Silicon Valley has long been a mecca for entrepreneurs and tech workers. But what’s the story behind all this glamour? Silicon Valley is a half-hour sitcom launched by US television network HBO in 2014 that follows the ups and downs of a group of programmers who start a business in Silicon Valley. The play satirizes the sentient beings in the silicon Valley entrepreneurship circle with a kind of exaggerated and sharp humor. The industry leaders and technology giants are innocent, making people laugh. This detailed interview with the people behind Silicon Valley is packed with anecdotes that are worth reading. Whether the real Silicon Valley led to the birth of Silicon Valley, or the fictional Silicon Valley led to the transformation of Silicon Valley, I believe you will have an answer after watching.

Back in the 1980s, Dick Costolo was studying computer science at the University of Michigan when he discovered he had a knack for improvisational comedy. After graduation, he moved to Chicago to take classes at The Second City Theatre. Unlike his fellow students Steve Carell, Tina Fey and Adam McKay, Costolo did not join the troupe and his comedy career ended.

So he went back to work as a programmer and started a series of technology companies. One was eventually bought by Google for $100 million. Costolo became CEO of Twitter in 2010, earning $10 million in his first year. At a charity event, he ran into Steve Carell, an old classmate. Together, the two reminisced about their wild days as improv comedians. “Too bad acting isn’t your thing.” Carell joked.

In June 2015, Costolo announced that he was stepping down as Twitter’s stock was weakening. (According to the Tech press, Costolo was forced out by the board; He insists it was his idea.) Three days later, HBO aired the second season finale of the satirical sketch silicon Valley, leaving a big cliffhanger.

The founder and CEO of a tech startup has been fired from his company’s board. As a fan of the show, Costolo found the scene eerily familiar. He said:

“I can relate to everyone in that situation, whether it’s the founder stepping down, the new CEO coming in, or the employees who are watching.”

At the time, Costolo had breakfast with Kara Swisher in San Francisco. Swisher is a technology journalist and a well-known “power broker” in her industry, calling herself “the most fearsome and likable journalist in Silicon Valley.” The conversation turned to the TV show Silicon Valley.

“People in Silicon Valley — at least the ones I know — talk about it a lot.” Costolo told me, “Oddly enough, most people love it. I think a lot of people are more or less telling themselves, ‘They’re mocking the geeks in the tech world, not me. ‘” The well-connected Swisher is in constant contact with executive producers Mike Judge and Alec Berg. “I’ll introduce you to them,” she says to Costolo.

A month later, Costolo had lunch with Judge and Berg in Los Angeles. Screenwriting, they told Costolo, was in trouble. The show is about an entrepreneur trying to get started; Now that the entrepreneur has been kicked out of the company he founded, they don’t know what the plot should be.

Despite seeming to be full of slapstick plots and cliched jokes, Silicon Valley actually does its homework. Judge and Berg decided that the best way out was to hire a consultant to get more information from him. What they didn’t expect was that Costolo was interested.

“We just need someone who knows how these companies work, not someone who’s actually running a company.” Berg said. Though overqualified, Costolo accepted the job.

Most of “Silicon Valley” was filmed not in Silicon Valley but on a SONY lot in Los Angeles, but the two locations are in the same time zone. Every Monday morning for three and a half months, Costolo would fly from San Francisco to Los Angeles, get an Uber to Culver City, drop off his overnight luggage at a nearby hotel, and spend two days in the writers’ room.

Berg, Judge and the 10 other writers will throw questions at him, both specific and broad. Like: Where do the most powerful people sit on the board? What motivates and frustrates entrepreneurs like Richard?

Costolo said.

“I’ll tell them about a detail I observed, or someone I met. And their eyes lit up and they said, ‘Is that true? ‘”

Gradually, Costolo opens up and tells his own jokes. “They were very thoughtful not to rush me,” he told me. “It was fun going from BEING the CEO to being the least experienced person in the room.” Hatching Twitter is Nick Bilton’s history of Twitter, a tech nonfiction book that everyone on the staff reads.

“One time they were arguing about what should happen next in a certain story structure,” Costolo told me. “Mike said, ‘Isn’t the Twitter book about a similar problem they had? What was their decision? ‘Someone pointed out,’ Mike, one of the people who wrote that book is sitting in this room. Let’s just ask him what happened. ‘”

Silicon Valley, now in its third season, is one of the funniest shows on TV right now, and the first satire of its kind with an ambitious vision for the social and cultural realities of Northern California. The show’s energy comes from two opposing attitudes: disdain for deep-pocked tech giants and sympathy for entrepreneurs trying to disrupt them.

