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By ALESSANDRA STANLEY Something is up when an ad for Planters Peanuts archly features its mascot, Mr. Peanut, delivering a TED Talk-flavored motivational speech, complete with flashy graphics and spurious data points.
There is a relatively new social order disrupting the peace, a Palo Alto nerdocracy ruled by boy billionaires and Internet upstarts. “Silicon Valley,” a new and very funny HBO series that begins Sunday, taps into the foibles and pretensions of that world.
When Richard (Thomas Middleditch), a shy, painfully introverted programmer, is asked which Steve he identifies with, Jobs or Wozniak, he is almost insulted by the question. “Jobs was a poseur,” Richard replies. “He didn’t even write code.”
Mike Judge (“Beavis and Butt-head,” “Office Space”) is one of the show’s creators. The story centers on the start-up woes of a group of immature, socially inept programmers who share a house or, as its owner, Erlich (T. J. Miller) prefers to call it, an incubator. Erlich, a blustery dot-com millionaire, lets the others live with him rent free, in exchange for a 10 percent stake in their ventures.
Thomas Middleditch, left, and Josh Brener in “Silicon Valley,” a new HBO comedy.
Zach Woods, left, and Matt Ross in the new HBO satirical comedy “Silicon Valley.” CreditJaimie TruebloodThe most promising egghead is Richard, who has come up with an innovation that he can’t really explain. “You remind me of my son,” a man tells him. “He’s got Asperger’s, too.”
Nerds have ruled the television world for a while, but the phenotype keeps evolving. When the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” had its premiere in 2007, the lead characters were unworldly, “Star Trek”-obsessed university scientists. Now the insufferable tech plutocrat is king and can be found on all kinds of television shows, including “Veep,” which begins a third season on HBO right after “Silicon Valley.”
In an episode of “Veep” set in Palo Alto, Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is running for the presidential nomination and wants to win over Craig (Tim Baltz), the messianic 20-something founder of Clovis. She tours his state-of-the-art company headquarters and is delighted to see a Lego station in the office, saying that child care is one of her core issues. Her tour guide stiffly corrects her, explaining that the Legos are there because Craig believes that they stimulate the creativity of the employees, along with table tennis tables and sleeping pods.
Craig keeps the vice president waiting while he retreats into his “coding hour,” which is sacred and falls whenever he feels like it. Craig also doesn’t believe that his aggregating sites should pay for the content they make available.
“People want to work with us more than they want to be paid,” he explains. “That’s a given.”
“Silicon Valley” shares the satirical tone of “Veep,” but this new comedy is actually closer in spirit to an older HBO series, “Entourage.” It is as merciless about the cultish cultures of companies like Google as that show was about Hollywood. Everyone in Hollywood has a screenplay; everyone in Silicon Valley has an app.
But “Silicon Valley,” like “Entourage,” has a soft spot for its hoodie-wearing heroes. There is a sweetness behind the software swagger and coding jokes.
That kindness doesn’t extend to billionaire bosses or the lawyers, doctors and spiritual advisers who casually drop names like Sergey (Brin) and Larry (Page) and have start-ups of their own to sell. Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), the founder of Hooli, where Richard once worked, asks his guru if it is wrong for him to hate Richard for accepting seed money from Gavin’s arch rival, the venture capitalist Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch).
“In the hands of a lesser person perhaps,” the guru replies soothingly. “But in the hands of the enlightened, hate can be a tool for great change.”
Peter doesn’t make eye contact and speaks robotically, but he, too, is an early adapter to obscene wealth and the grandiosity that comes with giving back. He invites Richard and his friends to a charitable toga party, where rap stars entertain, and actresses are hired to make guests feel interesting. Peter, dressed as a Roman emperor, is carried to the stage in a sedan chair. “Welcome to the Peter Gregory Foundation’s fourth annual Orgy of Caring,” he says.
And that kind of mockery is badly needed.
