Pied Piper. However the presentation is cut short when one of the judges assaults Bachman for having adulterous sex with both his current and ex-wives. Pied Piper automatically advances to the final round as recompense for the assault on Bachman. Belson presents Nucleus, which is integrated with all of Hooli's services and has compression performance equal to Pied Piper. Watching from the audience, the Pied Piper team generally admits defeat. The team eventually retires to a hotel room, where Bachman nihilistically suggests "jerking off" every member of the audience, and the group launches into an engineering conversation about how to do that efficiently. The discussion sparks a sudden revelation in Hendricks, who spends the entire night coding. The next morning, Hendricks takes the lead in making Pied Piper's final presentation. Having scrapped all of Pied Piper's other features overnight, Hendricks describes his new compression algorithm, and demonstrates it. Hendricks' algorithm strongly outperforms Nucleus and he is mobbed by eager investors.

Season 2

In the immediate aftermath of their TechCrunch Disrupt victory, multiple venture capital firms offer to finance Pied Piper's Series A round. However, while expressing interest, several venture capitalists criticize Hendricks' lack of perceived direction and to come back with a more coherent "vision". Bachman insists that this is a strategy to lower Pied Piper's valuation. He responds to each offer by insulting each venture capital firm. One offer from the company End Frame in particular is revealed to be a scam to steal trade secrets from Pied Piper developers. Peter Gregory dies while on vacation and is replaced by Laurie Bream (Suzanne Cryer) to run Raviga Capital. Bream gives Richard the highest offer of all the VC firms: 20% equity at a $100 million valuation. Monica privately visits Richard to urge them to decline the offer, calling it a "runaway valuation that they could never live up to", which would result in diluting Series A investors in future financing rounds. Richard offers Bream the same 20% equity but at a $50 million valuation. Before he can collect the $10 million, Richard finds out at Peter Gregory's funeral that Hooli is suing Pied Piper for copyright infringement, claiming that Richard developed Pied Piper's compression algorithm on Hooli time using company equipment.

While the lawsuit appears frivolous to the Pied Piper team, Raviga retracts its offer. This has a domino effect, all the other VC firms retract their offers claiming Bachman's behavior was "rude" and that the lawsuit added too much uncertainty. LaFlamme, Pied Piper's attorney, estimates the cost of the lawsuit to be $2 – 2.5 million with the first $80,000 due immediately. Pied Piper cannot afford this retainer, but Hendricks receives a phone call from Gavin Belson. Richard secretly meets Belson at a Mexican restaurant, where Belson offers to buy out Pied Piper at a higher valuation than the initial $10 million offer. Richard rejects outright claiming that he doesn't want his compression algorithm to become the property of the heartless Hooli corporation. Belson convincingly argues that Pied Piper is no different: the ultimate objective of any company is to scale and become a publicly traded corporation just like Hooli. He insists the lawsuit will bankrupt Pied Piper and that Richard should get something out of his company while still possible. Gilfoyle, Dinesh and Bachman reject the buyout while Monica and Jared support it. As Richard is about to accept Belson's offer, he is confronted by Russ Hanneman (Chris Diamantopoulos), the wealthy man who "put radio on the Internet". Hanneman offers them $5 million despite the lawsuit and Richard turns down Hooli's buyout offer. Richard quickly begins questioning his decision after learning about Hanneman's mercurial reputation and his excessive interference in day-to-day operation. Belson meets with his litigators to discuss a strategy for the lawsuit. They decide to promote Big Head to Hooli's "moonshot" department, Hooli [xyz], to make people think he created the compression algorithm and Richard stole it to create Pied Piper.

When Hooli Nucleus fails to carry 4K video at a pay-per-view event, Pied Piper tries to generate publicity by live streaming a stunt for an energy drink company, Homicide. Despite a promising rollout, Erlich's past with the Homicide CEO and issues with the stunt driver complicate matters to a point that Pied Piper ends up quitting the job and instead live-streaming video of an unhatched condor egg. End Frame picks the event up for Homicide with a functioning, but lossy, 4K stream based on the Pied Piper algorithm, leaving Richard infuriated but without legal options to stop End Frame.