In the pilot, Richard Hendricks, a shy but brilliant engineer, devises a compression algorithm that subtly reduces the amount of space taken up by large files. He later started a company with the invention, which he insists on calling Pied Piper. (Richard: “It’s a classic fairy tale.” Employee: “It’s about a bloodthirsty Pied Piper who kills a bunch of kids in a cave.” )

As the company grows, Richard becomes a tech-nerd version of David, plagued by a variety of Goliath giants: two-faced board members, tycoons trying to steal his intellectual property. Can he succeed without compromising his values? Ironically, Richard’s ultimate goal must be to become another Goliath himself; If this point has not been discussed by the writers, it is shelved.

Roger McNamee, a respected venture capitalist, also consulted on the show. “The shit you see on the show is the shit that real startups go through, and some of it is worse,” he told me. Writers sometimes have to cut out things that actually happen to make it more believable.”

Judge and Berg both value authenticity.

Judge’s 1999 film Office Space enriches the theme of white-collar trappings through his own experiences and the details he has witnessed, such as the boss’s overemphasis on the format of TPS reports, Chain restaurants force waiters to wear at least 15 badges on their overalls to show the restaurant is “fun.”

Similarly, many of Berg’s works, notably Seinfeld, draw their stories from real life. “It happened over and over again with Seinfeld.” “Someone will come up with 10 ideas,” Berg says. The first nine are all weird and silly, and the tenth is always funny and funny. You ask, ‘Where did this idea come from? ‘And the guy said,’ Actually, it happened to a friend of mine. ‘”

If you’re creating a show like Seinfeld or a movie about cubicle culture, it’s not hard to gather real details. But if you want to know how non-compete clauses should be designed, or what kind of car a typical straight male farmer will drive, or whether Richard’s eviction will trigger an afternoon of discomfort and personal crisis, you need to do your homework.

TV writers have always turned to experts for advice. For example, asking a doctor to show you how to handle a defibrillator or an officer to make sure there’s nothing wrong with the color of the uniform. In the past, these consultants often acted as verifiers, brought in at the end of a script to make sure nothing went terribly wrong.

Now, thanks to Twitter and Wikipedia, viewers are taking television more seriously. Jay Carson said.

“You can’t fool people with unrealistic and lame memes anymore.”

Carson served as Hillary Clinton’s press secretary during her 2008 presidential campaign and was chief deputy mayor of Los Angeles. In 2011, his friend Beau Willimon hired him as a political consultant for the TV series house of Cards. “I’ve helped us pass the Washington insider test and the general audience test.” “Even in the five years I was there, every season the audience was smarter than before,” he said.

Silicon Valley is considered a sitcom. “We do a lot of silly jokes, but we also do a lot of work to make it real.” Berg told me, “We were hoping that people in Silicon Valley would watch the show and say, ‘I don’t like it when they make fun of us, but they’re right. ‘”

Now that Richard is CEO, Pied Piper, after several episodes of legal wrangling and succession crises, is happily back on track to develop their platform. “No one, no matter how successful the foreign ceos, is better at restoring morale.” Costolo told me.

One of the show’s most memorable memes is a minute-long clip from season 1 in which entrepreneurs claim to make the world a better place with “Paxos algorithm-consensus protocols” or “regular data models that enable communication between endpoints.” It was at TechCrunch Disrupt, where entrepreneurs take turns presenting their projects to a roomful of investors, much like on “American Idol.”

Before writing the episode, Judge and Berg spent a weekend at a TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. “The first thing you notice is capitalism masquerading as hippie, saying, ‘We’re making the world a better place,'” Judge said. They do it because they say, ‘Hey, we’ve solved this problem and we’re making a fortune. ‘It’s too cheesy.”

After the scene aired, viewers complained about the lack of diversity in the audience. “One of my friends in the community called me and said, ‘Why aren’t there any women? This is bullshit! ‘I said to her,’ Yes! Unfortunately, we did that scene at the actual TechCrunch Disrupt conference. ‘”

Both Berg and Judge have backgrounds in the tech industry, so they know the culture of Silicon Valley better than the average outsider. They also tend to use screenwriters with similar backgrounds.

