One of the more impressive aspects of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” is that the show managed to be incredibly funny with a premise that, at first glance, doesn’t exactly seem ripe for comedy. The show centers on a ragtag group of friends who form a tech startup and try to navigate the intricacies and politics of Silicon Valley. It doesn’t have the traditional trappings of a laugh out loud comedy series, but thanks to brilliant casting and sharp comedic writing, the show remains one of the best TV comedies of the last decade.
A driving force behind the show’s popularity is that it managed to be funny while also providing a realistic portrayal of startup culture in Silicon Valley. In fact, the show resonated so heavily with the tech community that Bill Gates, a few years ago, wrote a blog post arguing that if you “really want to understand how Silicon Valley works today,” you have to watch the show.
Gates’ blog post was mostly a glowing review of the show, but the Microsoft co-founder did have one specific gripe. Specifically, Gates writes that the show’s depiction of Hooli was perhaps too exaggerated. In the show, Hooli is largely believed to be a comedic spoof of Google. The company is depicted as being a bit out of touch and lacking in vision, creativity, and engineering prowess.
And this is where Gates takes a minor issue with the show.
“‘Silicon Valley’ gives you the impression that small companies like Pied Piper are mostly capable while big companies like Hooli are mostly inept,” Gates writes. “Although I’m obviously biased, my experience is that small companies can be just as inept, and the big ones have the resources to invest in deep research and take a long-term point of view that smaller ones can’t afford.”
The secret behind Silicon Valley’s success
For anyone who closely follows comedy, the success “Silicon Valley” enjoyed didn’t come as much of a surprise. After all, the show was the brainchild of Mike Judge, a Hollywood creative with about as successful a track record as anyone. Not only was Judge the creative force behind MTV’s iconic “Beavis and Butt-Head” series, he also created “King of the Hill”, “Office Space”, and “Idiocracy.” Suffice it to say, when Judge throws his full weight behind a project, his success rate is wildly impressive. What’s more, Judge also had a stint as a writer at “Saturday Night Live” in the late 90s.
Equally as important, however, is that Judge himself was very familiar with startup culture. Interestingly, Judge has a degree in physics and spent some time working at various startups in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s, including a video graphics card company called Parallax Graphics.
“Aside from living there in the late ’80s, my ex-wife worked in the tech world and is from Palo Alto,” Judge said in an NPR interview a few years ago. “So I know the area that well.”
In bringing the show to life, Judge also said that he toured Google and talked to engineers in incubators and various startups in an effort to find “stories anywhere we could.” Beyond that, the show’s creators made a point to consult with industry heavyweights, including Bill Gates himself, to ensure the series delivered an accurate portrayal of startup culture in Silicon Valley.