The Pied Piper team confronts End Frame about End Frame's theft of intellectual property, and during the visit End Frame brags that their large sales department will allow them to be successful despite their technical inferiority. Hanneman arranges for End Frame to buy Pied Piper, but Richard rejects the deal. Gilfoyle reveals that a post-it note with the administrator username and password he took from End Frame allowed him to retrieve sales contracts Pied Piper could use to poach End Frame's customers. Richard approaches the CEO of Intersite, a porn company with whom End Frame was negotiating a $15 million deal, and offers them a technically superior deal. The Intersite CEO proposes a "bake-off" between End Frame and Pied Piper, to see who can better compress their video data, but the competition is called off when Hanneman accidentally deletes a large portion of Intersite's video library from Intersite's servers.

Big Head finds a prototype Nucleus phone left behind at a bar and, stunned at how bad Nucleus really is, provides it to Richard to use as leverage against Belson. Belson agrees to drop the lawsuit in favor of binding arbitration to prevent the press from finding out about the phone. At the arbitration, Hooli's lawyers don't appear to have a real case. However, an unintentional slip by Bachman leads Hooli to realize that Richard had used a Hooli computer to run a single test of Pied Piper, meaning that per the terms of Richard's employment contract, Hooli owns the rights to Pied Piper. Hooli calls Richard as a witness and, unwilling to lie under oath, Richard admits that he used a Hooli computer. However, while reviewing Jared's contract with Hooli as part of the lawsuit, since Belson also sued for the illegal hiring of Jared from Hooli, the judge discovers that the contract has a clause that makes it unenforceable. Since Richard's contract also has this clause, along with many Hooli employees, the lawsuit is ruled in Pied Piper's favor. Thinking that they had lost Pied Piper to Hooli, Richard sends a text to the team to delete all of the Pied Piper code, but the deletion program crashes before any damage could be done.

Meanwhile, the museum providing the video of the condor egg decides to remove the camera due to low viewership numbers, but the technician taking it down falls and becomes trapped with the camera in a ravine. The feed of the injured technician goes viral, forcing Gilfoyle, Dinesh, Jared and Bachman to scramble to keep their servers online. Despite the high server load starting a small fire, the feed remains online until the technician is rescued.

After it is clear that Hooli has no claim on Pied Piper, Raviga, impressed by Pied Piper's performance during the live stream, buys out Russ Hanneman's stake in Pied Piper, securing three of Pied Piper's five board seats. However, due to the previous incidents with Intersite and Homicide, Raviga has little confidence in Pied Piper's leadership. As Pied Piper celebrates their arbitration victory, Richard is notified that the now Raviga-run board has voted to remove him from the CEO position.

Season 3

After failing to convince the board of directors to keep him on as Pied Piper CEO instead of demoting him to Chief Technology Officer, Richard threatens to quit and sue to regain his intellectual property. Richard meets with a company called Flutterbeam that wants to hire him as CTO. However, after being disappointed by their work, he rejects the offer and decides to stay with Pied Piper. Afterwards, Richard meets with Jack Barker, Raviga's choice for the CEO of Pied Piper. Richard struggles under Barker's leadership, which includes spending money on extravagant offices, completely changing the business model to one that goes against the company ethos, and later forcing Richard to work on an idea that he himself came up with as a demonstration of his frustration. Eventually, when the time comes to pitch the idea to the board, Monica sides with Richard and votes against it. Subsequently, Laurie fires Jack in response to his mocking that she could do nothing to stop him, and she permits the team to commence work on the platform. The CEO position is left empty by Laurie.