Judge was an electronics engineer designing graphics cards in Santa Clara in the 1980s, just before the first IT
 bubble burst. Berg’s father was a biophysicist at Harvard, while his brother, a programmer and entrepreneur, “went to Graduate school in computer science at Stanford, not far from Sergey and Larry.”

Sergey and Larry turned their research into Google’s Sergey and Peggy.

Dan Lyons, a writer on the third season of “Silicon Valley,” is a former technology journalist who left the media to work for a startup and then was laid off and wrote a memoir, “Disrupted”, about the experience.

Carrie Kemper, another screenwriter, graduated from Stanford in 2006 and works in HUMAN resources at Google. At that time, Kemper discovered that her boss’s morning routine included googling his name. This meme appeared in a recent episode of Silicon Valley. (” I always start my day by typing my own name into the Hooli search engine. I love this little ceremony because it centers on me.” “Lately, it’s been the other way around.” )

I happened to be there when silicon Valley was filming on the SONY lot this season. A lot of people urged me to talk to Jonathan Dotan. Now an entrepreneur himself, he is also the show’s chief technical adviser. “He’s the guy who looks like a con man in Havana in 1947.” “Writer and producer Dan O ‘Keefe told me. Indeed, unlike the cast, writers and other crew members who wear jeans and sneakers on and off the show, Dotan prefers well-tailored coats, pocket towels and colorful dress socks.

I’m waiting for Raviga in his office. Raviga is a fictional venture capital firm. The decor — exposed red brick, polished stainless steel and ubiquitous carpet — was eerily similar to the VC offices I’d visited, as if the Hyatt In Toronto had the same aesthetic as the Hyatt in Houston airport.

To allow the director to point his camera anywhere he wanted without being caught, the set designer created an entire floor of office space, hung the company logo on the background wall, A copy of THE M.I.T. Technology Review is spread out on a coffee table in the reception room — doing its best to make the place look realistic. And many of those rooms are actually being used as offices, with spare crew members sitting behind closed glass doors, tapping on keyboards or talking on phones — making it even more confusing to see what’s real and what’s not.

Dotan took me to the boardroom. He tried two fake outlets before finding the real one, plugged in his computer, placed it on a light-colored wooden conference table, and opened a powerpoint presentation he had prepared about the silicon Valley research process. “The first thing in this job is to make sure there are no problems with the technical parameters, because our audience won’t tolerate a little error.” He said.

For a show about computer nerds, Silicon Valley has a very detail-oriented fan base and is particularly prone to online arguments about it. If a post-it note, a URL or a line of code makes sense on the show, these people will take a screenshot and study it.

A few hours after one episode aired last year, a Reddit user going by the handle “He’s My Opossum” posted, asking “Why did the writers just ruin the good reputation they had built among their core audience?” He strongly suggested that the accidental deletion of data from the Piped Piper server was fake.

“So files are being transcoded at the same time as they are being FTP transferred? And that affects how fast the contents of the hard drive can be deleted? … Damn it.”

Rob Huller, who works as a consultant, is also a software engineer. He took to his Reddit account to defend his work with a technical riposte. “These things happen sometimes.” “I remember even Amazon having a crash where DNS and ACLs were changed at some point due to a misoperation by a system administrator,” he wrote.

Another user replied: “Thank you for interacting with us here. Thank you very much.” The post generated nearly 300 replies. “He’s my possum,” he later wrote:

“Sorry, I was stupid.”

Dotan worked part-time for a few weeks, then went full-time. He started with a staff of four: an expert in file compression, a UI engineer who helped write the programs that appeared on the show’s computer screens, a technology executive and a Silicon Valley lawyer who drafted contracts.

By the end of season 1, Dotan’s staff had increased to 12. “If there’s a person holding a document in the show, that document is actually fully written, just like in real life.” Dotan said.

“Instead of thinking, ‘How can we cut corners to get rid of what’s in the shot now?’ we think, ‘Let’s make it as realistic as possible and see if it works out. ‘And it usually does.”

Dotan is now one of the producers and has a say not only in the technical issues but also in the story and style.

Season 1 ends on a high note with the competition coming: Pied Piper’s compression algorithm meets its match. “The writers wanted Richard to have a moment of inspiration so that his technique would be an order of magnitude better.” Dotan said. “So we had to come up with a breakthrough that was big but didn’t look fake.”