A new cultural revolution is at hand, and many of its leaders are even more smug and self-righteous than the counterculture activists who, back in the 1960s, also thought they could change the world. Back then, there was a reigning establishment that pushed back; nowadays, Internet moguls are the establishment. They have the money, the power and a sense of entitlement that leads them to think they are reinventing good works, or as they prefer to call it, “philanthro-capitalism,” “social impact investment” and “social entrepreneurship.” At yet another opulent party, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, does a cameo, milling with high-powered guests. The host, a just-made mogul, takes the microphone away from Kid Rock to say a few words:
“A few days ago, when we were sitting down with Barack Obama, I turned to these guys and said, ‘O.K., you know we’re making a lot of money, and yes we’re disrupting digital media, but most importantly, we’re making the world a better place.’ ” He pauses, and then describes how exactly: “through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility.”
“Silicon Valley” isn’t making the world a better place, it is putting the real Silicon Valley in its place, one Tesla at a time.
There is no epiphanic moment of invention in “Silicon Valley,” Mike Judge’s new HBO comedy series about the socially awkward, emerging center of the world. Remember the lightbulb-flash scene in “The Social Network,” “A Beautiful Mind” or any other pop-cultural depiction of high-functioning nerdery, the moment when, in a fit of mania and caffeine, our hero scribbles out some groundbreaking bit of math on a slab of glass? In “Silicon Valley,” as in Silicon Valley, the process of discovering the next big thing is much more authentically dull.
Richard, our hero here — a quiet coder played by Thomas Middleditch, looking uncomfortable in his own skin — creates a search engine that allows musicians to find out if their songs sound too much like other people’s music. It’s an idea that everyone tells him has no future, because musicians don’t really care if they’re stealing.
But buried inside the search engine is a technology of true genius, a system that would instantly shrink any file on the Internet to half its size, allowing faster uploads and downloads of everything. Richard, though, can’t fathom the worth of his own ideas, and he’s shocked when the industry’s most ruthless billionaires start bidding for his work.
People who’ve spent time in the tech industry will recognize Richard’s type: the too-smart programmer who’s blind to the world, the guy who insists that tech innovations ought to triumph over business acumen. Asked what “Steve” would do in his situation, Richard is puzzled. “Jobs or Wozniak?” he asks. Unsurprisingly, he’s partial to the geekier, forgotten Apple co-founder.
If “Silicon Valley” is unusually adept at teasing out the social types and subtle stratifications that make up the tech-obsessed Bay Area, it’s because Mr. Judge and Alec Berg, his producing collaborator, set out to get the little stuff right. A former engineer who once worked in the industry, Mr. Judge has been keen to lampoon the valley ever since he spent a short stint in East Palo Alto in the late 1980s.
“I think people in tech are funny, weird, awkward and interesting people, and you just don’t see them portrayed as they are,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “I thought I might be one of the few people in Hollywood who could get this crowd.”
As has been observed ad nauseam, Silicon Valley is having a moment. The tech industry’s influence, arrogance and towering economic clout have put it at the center of discussions about inequality, privacy and the changing nature of work in an age ruled by machines. Film and television have begun to notice — in addition to “The Social Network“ (2010) and “The Internship“ last year, we’ve already seen one recent movie about Steve Jobs, the Apple leader (with Ashton Kutcher), and may soon see another. (Aaron Sorkin has been writing the script.)
In 2012, Bravo ran a reality show, “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” that was universally panned by techies as too sensationalistic. Last year, Amazon.com posted “Betas,” a traditional sitcom take on the valley. Think of “The Big Bang Theory,” only slightly nerdier. But “Silicon Valley,” starting on Sunday, marks a novel turn in the dramatic portrayal of the tech business: neither glamorizing nor fear-mongering, the series instead aims for dull realism, finding comedy in the humdrum annoyances of life on a peninsula overflowing with money, ambition and very little style.