Meanwhile, at Hooli, Gavin Belson discovers that the now invalid employment contracts would allow him to fire affected employees without severance and take back unvested stock options. Belson fires the entire Nucleus team, and uses the profits from the reclaimed stock options to offer Big Head a $20 million severance package in exchange for non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements. The fired Nucleus team goes to work for Endframe, and manage to set up a rival product to Pied Piper, which Gavin purchases for $250 million, although he is completely oblivious to the fact that the people he has just hired were the same programmers that he had previously fired. Big Head uses his $20 million to build his own Incubator, prompting Erlich to form a partnership with him, while exploiting his lack of business savvy to take a dominant role. However, because of Big Head and Erlich's spending habits (including a multi-million dollar Luau on Alcatraz) they declare bankruptcy, and Erlich is forced to sell his stake in Pied Piper to repay the debts. Meanwhile, after a story about Gavin scrubbing the Internet of bad press about himself is leaked by Big Head, and an attempt to steal a copy of the Pied Piper beta leads to the resignation of all of Endframe, the Hooli board of directors vote to remove him as CEO. After being removed as CEO, Gavin decides to go on a holiday to take his mind off everything. At the airport which hosts his private jet, he bumps into Jack Barker, the now-fired CEO of Pied Piper. They have a little chat, wherein Gavin incorporates Jack into his Hooli revival. Gavin now makes a new presentation in front of the board of directors. where he tells them of his "strategy" to keep up with the industry. He introduces Jack Barker as the new head of development and starts working on the "box" that Jack had set his mind to at Pied Piper.

After regaining his CEO position, Richard fires the staff members Jack hired and moves the company back into Erlich's house. The company hires contract engineers from around the world to help construct their application platform. Dinesh becomes attracted to one of them, a woman in Estonia, and initially she seems to reciprocate his feelings; he hacks together a superior video chat application using Pied Piper's algorithm to better pursue her, only to have her lose interest when she sees what he looks like over high-fidelity video (also revealing that she "has a boyfriend").

Eventually their platform reaches a point where they invite friends in the industry to test it, to universally positive reviews. The only negative response is from Monica, who says that she just doesn't understand how it works and that it seems too "engineered". She encourages Richard to trust his own instincts and release the platform if he feels it is ready, which he does.

After release, hundreds of thousands of people download the Pied Piper platform, leading to thoughts of a Series B funding round, and a sense of triumph when the Hooli board decides to allow it to be sold in the online Hooli Store. However, only a small fraction of the people installing the platform remain as daily active users. Focus groups investigating why this is the case reveal that Monica's instincts were correct – although it is an engineering triumph, most people do not understand how the platform works and find its design confusing and counter-intuitive. Richard decides that the best way to address this is through an outreach program to try and better explain the system, but this effort fails. Despondent, Richard expects the company to close down, but regains confidence at a sudden uptick in usership – which was due to Jared secretly employing a click farm in Bangladesh to artificially inflate usage statistics.

Richard soon discovers the deception and confronts Jared about it, and they agree to keep the secret to themselves, but Dinesh and Gilfoyle soon realize what is happening. Dinesh gives Richard a scrambling program which would hide the evidence in the case of an audit by future investors or regulators, which Richard seems prepared to use. Erlich, not knowing the real nature of the uptick, starts rumors about it and plays competing VCs against each other, leading to a very lucrative potential Series B funding deal from Raviga rival Coleman Blair. But before the deal is signed, Jared implores Richard not to take it, because it is based on fraud. An anxious Richard reveals the source of the uptick at the signing meeting, leading to the deal being scrapped and the company's reputation plummeting. Laurie no longer wishes for Raviga to be associated with Pied Piper and moves to sell majority control to any investor. At first the only person willing to buy seems to be Gavin Belson, who wishes to use the purchase to shut Pied Piper down permanently, but an unexpected windfall from the sale of a blog they bought while business partners leads Erlich and Big Head to buy control of the company. The original team (along with Monica, who was fired from Raviga for standing up to Laurie), having regained control, prepares to pivot again, this time to become a video chat company, based on the sudden popularity of Dinesh's video chat application.