Dotan called Tsachy Weissman, his algorithm expert and an engineering professor at Stanford. “He spent hours walking me through the heavy history of lossless compression.” “From what I understand, it was basically Shannon in 1948 using code trees to compress files from top to bottom; A few years later, Hoffman took a bottom-up approach.”

Dotan made a powerpoint presentation to Judge and Berg. They thought about it for a moment, and then they said, “You mentioned top-down and bottom-up. Can we start in the middle of the database and work up and down? ‘So I went back to Tsachy and said,’ How about starting in the middle? Is that a possibility? ‘He didn’t think it was ridiculous. He said,’ Actually, it’s an interesting idea. It might work.”

In the show, Richard’s “working from the middle” was inspired not by the Stanford professor, but by the most sophisticated Tintin joke in television history.

In a break from their work, Pied Piper’s engineers start talking about how best to lift a crowd of people. (It’s a long story.) They draw all kinds of diagrams on the whiteboard, expounding with great effort. Finally, one suggested that the most efficient way to do it might be to “masturbate four people at a time” by “standing two on each side, tink-heads to each other.” In other words, “pull from the middle.” Richard’s eyes light up, cheerful music starts playing in the background, and he walks to the computer and starts programming.

In 2015, Weissman held the Stanford Forum on Compression Algorithms and published a 40-page white paper on the implications of compression from the middle. One of his graduate students, Vinith Misra, wrote another paper that made the math more explicit.

“Obviously, the start-in-the-middle compression method doesn’t work as well as it does in television.” “If it worked, we’d all be billionaires,” Dotan told me. But we agreed with Tsachy and Vinith that Mike and Alex would share the Nobel Prize with them in case they perfected the method.”

Dotan now oversees more than 200 consultants. Some of them worked with him on the set; Most people intervene at a later stage. Most of them don’t get paid and don’t show up for recognition. They include academics, investors, entrepreneurs, and employees of Google, Amazon, Netflix and other tech companies. Dotan said.

“I might ask a quick, specific question or talk to them for an hour.”

Many, if not most, of the show’s best jokes come from this ongoing collaborative process. “I’ll post links to tip them off about things I’ve heard, and list current buzzwords that can be used to undermine them.” Aileen Lee, an investor in Palo Alto, told me. “And I’m not the only one. They’ve got eyes and ears everywhere, for all I know.”

Silicon Valley has a lot of cameos from the tech world that most viewers don’t notice; If they did, it was because of their incongruous rigidity. But even sharp-eyed viewers can’t grasp the intricate web of hidden relationships between “Silicon Valley” and the real world.

In addition to Dotan’s clutch of advisers, Judge and Berg have informal contacts, both publicly and privately, with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, including billionaires with humor and ulterior motives.

This informal relationship of irony and irony is something of an aberration in the history of comedy. Juvenal published satires as early as the second century AD, but he wasn’t exactly friendly with the Roman emperors he mocked — one of them banished him. It is also hard to imagine drunken men in 18th-century London posing for satirist William Hogarth, or King George II providing jokes for Jonathan Swift’s novels.

Swisher says she continues to “pimp out” Judge and Berg by introducing them to insiders like Dick Costolo, who have proven to be not only helpful to the show, but also “not too self-centered to make a joke about them.”

Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, a gaming company, did just that. “When they said they wanted to meet at our office, I went there very quickly. ‘Are they just trying to make us clowns? ‘When they saw our — we had this programmable lighting walkway that you would walk through, I kind of winced. It’s not easy to explain. Later, I did see something similar to this aisle in the play. But, look, a lot of what’s going on here is bullshit. So it’s not unfair.”

The relationship was symbiotic: The consultant was quickly becoming a bit of a celebrity outside the circle — Costolo and Pincus were about to guest star in future episodes — and there were opportunities to get in on the action. And the show’s creators can gather material, even when they don’t have their notebooks. “Mike seems quiet and approachable, but his mind is always on the go, writing down everything.” “As a journalist, it’s a skill I’ve always wanted to have,” Swisher told me. I asked, why would anyone in the tech world want to talk to Judge? “Why did they tell me?” asked Swisher.

Every summer, just after the current season ends and before the next one begins, the writers and producers of “Silicon Valley” take a scouting trip to northern California. Back to the hotel in San Francisco at night, during the day on a variety of activities. Such as a morning visit to the GitHub office, where the foyer is a one-to-one replica of the Oval Office in the White House; Lunch with Barry Schuler, former CEO of AOL; In the afternoon, visit the world’s most valuable venture capital firm on Dune Road in Menlo Park. Then dinner at LB Steak with Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) and Mark Pincus.

