The thing with HBO's "Silicon Valley" is that it's packed to the brim with little, authentic details that make it sometimes feel almost too real. People in San Francisco and the real Silicon Valley often joke that it feels more like a drama than a comedy.
Right off the bat, "Silicon Valley" nailed the look and feel of the massive campuses of tech titans like Google — the fictional Hooli has a very Google-y aesthetic.
That's down to Hooli's ridiculous kitchens, which mirror those of Silicon Valley's most perk-happy companies...
Right down the slogans on the walls. Here, Facebook gently mocks its own "Move Fast and Break Things" motto.
A memorable scene from the first season sees rapper Flo Rida playing a party for an incongruous crowd of Silicon Valley nerds. This is 100% accurate: MC Hammer, just as one example, often officiates at afterparties for Salesforce's Dreamforce conference.
Richard Hendricks, the hero of "Silicon Valley," is a Hooli employee who's trying to design a tool for musicians to see if they're violating copyright, and accidentally ends up inventing the most efficient file-compression algorithm known to man.
Lots of startups invented their best products by accident. Slack, the $3.8 billion chat app, started as a tool that the developers of a weird multiplayer game "Glitch" used to stay coordinated. The game died, but Slack lives on.
Hendricks developed Pied Piper while he was living and working in Ehrlich Bachman's "incubator," where he didn't have to pay rent in exchange for some equity in the company.
In real life, incubators do exist — hot startups like Dropbox and Airbnb came through Y Combinator, the real Silicon Valley's hottest incubator program. But the real incubators are more about mentorship and networking, not room and board.
The show also nails the way the programmers work together. When the team needs to stay organized and keep building the platform, they turn to the very real "Scrum" method...
...a methodology where teams of engineers also have a "stand-up" meeting where you literally stand while you deliver your reports. The idea is that standing up promotes short, focused meetings.
In the show, Hooli "benches" employees who have outstayed their welcome at the company, but who are too valuable to go elsewhere. This is actually an effective tactic used by the likes of Google in real life. It's sometimes called "rest and vest," since you keep earning shares in the company even if you're not doing anything.
Hooli CEO Gavin Belson, the show's main antagonist for the first two seasons, is a composite of a whole bunch of Silicon Valley CEOs: Like Marc Benioff, he's a big fan of "gurus;" like the Google cofounders, he loves "moonshot" projects; like all of them, he's proven himself over and over to be utterly ruthless, even if he has a smile on his face.
In the current season of Silicon Valley, Hendricks is fired as CEO of the company he founded, after his main investor loses faith in his leadership ability.
It sounds crazy, but it can and does happen in real life. Even Steve Jobs was fired from Apple by the board of directors after he tried to usurp control from then-CEO John Sculley. Eventually, Sculley got fired, too. It does happen.
In the show, Gilfoyle (left) and Dinesh (right) are both working at Pied Piper on H-1B visas. These are a controversial issue in the real Silicon Valley, with lots of tech companies sponsoring visas for well-educated programmers from overseas, in lieu of paying a more competitive salary.
Hooli's "brogrammers," or super-macho programmers, are a very real phenomenon in the streets and startups of Silicon Valley. They're an extension of a culture where wearing a t-shirt and a hoodie can pass as business casual.
One thing that Silicon Valley does not nail is representation of women. The most majorly recurring female characters are venture capital investors — but in real life, only 7% of partners in Silicon Valley investment firms are women. It's probably the least realistic part of the show — even when you put aside the fact that the main cast are all dudes.
Source: TechCrunch