Cast

Main

• Thomas Middleditch as Richard Hendricks, a Stanford University dropout and ex-coder at tech giant Hooli, Richard quits his job to pursue his Pied Piper compression application. Richard is timid and quiet, but is prone to occasional outbursts of extreme anger in certain circumstances. Richard is constantly struggling with the demands of the business world, preferring instead to disappear into the coding of his application, but realizes that as CEO he must do more.
• T. J. Miller as Erlich Bachman, a supremely confident and arrogant entrepreneur who founded an innovation incubator in his home after the purchase of his airfare collator Aviato. Under the incubator agreement, Erlich owns 10% of Pied Piper, and is later appointed to the company's board of directors after Richard realizes how important Erlich is to the business. Erlich is a frequent user of marijuana. It is revealed in the season 2 finale that Erlich no longer codes because of severe carpal tunnel syndrome.
• Josh Brener as Nelson "Big Head" Bighetti, a former tenant of Erlich's incubator who works at Hooli. After work on Pied Piper commences, Big Head is offered a huge raise and promotion by Gavin Belson to help Hooli develop its copycat software, Nucleus, out of spite and because Richard was forced to limit his staff. He is later removed from the Nucleus project due to his lack of technical knowledge, and has absolutely no responsibilities at Hooli. He was later promoted further to make it appear that he was the actual creator of Pied Piper while working at Hooli, but he is unaware of this.
• Martin Starr as Bertram Gilfoyle, a LaVeyan Satanist network engineer and Canadian illegal immigrant, until he successfully applies for a visa after Dinesh puts him under pressure. Gilfoyle credits himself as an online security expert, and as such is responsible for system administration and server configuration at Pied Piper. Gilfoyle often plays cruel pranks on Dinesh, but the two do appear to be friends despite this, with the two often bonding over their shared moral ambiguity. He acts as the systems architect of Pied Piper.
• Kumail Nanjiani as Dinesh Chugtai, a talented programmer originally from Islamabad, Pakistan who is typically the victim of Gilfoyle's embarrassing games and pranks. Dinesh exhibits an acerbic and sarcastic personality towards everyone on the team, and often behaves in a callous and amoral manner, such as when he plots the death of a man who was dating the girl that he liked.
• Zach Woods as Donald "Jared" Dunn, an ex-employee of Hooli who quits the company in order to join the Pied Piper team as its CFO and business advisor. Like Richard, Jared is extremely reserved, but gains confidence as the series progresses and the company's success necessitates it. His birth name is Donald, but his former boss, Gavin, once referred to him as Jared, and the nickname stuck, despite the Pied Piper team knowing it's not his real name. He is frequently disrespected by the other employees of Pied Piper, aside from Richard who often defends him, though he tends to be oblivious of this or too awkward to actually understand the insult.
• Amanda Crew as Monica Hall, an employee of Raviga Capital and assistant to both Peter Gregory and later Laurie Bream. Monica is often charged with engaging with clients on a more personable and approachable way than either Gregory or Bream are, and as such forms a bond with Richard after she convinces him to launch Pied Piper on his own. Her interactions with Richard subtly imply a mutual romantic attachment which, though rarely explored, may explain Richard's decision to go with Raviga over Hooli, Monica's persistence in keeping Pied Piper on board whenever issues arise and, later in the series, Monica's willingness to side with Richard at the eventual cost of her job.
• Christopher Evan Welch as Peter Gregory (season 1), the billionaire founder and CEO of Raviga Capital as well a 5% equity owner of Pied Piper after his $200,000 investment. Gregory is extremely brilliant but eccentric and unpredictable, once delaying a crisis business meeting to sample Burger King products for 8 hours. After the fifth episode of season 1 was completed, Welch died, but the character remained present off-screen for the remainder of the season. Gregory later died in the season 2 premiere.
• Matt Ross as Gavin Belson (recurring season 1, starring season 2–present), the chief innovation officer and founder of tech giant Hooli, who embodies the soulless corporate culture that Richard is desperate to avoid with Pied Piper. Belson constantly spews forth pseudo-philosophica rants to his employees, who remain enamored with his work, but often comes across as seeming unintelligent and mean-spirited. In season 2, Belson launched a lawsuit against Pied Piper, claiming that it was developed on Hooli company time and using company resources. Historically Belson and Peter Gregory were friends but later became business rivals, and interactions between the two of them became awkward as a result. Hooli's own compression program, Nucleus, has suffered serious public tech failure because no one who worked for him was willing to tell him about any tech issues.
• Jimmy O. Yang as Jian-Yang (recurring season 1, starring season 2–present), another tenant of Erlich's incubator, and the only person who lives there that is not involved with Pied Piper in any capacity. He speaks English proficiently but slowly and with a heavy Chinese accent.
• Suzanne Cryer as Laurie Bream (season 2–present), the new CEO of Raviga Capital and the replacement for Peter Gregory. Like her predecessor, Laurie is socially inept, but appears to rely more on tangible metrics than Peter. Her business-centric approach is what leads her to terminate Raviga's investment into Pied Piper after Belson's lawsuit is announced.