“There were a few dinners where it was just me and Alec and three or four billionaires.” Judge told me, “We just sat there and watched. One of them may have the most say. Sometimes one of them gets up to go to the bathroom and the rest of them lean over and start bad-mouthing him.” In one episode of the first season, two tech titans who used to work together and now fight each other come face to face in a restaurant similar to LB Steak. These people don’t hesitate to make million-dollar decisions, but they struggle to make small talk. Unless you’ve seen it in real life, it’s hard to handle in a script.

“They asked me questions about the fictional company on the show, like whether it could actually raise money.” “Said Marc Andreessen, an Internet pioneer and prominent venture capitalist. “The kind of technology described in the show, if it existed, would certainly have a big impact. But can you turn it into a viable business? Hard to say. But, to be fair, you can say the same about half the companies we invest in.”

Between seasons one and two, the writers waited in the lobby of Andreessen’s office to visit him. On the wall of the office hangs a picture of a hydrogen bomb exploding. (” It’s a good way to keep people awake.” Andreessen’s rep told me.) The writers were then ushered into a conference room, where they sat around a wood-colored table for an hour and listened to Andreessen pitch jokes to them.

“They’re not bad jokes.” One of the writers confided to me, “I took eight pages of notes in that meeting. I’ve never heard anyone talk so fast.” While none of Andreessen’s jokes actually made it into the show verbatim, one concept he explained evolved into a scene in season 2. The venture capitalist is a young woman, and the conversation begins when she interrupts Richard while he is using the bathroom.

During a visit to Google’s Mountain View headquarters, about a half-dozen screenwriters sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, head of Google X. Teller wore a knuckle ring and tied his long hair into a ponytail. “Most of our field trips are fun, but this one was uncomfortable.” Kemper told me. GoogleX is Google’s moonshot, dedicated to projects as difficult to pull off as driverless cars that could have a big impact.

Hooli, the billion-dollar company in the show, bears a strange resemblance to Google. “We want to do more and have a bigger impact in the world,” Larry Page, Google’s founder, told Forbes magazine. In season 2, Hooli’s CEO says, “I don’t want to live in a place where there are people who can better the world than we can.” )

Last season, Hooli announced his own moonshot, Project Hooli XYZ, with its ridiculous experiments: monkeys with bionic hand lifts, powerful cannons that can shoot potatoes across the room. “He (Teller) said he hadn’t seen Silicon Valley, but he mentioned many details about what happened in the show.” “The subtext was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here,'” Kemper said. What we do is really going to change the world, whether you want to laugh at us or not. ‘” (He couldn’t be reached for comment.)

Angry, Teller ended the meeting by standing up, but because he was on roller skates, he wasn’t able to make the dramatic exit he wanted. He staggered to the door without saying a word. “It was an awkward moment. He fumbled for his ID card to open the door.” “It felt like an hour,” Kemper said. We all tried hard not to laugh. Even with all this going on, I know we’re all thinking the same thing: Can we put this in the show?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too trite to use.”

In a 1991 interview with the Paris Review, Tom Wolfe discussed his satirical novel the Bonfire of the Vanities. He wanted to write a book that would capture the latest wave of history — “New York in the mania for money,” as he put it — and he felt that the only genre that could sustain his ambition was observation-based Zola realism. He visited temporary shelters and interviewed prosecutors and former inmates. “I do not think that the imagination of one writer, whoever he may be, can compare with the results obtained through research and reports.” He said.

Dave Eggers used a completely fictional approach to depicting his south Bay in The middle of a tech frenzy in his 2013 novel The Circle. “I’ve never been to any tech company, and I don’t really know how a company works.” “I really don’t want to know,” he told Time magazine.

Mr Wolfe’s book is full of details, such as a brass ornament in a Wall Street office, the “mint look” of a vodka cocktail; Eggers can only guess what kind of party a tech company employee might throw for his colleagues (brunch for people interested in Portugal?). “The result is a cautionary dystopian tale, more like a fanatical dream than a prophecy.

Eggers apparently thought he could criticize the Internet with his own imagination. But the Internet disagrees. According to Felix Salmon, “Eggers deviates so far from reality that his book doesn’t feel like a satire.” “Eggers satirized the tech world in nearly 500 pages, but he himself seemed uninterested in the real world,” Jessica Winter wrote.

