I’m burning through Silicon Valley, so I figured I’d give a light recap of the latest two seasons I watched! This show continues to deliver on laugh out load moments almost too frequent to count, so in my eyes, this comedy is gold.
In the third season, Richard threatens to quit Pied Piper and take his algorithm with him after being fired as CEO, but Raviga’s new CEO candidate, Jack Barker, manages to convince Richard to stay on the team. Not long after Jack burns through most of Pied Piper’s funding with new offices and a slew of other frivolous expenses, he gets ousted for wanting to make a box product instead of Richard’s original platform idea. Lucky for them, Gavin’s greed and want to show off is what pushes Laurie and the rest of Raviga in Richard’s favor. In good news and bad news for Pied Piper, Gavin’s awful leadership means that he shuts down Nucleus, then reinstates the team before they all quit on him. He manages to burn through three quarters of a billion dollars, so he gets ousted as CEO and replaced by Jack Barker.
When the Pied Piper platform finally does launch, it is a success, however, their daily active users are extremely low. This is because the team only had their engineering friends test the system. It’s too confusing for the average user, and even when the team goes out and demonstrates how to use the platform, it still fails. By the end of the season though, instead of dissolving the company, they realize Dinesh’s video chat built into the system is really catching on, so that’s what they decide to sell to users. Of course, while all of these failures are going on, Raviga decides to sell to the highest bidder, which is going to be Gavin Belson until Erlich beats him out by one dollar.
Speaking of Erlich, he’s always looking for ways to hitch his cart onto other people’s wagon by benefiting from potential wealth, which is why this season he learns about Big Head’s 20 million dollar settlement from Hooli and becomes partners with him and his incubator. Essentially, Erlich is in charge of all of Big Head’s assets, so he decides to throw a big party at Alcatraz to launch “Bachmannity.” This ultimately fails and Erlich ends up with nothing until Richard decides to hire him as the head of PR for Pied Piper.
The fourth season sees PiperChat as a hit, but Richard decides to leave because he’s not passionate about it. Instead, he wants to use his algorithm to create a decentralized internet that’s user and smartphone based, rather than by corporations. While Dinesh is CEO of PiperChat, it’s discovered that they are in severe violation of COPPA, which means they would owe at least 21 billion dollars in fines. That is thwarted when Gavin decides to acquire PiperChat because it’s using “similar technology” to HolliChat. Obviously the fines are uncovered and Gavin is officially let go as CEO, getting replaced by Jack Barker.
While working on his new internet, Richard finds out Peter Gregory had the same idea but compression was not what it is now and had abandoned the idea. Truthfully, he quit because Gavin took a patent out on the idea. Richard goes to a distraught Gavin and the two reluctantly decide to team up. Eventually, Gilfoyle and Jared join the team, with Dinesh soon to follow. After some time, Gavin leaves in order to “work on himself” but signs the patent over to Richard. This is great besides the fact that they have no funding. Instead of looking for a VC to fund them, they decide to pre-sell their product to an insurance company.
Speaking of funding, Laurie decides to leave Raviga and asks Monica to join her in starting a new VC firm. Erlich brings them Keenan Felspar who claims to have to newest and best VR technology. At first, he takes the funding to acquire Pied Piper, but then accepts funding at Hooli. Monica assures Richard that they dodged a bullet and that she will fund them once they get a substantial amount of users. They try and get their users at Hooli-Con, which works until phones start exploding during Jack’s presentation. Afterwards, instead of issuing an update, Jack decides to just replace all nine million phones, which ends up getting him held hostage at a Chinese factory. Since Erlich has made it to Tibet where Gavin in, he catches wind of this and heads back, but leaves enough money to keep Erlich there for five more years. After getting Jack back, Gavin is reinstated as CEO. Meanwhile, in an effort to keep the insurance company’s data live, they decide to move Gilfoyle’s server to Stanford, which fails when all the parts fall out of the back of a moving truck. Luckily, all is well when they find out that smart fridges are proving the distributed network concept from when Gilfoyle hacked Jian-Yangs’ smart fridge earlier in the season.
Overall, so much happened over these two seasons, and this group of guys continue to get screwed over. Somehow, they manage to scrape their way out of most trouble, usually due to the pompous nature of other big wigs in the Valley. A standout for me during these two seasons were definitely Big Head. He might not be used a lot, but his character really proves something that I think applies to a lot of corporate people. He is basically stupid but held such undeservingly high positions at Hooli that Stanford offers him a teaching job instead of letting him take classes. That’s amazing and hilarious. Jared also continues to be my favorite character. They are all awkward in their own ways, but he just makes me laugh the most. Anyway, I look forward to the last two seasons!