Recurring

Production

Mike Judge, co-creator of Silicon Valley.

Co-creator and executive producer Mike Judge had worked in a Silicon Valley startup early in his career. In 1987 he was a programmer at Parallax, a company with about 40 employees. Judge disliked the company's culture and his colleagues ("The people I met were like Stepford Wives. They were true believers in something, and I don't know what it was") and quit after less than three months, but the experience gave him the background to later create a show about the region's people and companies.^[9] He recollects also how startup companies pitched to him to make a Flash-based animation in the past as material for the first episode: "It was one person after another going, 'In two years, you will not own a TV set!' I had a meeting that was like a gathering of acolytes around a cult leader. 'Has he met Bill?' 'Oh, I'm the VP and I only get to see Bill once a month.' And then another guy chimed in, 'For 10 minutes, but the 10 minutes is amazing!'"^[9]

Filming for the pilot of Silicon Valley began on March 12, 2013, in Palo Alto, California.^[1] HBO green-lit the series on May 16, 2013.^[10]

Christopher Evan Welch, who plays billionaire Peter Gregory, died in December 2013 of lung cancer, having finished his scenes for the first five episodes.^[11] The production team decided against recasting the role and reshooting his scenes; on his death, Judge commented: "The brilliance of Chris' performance is irreplaceable, and inspired us in our writing of the series."^[12] He went on to say, "The entire ordeal was heartbreaking. But we are incredibly grateful to have worked with him in the brief time we had together. Our show and our lives are vastly richer for his having been in them."^[13] In the eighth episode of season 1, a memoriam is made in his honor at the end of the credits roll.^[14] The character of Peter Gregory was not killed off until the premiere of Season 2.^[15]

The show refers to a metric in comparing the compression rates of applications called the Weissman score, which did not exist before the show's run. It was created by Stanford Professor Tsachy Weissman and graduate student Vinith Misra at the request of the show's producers.^[16][17]

Reception

Critical response

Silicon Valley has received critical acclaim since its premiere. Metacritic, a website that gathers critics' reviews, presents the first season with an 84 out of 100 Metascore based on 36 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".^[18] Similarly, Rotten Tomatoes presented the first season with a 94% "Certified Fresh" rating and an average score of 7.9 out of 10 based on 49 reviews, with the critical consensus "Silicon Valley is a relevant, often hilarious take on contemporary technology and the geeks who create it that benefits from co-creator Mike Judge's real-life experience in the industry."^[19]