In 2014, Judge attended the Code Conference organized by Swisher. The following year, the conference appeared in silicon Valley in some form. Swisher played herself and interviewed Hooli CEO Gavin Belson. Belson, the show’s chief “villain,” is an integrated character — he has Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and others in him. In the scene Swisher interviews, he rebutts accusations of elitism against tech tycoons.

“Look at history,” he said. “Who else do you know who has slandered a small group of financiers and progressive thinkers called” Jews “?” The irony of the play is almost a direct reference to reality. In 2014, the Wall Street Journal published a letter from Tom Perkins, a billionaire venture capitalist and founding partner of KLEiner Perkins, a veteran Silicon Valley venture capital fund: “I am writing from San Francisco, the epicenter of progressive thought. I ask you to draw attention to the parallels between Nazi Germany’s war against her ‘one percent’ — the Jews — and the current struggle against the ‘rich’ class of the one percent in the United States.” If Belson and Perkins are really any different, the former’s outburst is at least more tasteful.

Sometimes all it takes to weave a real event into a virtual creation is to turn a news headline into a funny meme. The reverse is also true: Like all good satirists, the writers of “Silicon Valley” occasionally try to dramatise reality, only to have something similar happen later in life.

In the pilot, a straight male coder creates an app called “Boob Alarm” that helps users find the nearest “bump girl.” “When I read this, I thought, does this seem like a real thing, or is it a silly joke at best?” Berg said. Before the pilot episode aired, two worthy entrepreneurs launched Watch Boobs — “an app that takes selfies while users stare at boobs.”

In a recent episode, Gavin Belson asks a lawyer to come up with a new legal strategy to silence a blogger who says bad things about him. Given the timing, this is unlikely to be a reaction to provocative venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s legal maneuverings against Gawker, but it certainly looks like it.

In season 1, the show’s most direct portrayal of a real person, Thiel was slightly fictionalized as Peter Gregory, a smart but socially awkward investor. “I’m pretty sure he was offended because anything offends him.” “You can’t imagine how thin-skinned some people are,” Swisher said.

But then Mr. Thiel invited some of the cast members to a party he was throwing in Los Angeles and graciously hosted them. “We were surprised when he said he loved the show.” One of the producers told me, “He’s not as awkward as we always thought.” Maybe Thiel really likes the show; Maybe he just wants to prove he can take a joke, even if he can’t. Perhaps, having calculated that it would be hard to bring HBO down, he should befriend the enemy. Or maybe it’s like any other relationship in Silicon Valley: half personal, half business; Half frankly, half exchange interests; Half carrot, half stick.

Roger McNamee, a successful tech investor since the 1980s, told me, “When I first met Mike, I asked him, ‘What the hell are you doing? ‘And he said,’ I think Silicon Valley faces a serious conflict between the hippie values of Steve jobs’s generation and the Liberal values of Peter Thiel’s generation. ‘I’ve never been able to tell it better myself — I’ve been there!”

McNamee recently stepped down from his last venture fund, which he co-founded with Bono; Most days now, he Tours the country with his two improvisational bands, Moonalice and the Doobie Decibel System.

“In fact, some of us, childish as it sounds, are here to make the world a better place,” he continued. But we didn’t make it. We improved some things and screwed up others. Liberals, meanwhile, took up the fight; They don’t care whether they’re right or wrong. They’re here to make money.”

In an upcoming episode, McNamee’s name comes up in a monologue about a competitive funding round. I happened to be there when the scene was shot. T. J. Miller, the actor performing the piece, had to stop several times for mispronouncing “McNamee” or “Vinod Khosla.”

“Are they real, or are you fucking kidding me?” Miller asked one screenwriter. By the sixth attempt, he had come up with a decent name: “I talked to McMeenan Bartman Associates. Then Jim Goebbels called and I hung up and left him on voicemail.”

