Silicon Valley (2014) s01e00 Episode Script
Making Silicon Valley
1 Man: For thousands of years guys like us have gotten the shit kicked out of us.
But now, for the first time, we are living in an era where we can be the vikings of our day.
Are you going to help me with this or not? You turned down $10 million to be able to develop something you can't even describe to another human being.
I say this only to motivate you.
Oh man, look at this place.
Save your childishness.
There's 40 billion of net worth walking around this party.
Cut.
I was interested in doing a show about Silicon Valley because I lived there and worked there as an engineer.
The world's very interesting to me.
I just knew a lot of these types.
They always travel in groups of five, these programmers.
There's always a tall, skinny white guy.
Short, skinny Asian guy.
Fat guy with a ponytail.
Some guy with crazy facial hair.
And then an East Indian guy.
It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group.
You clearly have a great understanding of humanity.
Judge: Same kind of personalities now.
I think there's more money, which makes it more interesting.
We start out in the series as Richard & Co.
, or just co-nerds trying to figure it all out.
There's money flying all over Silicon Valley, but none of it ever seems to hit us.
Richard is a humble employee at Hooli and he doesn't like it.
He wants more.
Richard has been developing a music app, but buried in the heart of that music app is this kind of kernel of genius.
Do you even realize the impact that a compression this good could have on the world? This is game changing.
I'm prepared to give you $200,000.
Six hundred thousand for - ten percent of your company.
- Ten million! I will take a small piece but the company will belong to you, not Gavin Belson.
- Um, you know - Pull your head out of your ass, Richard.
Richard is lured by the notion of being in complete control of his own destiny and ends up going with the rock and roll Peter Gregory.
My first official purchase as CEO of Pied Piper.
That's not really our logo, is it? It looks like a guy sucking a dick and he's got another dick tucked behind his ear for later.
It's like a snack dick.
The show is basically a how-to in starting your own business and doing it the wrong way.
Doing it the wrong way.
We're terrible at it.
Erlich is a guy who he had this company Aviato.
Sold Aviato for a few million and was able to buy this house.
And now I've become kind of the smallest, most pathetic version of a venture capitalist.
He owns and administers the house that these guys all live in.
The Hacker Hostel.
Miller: I let people stay at the house for free, and then I own 10% of the company.
Gavin Belson likes Pied Piper.
I own 10% of Pied Piper.
You said it was a shitty idea.
It was a shitty idea.
I'm not sure what it is now.
He's a talker and he's charming, so he can smoothly talk his way into pretty much any situation, including on-stage during a Flo Rida concert.
Look at Erlich.
See, that's what I wish I had.
It's like I don't have any, um Game.
Game.
Yes! That's it.
Gilfoyle, in a way, is kind of a quintessential programmer type.
He's a satanist.
Which is basically just he likes to party and have fun.
Sin is a thing of beauty.
What's with the cross? It's an upside down cross.
Not from here it isn't.
We have a rivalry, so we're arguing about who the better programmer is.
I just want to say that I feel I should get more equity than Dinesh.
Whatever equity I get, it should reflect that I contribute more than Gilfoyle.
Big Head is Richard's best friend.
Man: He's sort of a happy go lucky kind of hapless person who freely admits that he's not as good at coding as Richard.
What if Big Head is sort of like, uh, a floating utility player? Kind of like a Jack of all trades.
But by his own admission he's really more like a master of none.
That's true.
That is true.
When Richard is sort of taking ownership of this company, he needs to let Big Head know that Big Head is really non-essential personnel.
So this is goodbye then.
It's one of the first kind of difficult choices that Richard has to make as the CEO of this new company.
Gavin Belson just offered me a job for 600 grand a year.
What? Yeah, for revenge.
So you're like, the VP of spite? I play Gavin Belson who is the CEO and founder of Hooli.
He wants to buy and crush Richard Hendricks.
I hate Richard Hendricks, that little Pied Piper prick.
Is that wrong? Gavin is sort of in the mold of one of these guys who has accomplished so much, they think they can do anything.
He's the least cool guy I've ever met.
Jared's a guy who's second in command to Gavin Belson, and he defects from Hooli to join this pirate ship of young tech guys.
Hey.
Sorry if I scared you.
I know I have some like ghost-like features.
My uncle used to say, "you look like someone starved a virgin to death.
" Jared just happily takes the shape of whatever shoe is pressing down on him.
His strength would be his meticulousness and his material feelings.
From rules based filtering we go to workflow.
At which point that card is moved from the icebox into the in progress column and it stays there until it is ready for testing.
And that, gentlemen, is scrum.
This just became a job.
Gavin Belson is spurned by Richard in favour of Peter Gregory who promises Richard he will help Richard find his way.
Man: He's this weirdo, eccentric billionaire who can't talk to people, and yet has that vision that can see just beyond the horizon.