The ethos is familiar to fans of Mr. Judge’s work. Here, we find hints of the totalitarian banality of corporate life as portrayed in “Office Space,” but now set against the splendors of sprawling, decked-out tech campuses rather than drab office parks. And for devotees of “Beavis and Butt-head,” there are nods to the juvenile. One of Richard’s pals, for instance, is working on an app called Nip-Alert, which lets users know where to find beautiful women.
But “Silicon Valley” is as much a wry study of modern entrepreneurialism — or, in jargon, “start-up culture” — as it is a comedy about work. To get the details right, Mr. Judge and Mr. Berg consulted with a network of technologists, journalists and money professionals in the valley. They invited tech luminaries to step in for cameos (look, there’s Eric Schmidt of Google! And there’s the writer Kara Swisher!), and a climactic scene occurs at TechCrunch Disrupt, an industry conference that pits start-ups against one another, “American Idol” style.
“What we found was that the more research we did, the more the show started to write itself,” Mr. Berg said. “We kept coming up with ideas, and then we started asking people if they had heard anything like such and such happening. And usually they had better ideas.”
The time that Larry Page and Sergey Brin got a $100,000 investment in Google, but then found they couldn’t deposit the check because they didn’t yet own the name Google: A similar event happens to Richard, too. Even Richard’s compression algorithm, the breakthrough technology at the center of the show, is realistic; a Stanford compression expert consulted on the tech.
And some of the show’s jokes are so tucked into the world of code that they function as what creators call “dog whistles” for the initiated: You’ll only notice there’s a joke there if you’re a geek. For instance, Richard has a pinup of the Swedish model Lena Soderberg in his room; that’s a reference to a standard test image used to test computer graphics algorithms, an image chosen by randy computer scientists in the 1970s.
Perhaps the most obvious way “Silicon Valley” departs from previous portrayals of the tech business is in its studied unglamourousness. Where “The Social Network” revolves around money, and “The Internship” brims with fun, Richard and his programmer pals don’t care much about either.
“They have tons of money, and they’re not quite sure how to enjoy themselves,” Mr. Judge said. “There is absolutely no show of wealth there. Everyone is so conscious about not displaying their money, so the whole place ends up looking kind of drab.”
Silicon Valley’s foibles are inherently amusing, Mr. Judge said. “I watched ‘Naked Gun’ in a movie theater in Palo Alto when it came out, and I was the only one in the theater laughing,” he said. “There’s not a lot of humor up there, and that’s kind of what’s funny about it.”
The pilot opens with Kid Rock onstage at a lavish launch party, but no one is watching — not even ironically. Later, when someone orders a stripper to entertain Richard and his pals for landing their first investment, they each scamper away from the poor woman. “God, I hate Palo Alto,” she deadpans.
Rather than money or power, what motivates Richard and the other coders of “Silicon Valley” — to the extent that they’re motivated at all, which is sometimes debatable — is something quite prosaic. They seem to be in love with the intellectual puzzle of creating better code, and they genuinely believe that their technologies will benefit humanity.
This sounds hackneyed, and the show does use some of the tech set’s soaring, world-changing rhetoric for comic grist. Yet, in a way that feels unusual on TV and the movies, “Silicon Valley” buys into the central dogma of Silicon Valley: Finding new methods to make everything faster, cheaper, more convenient and more efficient will be good for the world.
The producers’ decision to portray the industry in a positive light was, in part, tactical. “We couldn’t completely kick over the idea of Silicon Valley,” Mr. Berg said. “If we’re trying to get people to invest in our guys, and what our guys want is to succeed in this business, we can’t have the audience feeling that these guys are wrong to want that.”
But Mr. Judge and Mr. Berg are also enamored of the valley and of the way it has wormed itself into the rest of our lives. And they both said that for all its influence, the travails of the tech business had been all but overlooked by the tastemakers of pop culture.