After the scene was shot, Miller walked back to his trailer room and used a steam respirator to soothe his voice. “I’m connected to the tech world in a weird way now because of this role.” “You never know how they’re going to react,” Miller said. By satirizing them, you’re holding up a mirror. Some people look in the mirror and say, ‘Fuck, we look stupid. ‘And other people look in the mirror and say,’ Wow, I look fucking good. ‘”

Miller plays Erlich Bachman, a pot-smoking, comically bearded blowhard who turns his Silicon Valley house into a tech incubator. Because Richard started Pied Piper while living in his house, Erlich does little to get a small stake and a board seat. “A lot of people tell me, ‘I’m the Erlich of our company. ‘” Miller continued, “and I tell them,’ You know this isn’t a good thing, right? ‘”

“Silicon Valley” premiered in 2014 in Redwood City, Calif. Tech celebrities were in attendance. At the after-party, when a waiter served up a tray of hors d ‘oeuvres, Elon Musk made a negative comment to a group that included a Recode reporter:

“Most startups are soap operas, but not like this.”

As one of the “Silicon Valley” writers later told me, “The more self-righteous these people are, the more likely they are to overlook the difference between a sitcom about their lives and a documentary.” But the writers seem to want it both ways: when they get it right, they brag about how realistic the show is; When not, they laugh at anyone who mistakes comedy for fact.

“Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley don’t know how to respond to the show.” “They couldn’t decide whether to be offended or flattered,” Miller told me. And they wonder why actors have the fame they never could have — there’s no reason, but it’s true. It’s killing them.”

Miller met Musk at a victory party in Redwood City. “I think he was shocked that I didn’t kiss his ass — and I certainly couldn’t because I didn’t realize who he was. He said, ‘I have some suggestions for your series. ‘AND I said,’ No thanks, we don’t need any advice. ‘He was even more shocked. And while we were talking, a female fan came up and said, ‘Can I take a picture with you? ‘And Musk starts to pose — which is sad, to be honest — but she hands him the camera and starts to pose with me. It’s like, sorry man, I know you’re the star — and, in this case, he is the star — but I’m the actor in the 3D Yogi Bear movie, and apparently I’m the one she wants the photo taken with.”

The three largest publicly traded companies in the world by market capitalization are Apple, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and Microsoft. Are they enlightened spokesmen of philanthrocapitalism or monopolistic giants? “In the real Silicon Valley, as in the show, there are people who are really ambitious and think they are going to change the world; There are also people who say they have a lot of hype about their app but clearly don’t believe it.” Sam Altman, the head of Y Combinator, an incubator, told me.

“Silicon Valley” captures this complexity well, because its producers — like all thinking people, including the most powerful in the valley — aren’t sure how they feel about Silicon Valley. “I’m wavering.” “The more I deal with these people and the more I learn about them, the more I realize that despite all the bullshit and greed, there’s something really exciting and hopeful here.”

In an upcoming episode, Pied Piper’s sales department commissions an AD agency to create a boaxed but empty AD. “Anyone can sit at the table.” The narrator says, “Tables are meant to help people gather and share. That’s why tables are like Piped Piper.”

Around the time the scene was filmed, Uber released an AD with a similar tone: “Atoms. Born 13.8 billion years ago, it makes up everything from BLT sandwiches to all mothers to New York City. Until just a few years ago, atoms and bits existed in completely different worlds. However, something happened. At Uber, we asked, what if we combined these two worlds?”

During a break from filming, Thomas Middleditch, who plays Richard Hendricks, and Zach Woods, who plays Pied Piper’s soft-hearted CFO, watched an Uber AD on their phones together and laughed invisibly. Woods sat down next to Tarver and Dan O ‘Keefe. O ‘Keefe was sitting in a canvas director’s chair, watching a set of video monitors. Woods showed them the Uber AD and asked, “Did you make that up?”

“Actually, it didn’t come out until after we wrote that episode.” “We were thinking of another one, a Facebook AD,” Tarver said.

“The Facebook one uses a chair.” O ‘said Keefe.

“Really,” Woods said. “Really?”

“All the big companies are doing it now.” “It reminds me of those early ads for Viagra,” Tarver said. “They wanted to be as vague as possible because they were ashamed of it.”

“I think it’s a combination of these people’s affectation and their high market penetration.” “Since everyone is using it, they don’t have to tell you what it does,” O ‘Keefe says. The purpose of advertising now is to make you feel better when you use it.”

Woods and Middleditch were called back to prepare for the next shot. “I’ve been told that in some large companies, the PR department has ordered employees not to say ‘we’re making the world a better place,’ mainly because we mock it mercilessly,” Tarver says. So I guess at least we’ve made the world a better place by getting people to stop claiming they’re making the world a better place.”

This article was originally published in The New Yorker.