Silicon Valley

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Silicon Valley is a American Sitcom series created by Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, that aired for six seasons in HBO between 2014 and 2019. It revolves and parodies the culture of the Silicon Valley area, notorious for their informatic startups, idiosincratic geekery, and a level of greed comparable to the one of Wall Street..

The series revolves around Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), a programmer that creates a revolutionary app named Pied Paper, and his efforts to keep his startup functioning while facing multiple rivals, both corporate and personal.

Tropes used in Silicon Valley include:
  • A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: Big Head, to a T. Due to both Erlich's manipulation and his own inability to take anything seriously, Big Head quickly burns through the multimilllion dollar buyout package Hooli gives him. It turns out Big Head only spent about half his money, and his dad took the rest. The DA has little sympathy, though, pointing out they would have wasted it all in short order anyway.
  • Actually, That's My Assistant: When the group attempts to confront EndFrame for stealing middle-out compression, the receptionist assumes that Erlich is the CEO instead of Richard...and then thinks Richard's name is "Erlich Bachman" and that Erlich is "Richard Hendricks."
  • Ambiguous Disorder: Peter Gregory and his replacement Laurie Bream both have No Social Skills apparently due to some social disorder, possibly autism. They are both, however, highly successful tech investors. Richard also has shades of this, given his high-strung personality, insecurity, poor social skills and odd habits. Several characters actually think he has Asperger's, which he denies having.
  • Apologizes a Lot: Jared. He's constantly apologizing and very self-deprecating.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: Russ Hanneman's claim to inventing "radio on the internet." Sure, there are plenty of digital technologies that could be called radio on the internet (radio station streaming on the web, Pandora, etc.) but because of that the audience has no idea precisely what Russ made.
  • Artistic License: Biology: : In Season 5, when Dinesh and Jared go on Ludicrous mode in the former's Tesla, their cheeks pouch out from the high speed. However, people's faces do this at high speed only as a result of wind resistance, while the guys are behind a windshield. It just looks funny.
  • Bad Boss: Gavin Belson. While he presents himself as a magnanimous boss who wants to make the world a better place, he's really selfish, ruthless, and constantly tries to engineer situations so he benefits and the blame falls on others.
  • Bait and Switch:
    • The beginning of the first episode opens with Kid Rock at what appears to be a concert. It pulls out to show that he is actually playing at a party for a bunch of bored-looking programmers, thus setting the tone of the entire show.
    • One episode has Russ' accountant telling him some bad news due to bad investments. Russ tells Richard it's bad as he's no longer a billionaire. Instead, his net worth is now... $968 million. He, of course, treats the news like an announcement that he's poor.
    • Gavin announces that he's moving the company to Georgia to cut costs. Hoover and Denpok, not thrilled, attempt to make peace with the decision and start looking forward to Southern cooking and attending Freaknik, only for Gavin to clarify that he meant Georgia the country.
  • Batman Gambit: Gavin Belson sues Pied Piper for copyright infringement, knowing that even though he has no case, the pending lawsuit will scare away other investors and prevent Pied Piper from mounting an adequate legal defense. It appears to work until Russ Hanneman steps up.
  • Being Evil Sucks: Gavin's life is often shown to be rather sad and lonely. He needs to keep a sycophantic guru and a security officer around to tell him what to do. When he retires and opens the floor up for reactions, no one has anything to say. They don't even care enough to yell at him.
  • Berserk Button: Richard loses it every time someone uses spaces instead of tabs on a coding project. It causes him to leave his girlfriend.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: In Seasons 5 and 6, Extreme Doormat Jared shows that he might be a very bad guy to cross. He systematically terrorizes Richard's new assistant Holden and seems very comfortable threatening the life of a camper who yells at Dinesh.
  • Big Bad: Gavin Belson is consistently Pied Piper's most direct form of competition. He starts to fit into the role more traditionally as Pied Piper begins to overtake Hooli, causing him to become progressively more cartoonishly villainous and ineffectual.