The second season also received critical acclaim, and has a score of 86 out of 100 based on nine reviews from Metacritic.^[20] On Rotten Tomatoes, the season received a 100% rating with an average rating of 8.3 out of 10 based on 19 reviews. The site's consensus reads, "Silicon Valley re-ups its comedy quotient with an episode that smooths out the rough edges left behind by the loss of a beloved cast member."^[21]

Its third season also received critical acclaim. On Metacritic, the season has a score of 90 out of 100 based on 15 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".^[22] On Rotten Tomatoes, the season received a 100% rating with an average rating of 8.5 out of 10 based on 16 reviews. The site's consensus reads, "Silicon Valley's satirical take on the follies of the tech industry is sharper than ever in this very funny third season."^[23]

Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter said "HBO finds its best and funniest full-on comedy in years with this Mike Judge creation, and it may even tap into that most elusive thing, a wide audience."^[24] Matt Roush of TV Guide said "The deft, resonant satire that helped make Judge's Office Space a cult hit takes on farcical new dimension in Silicon Valley, which introduces a socially maladroit posse of computer misfits every bit the comic equal of The Big Bang Theory's science nerds."^[25] Todd VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club said "It feels weirdly like a tech-world Entourage—and that's meant as more of a compliment than it seems."^[26] Brian Tallarico of RogerEbert.com praised the jokes of the series but commented on the slow progression of the character development in the first two episodes and the reliance on common stereotypes in technology, including "the nerd who can't even look at a girl much less talk to her or touch her, the young businessman who literally shakes when faced with career potential." He goes on to state that the lack of depth to the characters creates "this odd push and pull; I want the show to be more realistic but I don't care about these characters enough when it chooses to be so."^[27]

David Auerbach of Slate stated that the show did not go far enough to be called risky or a biting commentary of the tech industry. "Because I'm a software engineer, Silicon Valley might portray me with my pants up to my armpits, nerdily and nasally complaining that Thomas' compression algorithm is impossible or that nine times F in hexadecimal is 87, not 'fleventy five' (as Erlich says), but I would forgive such slips in a second if the show were funny."^[28] Auerbach claimed that he used to work for Google, and that his wife also worked for them at the time of the review.^[28]

Other reactions

Elon Musk, after viewing the first episode of the show, said: "None of those characters were software engineers. Software engineers are more helpful, thoughtful, and smarter. They're weird, but not in the same way. I was just having a meeting with my information security team, and they're great but they're pretty weird—one used to be a dude, one's super small, one's hyper-smart—that's actually what it is. [...] I really feel like Mike Judge has never been to Burning Man, which is Silicon Valley [...] If you haven't been, you just don't get it. You could take the craziest L.A. party and multiply it by a thousand, and it doesn't even get close to what's in Silicon Valley. The show didn't have any of that."^[29]

In response to Musk's comments, actor T.J. Miller, who plays Erlich on the show, pointed out that "if the billionaire power players don’t get the joke, it’s because they’re not comfortable being satirized... I’m sorry, but you could tell everything was true. You guys do have bike meetings, motherfucker.” Other software engineers who also attended the same premiere stated that they felt like they were watching their "reflection".^[29]

Accolades

Home media

The complete first season was released on DVD and Blu-ray on March 31, 2015. The set contains all eight episodes, plus audio commentaries and behind-the-scenes featurettes.^[45] The second season was released on DVD and Blu-ray on April 19, 2016. The set contains all ten episodes, plus six audio commentaries, a behind-the-scenes featurette, and deleted scenes.^[46]

Broadcast

In Australia, the series premiered on April 9, 2014, and aired on The Comedy Channel.^[47] In the United Kingdom, it premiered on July 16, 2014, and aired on Sky Atlantic, while also being available on internet view-on-demand services such as Blinkbox.^[48]

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Silicon Valley (TV series)

• Official website
• Silicon Valley at the Internet Movie Database
• Silicon Valley at TV.com
• In-universe websites: Pied Piper, Hooli, Code/Rag, Raviga, Endframe, Aviato, Bachmanity, Homicide