HBO’s Silicon Valley: A project44 Story

HBO’s hit show, Silicon Valley, is a delightfully poignant, accurate satire of American startup culture. It does a fantastic job of parodying some of the goofier aspects of young technology companies which still maintaining the value and incredible possibilities in a great idea and its execution. This season, however, some of us at project44 have started to notice something. The events happening on Silicon Valley are starting to hit pretty close to home. Have a look at some of the similarities… (This blog contains minor spoilers for Season 5 of Silicon Valley.)

Office Space

startup office space

Silicon Valley’s Season 5 begins with the team growing rapidly and needing to find new office space as soon as they can. While Pied Piper CEO, Richard Hendricks, considers purchasing space in a fluorescent lit, windowless room, they ultimately settle for a much more comfortable space.

growing pains

As many growing startups can attest, once things gain momentum you have to hire faster than you can find space for new team members. p44 has more than doubled in the last year alone, and while we love our current space, you can probably see things are getting a little bit… crowded. Lucky for us, we’re headed to a new office very soon, complete with windows, natural lighting, and plenty of other awesome features as well.

Radical Candor

While the characters in Silicon Valley may have somewhat missed the mark on the principles of Radical Candor, it’s still a popular book among business professionals right now, and for good reason. We weren’t surprised to see it on the show, considering how many copies of the book are currently sitting in our company library.

radical candor

The Search for a COO

On the show, Richard Hendricks is introduced to Radical Candor during his search for a new COO. Oddly enough, project44 recently began searching for a full-time COO as well. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley favorite, Jared, is unavailable having just accepted the position at Pied Piper.

silicon valley resumes

Bloomberg TV Talks Supply Chain Visibility

silicon valley bloomberg tv

Richard and Jared go on Bloomberg TV to talk about the exciting projects their company is working on. Richard basically bombs, but luckily Jared is able to pull everything together, and the TV spot ends up being a breakthrough moment for Pied Piper. You can probably tell where this is going… Just last month, project44 Founder and CEO, Jett McCandless, went on Bloomberg TV to talk about what we’re working on. We like to think it went just a little bit better than Richard’s appearance.

bloomberg tv

Well written satire, by definition, is rooted in quite a bit of truth. We’re happy to share some of the growing pains that Pied Piper experiences on the show, but we’re more happy to share their successes. For example, in Silicon Valley’s most recent episode, they receive a term sheet for their Series B round. Granted their round came after their VC group scrapped an ambitious AI project and almost went broke, a foreign market company attempted to copy Pied Piper’s idea, and they ultimately decide on doing an ICO. Despite our last year being relatively smooth sailing, we also received more funding last month, but don’t expect us to drop an ICO anytime soon, despite the potential our technology has to integrate with blockchain. It’s hard to say what will become of Pied Piper on the show, but we’re extremely excited about our direction.