(Gagging) Hi.
Monica.
I work with Peter Gregory.
My character is kind of the right hand woman for Peter Gregory.
She's independent, she's strong, and she holds her own in this world that is dominated by men.
She's part of the 2% women that there are in the tech world.
Crew: I was a little nervous working with all of these amazing comedians.
They've been nothing but so welcoming and sweet to me, and I feel like I'm one of the guys.
Grow a pair and talk to her.
Find out for sure.
Why don't you grow a pair and I'll talk to her.
Judge: The cast in this is really great.
Man: These guys are all young, really talented improv comedy guys.
They're really good at playing off each other.
We just kind of wrote to that.
One of the cools things about the show is that we all knew each other in some capacity.
In real life we're very similar.
Miller: I mean, they're actually legitimate nerds.
I don't know.
Are you similar? No.
(Laughs) Miller: In real life I'm kind of the least nerdy guy.
I think I'm the only person that's been in a fight.
Many times Mr.
Michael Judge will see what we're doing, which is like, playing video games or playing some other obscenely nerdy thing and he'll just go, "huh.
Man, art imitates life.
" He's super annoying because not only is he like, obviously a comic genius, he's also like, a sick upright bassist.
The one thing I did remark when I first met him is he's handsome.
He's got a strong jaw line.
He has really beautiful eyes.
Oh yeah.
Handsome fella.
He's going to see this.
It's going to be weird.
Miller: He sounds exactly like butt-head from Beavis and Butt-head.
I don't know if he knows the guy or he used to watch that growing up a lot or what.
Well, Mike Judge does have actual street cred as an engineering nerd.
I never really knew the distinction between nerds and geeks, and it's changed over the years.
People nerd out on what is defined as nerd versus geek.
Geeks to me are so they kind of geek out on certain stuff.
Geek is like, a guy who like, has adult braces and gets in your not there's anything wrong with adult braces, but like, I feel like he has like, elective adult braces.
Geeks obviously have some sort of traumatic past Big Head's a nerd.
Gilfoyle's the geek.
Dinesh is a nerd.
Uh, and Erlich is a drug addict.
Erlich: I'm making the world a better place.
Making the world a better place.
Making the world a better place.
Making the world a better place.
Making the world a better place.
Sir! Are you okay in there? There are these kind of characters who if they were born 300 years ago, would not be the richest people in the world.
And now you have these guys with billions of dollars and they're still the same kind of socially awkward types.
They just don't quite know how to have fun with it.
That is a narrow car.
Fucking billionaires.
It's the Hollywood of tech.
Whooo! Man: What a dick.
It's weird.
It's like it's not enough that they're making billions of dollars, they also have to be always talking about how they're making the world a better place.
You know, we're making a lot of money.
And yes, we're disrupting digital media.
But most importantly we're making the world a better place through constructing elegant class hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility.
Yeah! You do not have to know anything about tech to get the humour of the show.
When our guys are talking about tech, we try and always attach it to some sort of an emotion where even if you don't understand what they're saying, you understand the thought behind it.
O'Keeffe: Mike and Alec Berg really pulled out all the stops with multiple researchers and consultants to make sure that this all reflects the reality of the world we're trying to portray.
Because, you know, we really, really want to get it right.
I think we have.
At some point I want to make sure it's all accurate and real and then after that it probably just goes in one ear and out the other for me.
What we've recreated in the other room is an exact replica of a real conference, TechCrunch Disrupt.
It's a bunch of venders or a bunch of start-up companies that all come together and they pitch their wares in the hopes of winning TechCrunch.
Crew: They have to present their app, and fingers crossed it works.
And if it does, it's game changing for all of them.
And if it doesn't, they're screwed.
We learned about all these companies.
We learned about what TechCrunch was and in very many ways we really learned a lot about the depth of the tech industry.
We've recruited a lot of the companies that were actually present at the real TechCrunch.
So a lot of the companies that have booths here, they're kind of peddling their wares, are real companies.
So many companies.
So many names.
Any combination of letters are already taken.
What about smaller? Because then that's an even smaller version of the word smaller.
So that it looks like smiler.
We're not going to kick the shit out of nucleus with smiler.
Kwerpy.
Yeah, there's a kwerpy.
You gotta spell it with a "k".
You can't clear anything.
The name defines the company.
It has to be something primal.
Something that you can scream out during intercourse.
Pied Piper! Ugh.
Ross: I think Silicon Valley, the show, is very much about making your way in the world and the choices you make, presented in a comedic fashion, but under the very intense fire of everything that's happening in Silicon Valley right now.
It's just cool to see, you know, what that breathes in people when like, literally from one day to the next you could become a multi, multi millionaire.
O'Keeffe: But it's in a world that I don't think people have seen a lot of on television, so it's interesting.
