There is a slight chance that you thought the big tech news of the week was the impending sale of Yahoo, or the pivot by Intel towards cloud computing, maybe even the news that bio-tech startup Theranos was facing a federal shutdown of its labs for two years. But you would be wrong. The big news of the week has to be the impending return of beloved startup TV series, Silicon Valley, premieres on HBO on Sunday 24 April.
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Naturally, it’s not going to be on any local channels right off the bat (or ever) but we know that you’re geeky enough to find ways to see what needs to be seen, so let’s not talk about that any further.
This series takes really long gaps between each season, which is part of the reason that it’s so fresh and engaging every time it comes back. For those of you who have somehow missed it, or forgotten what’s been happening, let’s do a quick recap.
Silicon Valley is the story of Pied Piper, a plucky startup run by six tech bros out of a suburban house in Silicon Valley. The company is led by Richard Hendricks, a bona fide genius with a killer compression algorithm, and Erlich Bachmann, the entrepreneur who owned the incubator in which Pied Piper was born and who’s house the team work out of.
Pied Piper narrowly avoid having its intellectual property stolen by corporate giant Hoolli, after Hendricks showed it to a few engineers who worked there. They then refused a $4 million buy-out by the same company in order to go it alone, and made an enemy of founder of Hooli, Gavin Belson, in the process.
Pied Piper has made the decision to go it alone.
This independent spirit leads the team to a rocky pitch with enigmatic venture capitalist Peter Gregory who ends up offering a $200 000 investment for 5% ownership of the company, which is an equivalent valuation to the one from Hoolli.
But Gregory is not an easy character to work with.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, the team’s pitch goes disastrously as Bachmann is assaulted by a judge who claims Bachmann had sex with his wife and ex-wife. (not at the same time). Meanwhile Gavin Belson is presenting Nucleus, a corporate knock-off of Pied Piper which matches their performance. The team are dispirted to say the least, but Hendricks spends the night re-inventing the entire product and ‘crushes it’
At the end of Season 1, Pied Piper are mobbed by potential investors for the company.
Season 2 sees Pied Piper swimming in the shark tank of Silicon Valley and trying to stay true to its vision. A round of financing goes nowhere as Bachmann insists on insulting every VC he can get in front of, but matters get complicated when Peter Gregory dies and is replaced by a far more conservative board leader at Raviga Capital.
When news breaks that Hooli intends to sue Pied Piper, all the investment options dry up really quickly and they are forced to scramble into some awful partnerships with dubious companies and a crazy investor called Russ Hannemann who made his money putting “radio on the internet”.
After a whole bunch of mis-steps and near disasters, Pied Piper come out the other end and Raviga Capital decide to re-invest and buy Hannemann out, but the Raviga board has voted him out as CEO.
Which brings us to the Season 3 premiere this Sunday.
Part of the magic of this series is the incredible skill the creators have for inventing startups, characters and companies that could exist in Silicon Valley as we know it today. Let’s hope they get it right again this season!
