The popular HBO show Silicon Valley has been responsible not just for making fun of the real Silicon Valley, but also highlighting real-life trends in Silicon Valley.
As part of the journey of fictional startup Pied Piper and its founder, Richard, the show has been remarkably good at inserting concepts and memes from the tech world (What is an incubator? What is a unicorn? What is Disrupt?) into the mainstream consciousness.
Anyone who has been in the real Silicon Valley in the last year knows that the hottest trend has been blockchain and cryptocurrencies. With the fifth season of the popular HBO show set for release on March 25, will this trend continue with the introduction of blockchain and a peer- to- peer future into the plot of the show?
Season 5 is coming soon — will it be more or less like the real “Silicon Valley”??
Blockchains are built on the idea of a decentralized peer-to-peer internet rather than the client-server model since the dawn of web 1.0. Speaking of web 1.0, when I was in Silicon Valley in 1998, in the middle of the dot com boom, I remember complaining that I couldn’t walk into an apartment complex without their being at least two web startups. If you went to a coffee shop or any tech-related event last year (and even during the first months of this year), you can’t get away from it. Bitcoin! Ethereum! ICO! Does this portend a Pied Piper Coin and an initial coin offering built on blockchain for the team in season 5? And if so, will Silicon Valley do a better job of explaining the tech than most mainstream coverage thus far?
Before we go too deep into this question, let’s look at a question that I always get asked about the show from viewers who aren’t here in Silicon Valley. How much like the real Silicon Valley is HBO’s Silicon Valley?
How well does the show follow real life trends from Silicon Valley?
In its four seasons thus far, the show has satirized almost every aspect of Silicon Valley, ranging from Google (with a company called Hooli) to well known personalities like Peter Thiel, Marc Benioff and even Marissa Mayer.
Amidst the comedy, the show has actually been pretty good at following trends in the real Silicon Valley, though it’s usually about a year behind and exaggerates real-life. This makes sense since each season is filmed the year before.
When IoT (the Internet of Things) and VR were hot in Silicon Valley in 2016, you can see how their influence crept into the show. Haley Joel Osmont played a VR entrepreneur whose startup became a unicorn in season 4 (which aired in 2017) and the season ends with data being transferred to a decentralized interent of things.
The many lives of Pied Piper- are they realistic?
In its winding journey, Pied Piper goes through that most famous of Silicon Valley moves — the Pivot — often while it tries to find the right business model for the revolutionary compression technology developed by Richard and his friends.
The show follows fictional adventures of the startup, Pied Piper
Is their compression technology best for end users (turns out not really, as it was too complicated)? Should they license it or sell it to giants like Hooli (maybe, but the team doesn’t want to “sell out”)? Is a video chat (Piper Chat) the real killer application of this tech (they try this too)? Or should it be used to store data on a new, decentralized internet (which is where they end up trying to keep Pied Piper alive)?
Whew! It’s a lot to keep track of, but these kinds of pivots are actually more realistic than you would think. I’ve seen similar struggles and debates of how to take the technology to market: consumer vs. B2B, licensing vs. building a killer application. The only catch is that in the real Silicon Valley, it’s unlikely one company would survive so many pivots because they’d run out of money after one or two!
Are the management and board struggles really that crazy?
After Pied Piper gets an investment from Peter Thiel, err, I mean the character Peter Gregory, his second in command, Laurie Bream (who some say is a lot like Marissa Mayer), joins the Pied Piper board. Hijinks ensue.
Richard goes from being CEO to being kicked out of the role as the board brings in an older, balder executive, who then gets kicked out himself. In the meantime, the board members plot against one another, against the CEO, and one of the early shareholders is forced to sell his founder stock at a discount, prompting an article about how he may be the dumbest guy in Silicon Valley.
It’s enough to give one whiplash, but again, some of these struggles are quite real — as a young engineer in my very first startup, I too was replaced by the board with an older, balder CEO that didn’t work out. Yes, in the real Silicon Valley, I’ve seen boards call in CEOs to tell them they are fired, and board members plotting to kick out other board members, and i’ve seen founders forced to sell their stock at discounts.
Is it really that difficult to go from an engineer to CEO?
In the promo trailer for season 5, Richard is introduced to his 50 new employees as the CEO who has to make a speech. He asks for a minute to gather his thoughts and pukes into the trash can in his office — not realizing he’s being watched by all 50 new employees!
Going from an engineer to a manager of a few people is one thing, but going from an engineer to a CEO of a 50-person company is no picnic — I’ve had to do it myself when I was a fresh graduate from MIT. It’s stressful. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a CEO puke in front of his employees (in the office, that is!).
So will Silicon Valley help explain blockchain and a server-less future to the mainstream?
OK, so we can see that the show is a bit realistic, even if it’s usually a year behind and a lot exaggerated.
So what does this predict about Blockchain and the next season?
At the end of the last season, Richard stumbles onto the idea of a “decentralized internet” as “the next big thing” and has taken on a pilot project to store a ton of data in this new decentralized world. After an unsuccessful attempt trying to move the data from the servers in their garage to Stanford’s servers (his friend, Big Head Bighetti, the prince of serendipity in the show’s Valley, ends up as a CS professor at Stanford- don’t ask how!), they are magically rescued by the fact that their the data ends up on 30,000 smart fridges.
At the end of Season 4, Richard with Big Head on the Stanford Campus
In other words, they went from a startup with video compression technology to a new vision of a server-less, de-centralized, peer to peer future as a way to re-invent the internet.
Since Blockchain is all about decentralized peer-to-peer networks, this provides the perfect gateway into the merger of art and life.
Most coverage of blockchain and crypto in the mainstream thus far has been about the rapid rise (and fall) of Bitcoin’s price over the past year. Even when the Big Bang Theory did an episode on Bitcoin, it was about how much the crypto was worth. This is probably because blockchain, decentralized peer-to-peer networks, and cryptography are complicated and difficult to explain beyond the idea of “Bitcoin millionaires”.
Could HBO’s Silicon Valley provide a more accurate description of a server-less decentralized future? Moreover, could the introduction of a Pied Piper Coin and blockchain in season 5 introduce these concepts into the mainstream in ways that real ICOs and crypto investor never could?
I’d say there’s a good chance. We’ll find out on March 25.
Rizwan Virk is an advisor, investor and the Head of Corporate Development at SLIVER.tv, and a member of the founding team at Theta Labs, Inc. He also serves as the current director of Play Labs @ MIT. He is an early investor in cryptocurrency and many blockchain companies, including Ripio/BitPagos, CoinMkt, along with many gaming companies including Telltale Games, Funzio, Tapjoy, Discord. He was also the designer of one of the first peer-to-peer mobile applications for in-person trading of bitcoin.