What Mike and Alec have really brought to this is a relatability of guys and friendship and sort of normal people, but set in this world with these heightened stakes, and that part of it is universal.
But now, for the first time, we are living in an era where we can be the vikings of our day.
Are you going to help me with this or not? You turned down $10 million to be able to develop something you can't even describe to another human being.
I say this only to motivate you.
Oh man, look at this place.
Save your childishness.
There's 40 billion of net worth walking around this party.
Cut.
I was interested in doing a show about Silicon Valley because I lived there and worked there as an engineer.
The world's very interesting to me.
I just knew a lot of these types.
They always travel in groups of five, these programmers.
There's always a tall, skinny white guy.
Short, skinny Asian guy.
Fat guy with a ponytail.
Some guy with crazy facial hair.
And then an East Indian guy.
It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group.
You clearly have a great understanding of humanity.
Judge: Same kind of personalities now.
I think there's more money, which makes it more interesting.
We start out in the series as Richard & Co.
, or just co-nerds trying to figure it all out.
There's money flying all over Silicon Valley, but none of it ever seems to hit us.
Richard is a humble employee at Hooli and he doesn't like it.
He wants more.
Richard has been developing a music app, but buried in the heart of that music app is this kind of kernel of genius.
Do you even realize the impact that a compression this good could have on the world? This is game changing.
I'm prepared to give you $200,000.
Six hundred thousand for - ten percent of your company.
- Ten million! I will take a small piece but the company will belong to you, not Gavin Belson.
- Um, you know - Pull your head out of your ass, Richard.
Richard is lured by the notion of being in complete control of his own destiny and ends up going with the rock and roll Peter Gregory.
My first official purchase as CEO of Pied Piper.
That's not really our logo, is it? It looks like a guy sucking a dick and he's got another dick tucked behind his ear for later.
It's like a snack dick.
The show is basically a how-to in starting your own business and doing it the wrong way.
Doing it the wrong way.
We're terrible at it.
Erlich is a guy who he had this company Aviato.
Sold Aviato for a few million and was able to buy this house.
And now I've become kind of the smallest, most pathetic version of a venture capitalist.
He owns and administers the house that these guys all live in.
The Hacker Hostel.
Miller: I let people stay at the house for free, and then I own 10% of the company.
Gavin Belson likes Pied Piper.
I own 10% of Pied Piper.
You said it was a shitty idea.
It was a shitty idea.
I'm not sure what it is now.
He's a talker and he's charming, so he can smoothly talk his way into pretty much any situation, including on-stage during a Flo Rida concert.
Look at Erlich.
See, that's what I wish I had.
It's like I don't have any, um Game.
Game.
Yes! That's it.
Gilfoyle, in a way, is kind of a quintessential programmer type.
He's a satanist.
Which is basically just he likes to party and have fun.
Sin is a thing of beauty.
What's with the cross? It's an upside down cross.
Not from here it isn't.
We have a rivalry, so we're arguing about who the better programmer is.
I just want to say that I feel I should get more equity than Dinesh.
Whatever equity I get, it should reflect that I contribute more than Gilfoyle.
Big Head is Richard's best friend.
Man: He's sort of a happy go lucky kind of hapless person who freely admits that he's not as good at coding as Richard.
What if Big Head is sort of like, uh, a floating utility player? Kind of like a Jack of all trades.
But by his own admission he's really more like a master of none.
That's true.
That is true.
When Richard is sort of taking ownership of this company, he needs to let Big Head know that Big Head is really non-essential personnel.
So this is goodbye then.
It's one of the first kind of difficult choices that Richard has to make as the CEO of this new company.
Gavin Belson just offered me a job for 600 grand a year.
What? Yeah, for revenge.
So you're like, the VP of spite? I play Gavin Belson who is the CEO and founder of Hooli.
He wants to buy and crush Richard Hendricks.
I hate Richard Hendricks, that little Pied Piper prick.
Is that wrong? Gavin is sort of in the mold of one of these guys who has accomplished so much, they think they can do anything.
He's the least cool guy I've ever met.
Jared's a guy who's second in command to Gavin Belson, and he defects from Hooli to join this pirate ship of young tech guys.
Hey.
Sorry if I scared you.
I know I have some like ghost-like features.
My uncle used to say, "you look like someone starved a virgin to death.
" Jared just happily takes the shape of whatever shoe is pressing down on him.
His strength would be his meticulousness and his material feelings.
From rules based filtering we go to workflow.
At which point that card is moved from the icebox into the in progress column and it stays there until it is ready for testing.
And that, gentlemen, is scrum.
This just became a job.
Gavin Belson is spurned by Richard in favour of Peter Gregory who promises Richard he will help Richard find his way.
Man: He's this weirdo, eccentric billionaire who can't talk to people, and yet has that vision that can see just beyond the horizon.
(Gagging) Hi.
Monica.
I work with Peter Gregory.