“It’s easy to take shots, and we take some of them,” Mr. Berg said. “But I don’t think it’s fair to indict the entire tech world. I know a lot of people who work in that business, and they’re super smart, and they work really hard, and they do great things.”
Whether the audience will see it that way is an open question. While the inner workings of Hollywood or the C.I.A. or the White House have natural appeal, the inner workings of software engineers could be a harder sell. This is the big bet of “Silicon Valley”: that we all care enough about the weird guys who make our apps to tune in for eight episodes.
The best argument for why anyone might care is that lots of people are envious of the smart alecks in Silicon Valley, and they’d love to figure out a way to get there. “Who hasn’t had this conversation with a friend or family member about some great app idea you have?” said Jonathan Dotan, who served as a technical adviser and associate producer on the show. “But what’s the next step? That’s not obvious to a lot of people.”
Well, here’s the ultimate sell for a TV comedy. “If you watch the season closely, you get the whole recipe in there,” Mr. Dotan said. “All the steps these guys have to take to create their start-up. That’s what you’d actually have to do. The whole recipe is right in our show.”
You need stars that inspire massive numbers of people to pursue their dreams
It takes a massive number of attempts to be successful
Silicon Valley's culture of failure … and 'the walking dead' it leaves behind
Though tech startups rely on origin myths and mantras like 'Fail fast, fail often,' the psychic toll of unrelenting failure simmers just beneath the exuberance
Shikhar Ghosh, a Harvard lecturer, says venture capitalists 'bury their dead very quietly'.
It is probably Silicon Valley's most striking mantra: “Fail fast, fail often.” It is recited at technology conferences, pinned to company walls, bandied in conversation.
Failure is not only invoked but celebrated. Entrepreneurs give speeches detailing their misfires. Academics laud the virtue of making mistakes.FailCon, a conference about “embracing failure”, launched in San Francisco in 2009 and is now an annual event, with technology hubs in Barcelona, Tokyo, Porto Alegre and elsewhere hosting their own versions.
While the rest of the world recoils at failure, in other words, technology's dynamic innovators enshrine it as a rite of passage en route to success.
But what about those tech entrepreneurs who lose – and keep on losing? What about those who start one company after another, refine pitches, tweak products, pivot strategies, reinvent themselves … and never succeed? What about the angst masked behind upbeat facades?
Silicon Valley is increasingly asking such questions, even as the tech boom rewards some startups with billion-dollar valuations, sprinkling stardust on founders who talk of changing the world.
“It's frustrating if you're trying and trying and all you read about is how much money Airbnb and Uber are making,” said Johnny Chin, 28, who endured three startup flops but is hopeful for his fourth attempt. “The way startups are portrayed, everything seems an overnight success, but that's a disconnect from reality. There can be a psychic toll.”
It has never been easier or cheaper to launch a company in the hothouse of ambition, money and software that stretches from San Francisco to Cupertino, Mountain View, Menlo Park and San Jose.
In 2012 the number of seed investment deals in US tech reportedly more than tripled, to 1,700, from three years earlier. Investment bankers are quitting Wall Street for Silicon Valley, lured by hopes of a cooler and more creative way to get rich.
Most startups fail. However many entrepreneurs still overestimate the chances of success – and the cost of failure.
Some estimates put the failure rate at 90% – on a par with small businesses in other sectors. A similar proportion of alumni from Y Combinator, a legendary incubator which mentors bright prospects, are said to also struggle.
Airbnb 'started as two guys with an air-bed' and is now a global rival to hotel chains valued at $10bn. Companies typically die around 20 months after their last financing round and after having raised $1.3m, according to a study by the analytics firms CB Insights titled The RIP Report – startup death trends.
Failure is difficult to quantify because it does not necessarily mean liquidation. Many startups limp on for years, ignored by the market but sustained by founders' savings or investors.
“We call them the walking dead,” said one manager at a tech behemoth, who requested anonymity. “They don't necessarily die. They putter along.”
