Tue, 23 Apr, 2024

Series Review : Silicon Valley

By Ashish Bikram Lamichane

Photo Courtesy : http://www.marketwatch.com/

Silicon Valley is an American TV series created by Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky. It is about the world of  technology. It teaches  how one struggles when he /she creates a tech product and tries to implement it into the market. It also shows how a developer is used as a punching bag by the billionaires.

Silicon Valley has two seasons released. First season contains 8 episodes and second season contains 10.

The first season begins with, Richard Hendricks who is a programmer and works at a large Internet company called Hooli. He is also developing a music application called Pied Piper. After a rocky post-TED elevator pitch of Pied Piper to venture capitalist Peter Gregory, Hendricks also shows his work to a pair of programmers at Hooli who mock him. Within an hour, Peter Gergory and Gregory's assistant Monica discover that the app contains a revolutionary data compression algorithm. Hooli CEO Gavin Belson proposes to buy the app for$ 4 million, whereas Peter Gregory offers a $200,000 investment for 5% ownership in the company which led Gavin to increase his offer to $10 million. He chooses Peter’s offer . Then he hires the residents of the incubator, except for his friend Nelson to become the Pied Piper team, along with Dunn, who gets fired from Hooli. The Hooli team works to reverse engineer Pied Piper's algorithm  and develops a copycat product called Nucleus. The rest is how the Nucleus created trouble for the development of the Pied Piper and the competition between Nucleus and Pied piper in TechCrunch event and how the team wins over the Nucleus.

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In the second season, multiple venture capital firms offer to finance  Pied Piper but criticize  Hendricks’ lack of perceived direction. Bachman insists that this is a strategy to lower Pied Piper's valuation and he responds by insulting the VC firm. One Company called End Frame tries to steal the algorithm. Peter Gregory dies during holiday and is replaced by Laurie Bream to run Raviga Capital. On  Peter Gregory's funeral Richard finds out Hooli is suing Pied Piper for copyright infringement, claiming that Richard developed Pied Piper's compression algorithm on Hooli time using company equipment. Due to the lawsuit Raviga cancels her offer and other companies rejects to invest. The rest of the story how Richard nearly sells the Pied Piper to Hooli and Russ Hanneman (a man who put radio on the Internet ) saves him from selling the company. The other stories of the series you need to watch yourself to know.

As a part of the technology field, it helps the students understand the technological world. We should be clever about whom to trust. It tells us there are many people who want to steal our idea and make it their own. So if we want to implement new idea in this world we should be clever.