My character is kind of the right hand woman for Peter Gregory.
She's independent, she's strong, and she holds her own in this world that is dominated by men.
She's part of the 2% women that there are in the tech world.
Crew: I was a little nervous working with all of these amazing comedians.
They've been nothing but so welcoming and sweet to me, and I feel like I'm one of the guys.
Grow a pair and talk to her.
Find out for sure.
Why don't you grow a pair and I'll talk to her.
Judge: The cast in this is really great.
Man: These guys are all young, really talented improv comedy guys.
They're really good at playing off each other.
We just kind of wrote to that.
One of the cools things about the show is that we all knew each other in some capacity.
In real life we're very similar.
Miller: I mean, they're actually legitimate nerds.
I don't know.
Are you similar? No.
(Laughs) Miller: In real life I'm kind of the least nerdy guy.
I think I'm the only person that's been in a fight.
Many times Mr.
Michael Judge will see what we're doing, which is like, playing video games or playing some other obscenely nerdy thing and he'll just go, "huh.
Man, art imitates life.
" He's super annoying because not only is he like, obviously a comic genius, he's also like, a sick upright bassist.
The one thing I did remark when I first met him is he's handsome.
He's got a strong jaw line.
He has really beautiful eyes.
Oh yeah.
Handsome fella.
He's going to see this.
It's going to be weird.
Miller: He sounds exactly like butt-head from Beavis and Butt-head.
I don't know if he knows the guy or he used to watch that growing up a lot or what.
Well, Mike Judge does have actual street cred as an engineering nerd.
I never really knew the distinction between nerds and geeks, and it's changed over the years.
People nerd out on what is defined as nerd versus geek.
Geeks to me are so they kind of geek out on certain stuff.
Geek is like, a guy who like, has adult braces and gets in your not there's anything wrong with adult braces, but like, I feel like he has like, elective adult braces.
Geeks obviously have some sort of traumatic past Big Head's a nerd.
Gilfoyle's the geek.
Dinesh is a nerd.
Uh, and Erlich is a drug addict.
Erlich: I'm making the world a better place.
Making the world a better place.
Making the world a better place.
Making the world a better place.
Making the world a better place.
Sir! Are you okay in there? There are these kind of characters who if they were born 300 years ago, would not be the richest people in the world.
And now you have these guys with billions of dollars and they're still the same kind of socially awkward types.
They just don't quite know how to have fun with it.
That is a narrow car.
Fucking billionaires.
It's the Hollywood of tech.
Whooo! Man: What a dick.
It's weird.
It's like it's not enough that they're making billions of dollars, they also have to be always talking about how they're making the world a better place.
You know, we're making a lot of money.
And yes, we're disrupting digital media.
But most importantly we're making the world a better place through constructing elegant class hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility.
Yeah! You do not have to know anything about tech to get the humour of the show.
When our guys are talking about tech, we try and always attach it to some sort of an emotion where even if you don't understand what they're saying, you understand the thought behind it.
O'Keeffe: Mike and Alec Berg really pulled out all the stops with multiple researchers and consultants to make sure that this all reflects the reality of the world we're trying to portray.
Because, you know, we really, really want to get it right.
I think we have.
At some point I want to make sure it's all accurate and real and then after that it probably just goes in one ear and out the other for me.
What we've recreated in the other room is an exact replica of a real conference, TechCrunch Disrupt.
It's a bunch of venders or a bunch of start-up companies that all come together and they pitch their wares in the hopes of winning TechCrunch.
Crew: They have to present their app, and fingers crossed it works.
And if it does, it's game changing for all of them.
And if it doesn't, they're screwed.
We learned about all these companies.
We learned about what TechCrunch was and in very many ways we really learned a lot about the depth of the tech industry.
We've recruited a lot of the companies that were actually present at the real TechCrunch.
So a lot of the companies that have booths here, they're kind of peddling their wares, are real companies.
So many companies.
So many names.
Any combination of letters are already taken.
What about smaller? Because then that's an even smaller version of the word smaller.
So that it looks like smiler.
We're not going to kick the shit out of nucleus with smiler.
Kwerpy.
Yeah, there's a kwerpy.
You gotta spell it with a "k".
You can't clear anything.
The name defines the company.
It has to be something primal.
Something that you can scream out during intercourse.
Pied Piper! Ugh.
Ross: I think Silicon Valley, the show, is very much about making your way in the world and the choices you make, presented in a comedic fashion, but under the very intense fire of everything that's happening in Silicon Valley right now.
It's just cool to see, you know, what that breathes in people when like, literally from one day to the next you could become a multi, multi millionaire.
O'Keeffe: But it's in a world that I don't think people have seen a lot of on television, so it's interesting.
What Mike and Alec have really brought to this is a relatability of guys and friendship and sort of normal people, but set in this world with these heightened stakes, and that part of it is universal.