Software engineers employed by such zombies face a choice. Stay in hope the company will take off, turning stock options into gold. Or quit and take one of the plentiful jobs at other startups or giants like Apple and Google.
Founders face a more agonising dilemma. Continue working 100-hour weeks and telling employees and investors their dream is alive, that the metrics are improving, and hope it's true, or pull the plug.
The loss aversion principle – the human tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains – tilts many towards the former, said Bruno Bowden, a former engineering manager at Google who is now a venture investor and entrepreneur.
"People will do a lot of irrational things to avoid losing even if it's to their detriment. You push and push and exhaust yourself."
Silicon Valley wannabes tell origin fables of startup founders who maxed out credit cards before dazzling Wall Street, the same way Hollywood's struggling actors find solace in the fact Brad Pitt dressed as a chicken for El Pollo Loco before his breakthrough.
“It's painful to be one of the walking dead. You lie to yourself and mask what's not working. You amplify little wins,” said Chin, who eventually abandoned startups which offered micro, specialised versions of Amazon and Yelp.
That startup founders were Silicon Valley's “cool kids”, glamorous buccaneers compared to engineers and corporate drones, could make failure tricky to recognise, let alone accept, he said. “People are very encouraging. Everything is amazing, cool, awesome. But then they go home and don't use your product.”
Chin is bullish about his new company, Bannerman, an Uber-type service for event security and bodyguards, and has no regrets about rolling the tech dice. “I love what I do. I couldn't do anything else.”
The comedy Silicon Valley lampoons the culture of tech entrepreneurs and also highlights their attendant failures. Venture capitalists and angel investors tolerate failure only up to a point, said Bowden. "You won't get funding unless you're credible. One previous failure can be OK but multiple failures will make it impossible to get funding."
Shikhar Ghosh, a lecturer at Harvard who has studied startup mortality, noted that “VCs bury their dead very quietly.”
Many founders are confessing anxiety in public for the first time via anonymous gossip sites like Secret and startupsanonymous.com. “My biggest mistake was trying to be an entrepreneur when I should have continued on with my current job,” confided one.
“I’ve got this month to pull something off, otherwise I’m screwed and looking for a job. I’m scared as hell that I can’t do it,” wrote another.
Common threads are fear of failure and the stress of pretending everything is going well. “The time you send your monthly investor update and spend an hour trying to come up with positive shit to say,” wrote another.
Failure post-mortems by founders and investors – the tone ranging from philosophical to despairing – have proved a hit on the CB Insights blog. A Wired cover story about one startup's travails, titled No Exit, also set tongues wagging.
Tragedy struck last year when Jody Sherman, a 47-year-old serial entrepreneur, shot himself. A tattoo on his wrist said “I am awesome” but it emerged he had agonised over raising fresh funding for a startup, Ecomom, which he knew was floundering.
Some startups raise the white flag under cover of “aqui-hire” in which they are bought by established firms, allowing founders a graceful exit, but often it is a fig leaf to poach staff, especially programmers and designers.
Even if startups survive the stress can drain you, Justin Yoshimura, 24, a high-school dropout who founded three companies, most recently 500friends, an online retail loyalty platform, told the General Assembly, a business and technology speaker series. “I'm not burned out but I don't want to be a founder or CEO anymore,” he said. “It's like running marathons back to back.”
Such cautionary tales, and fears of a bubble, are not denting exuberance. Silicon Valley remains in thrall to the success stories, none more so than Airbnb, which started as two guys with an air-bed and is now a global rival to hotel chains valued at $10bn.
“You need stars that inspire massive numbers of people to pursue their dreams,” said co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, 30, seated on a sofa in the company's gleaming new headquarters.
Failure really does pave the way to success, he said. “I started coding when I was 12. A lot of things I did didn't pay off but it all went into my toolbelt. It takes a massive number of attempts to be successful.”
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