  • Big in Japan: In-Universe. Pied Piper's video compression becomes especially popular in the Philippines after Manny Pacquiao tweets about it to his millions of followers.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Dinesh is a native Urdu speaker, like his actor Kumail Nanjiani, and he speaks it several times in the series. The funniest example is, by far, when he says the proper word for a "male dildo" to try to convince people to not download his Pakistani cousin's app.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The series ends with Pied Piper having to kill their product for the greater good, just as they were on the cusp of becoming billionaires. But the core characters are able to move on and find contentment in new ventures. They end the series reuniting at the old incubator and happily playing "Always Blue!" with their old Hoberman Switch Pitch.
  • Black Comedy: Happens very frequently, as it's the main genre the show falls in. Some iconic examples include Dinesh and Gilfoyle's "Let Blaine Die" SWOT board and Gavin's "penis logo."
  • Bland-Name Product:
    • The production team said that one of the hardest parts of character design was the company names. Nearly everything they came up with was taken. They settled on things like "Hooli" which sound like "Google" being twisted around a bit.
    • In Season 2, the guys stop by a porn conference and viewers are treated to fake names like "Non Consensual Santa" and "Poop on My Wife", reflecting Rule 34 and just how hard it must have been to find unclaimed names/fetishes.
  • Born Lucky: Big Head. No matter what, he fails upwards, constantly getting promoted, receiving an expensive severance package, and eventually becoming the president of Stanford University. All of these things simply happen to him.
  • Brick Joke: In Season 3, Gavin Belson speaks to five Hooli executives about the possibility of firing the 20% of Hooli employees are who underperforming. One of the five executives suddenly announces that he wasn't listening to what Gavin was saying, and the other members of the board glance meaningfully at each other. In the next board meeting, that executive's chair is empty.
  • Bunny Ears Lawyer:
    • While Richard has No Social Skills, he's still a brilliant programmer.
    • Ron LaFlamme, Pied Piper's corporate lawyer, is eccentric and super laid-back but still an excellent lawyer.
    • Pied Piper acquires the services of Pete Monahan, a litigator who'll work on contingency, during Gavin's lawsuit. We're led to believe he'll be comically incompetent, especially because Ron recommended him, but he's actually quite skilled and professional. The reason they got him for so cheap is that he was disbarred after a downward spiral of drugs, criminal activity and eventually prison. As stated, he's a perfectly capable litigator, except that he seemingly can't stop bringing up his Dark and Troubled Past at every opportunity.
  • The Bus Came Back:
    • Due to his popularity, Russ Hanneman pops in for a brief appearance in each season after the second, when Pied Piper severs their business association with him.
    • Despite being sent back to prison shortly after his debut, Pete Monahan proved popular enough to keep making occasional appearances in the third and fourth seasons.
  • Butt Monkey:
    • Most jokes involving Jared are about how incredibly pathetic his life is, staring with the fact that his name isn't even Jared (although it is his middle name), but he's too meek to insist that people use his real name.
    • Dinesh almost always gets the worst of his exchanges with Gilfoyle. Occasionally, this can lead to others piling onto him as well, as seen when even Jared starts piling on Dinesh during the episode in which he bought a gold chain necklace.
  • Call Back:
    • Big Head's Nip Alert app from the first episode is mentioned in court during the second season finale.
    • On Laurie's advice, Monica dresses "ugly" to ease the pain of the announcement that Raviga will be distancing itself from Pied Piper. Later, when she has to give a negative evaluation of Pied Piper's beta platform, she wears the exact same outfit. In season 4, Jared wears the same outfit.
    • Peter Gregory’s storage room at Raviga is full of callbacks, including sesame seeds, the self-driving car (which frightens Jared), and a photo of Peter Gregory and Gavin Belson when they were friends in their teenage years.
    • Richard's contempt of engineers who use spaces instead of tabs is brought to light in season 3. Later in season 4 Jared is terrified Richard is going to hire a vile old co-worker, but Richard assures him that he rejected him for using spaces.
    • In season 4 Richard and Erlich try to sell their new product to an insurance company, only to find that the CTO is the Techcrunch judge whose wives Erlich slept with, who is now engaged again. Erlich gets him to agree to buy their product by threatening to sleep with his third wife after his second divorces him. But then, Richard sleeps with her.
  • Character Development: Jian-Yang serves mostly as a clueless lackey to Erlich during the first few seasons. After Erlich leaves, however, Jian-Yang reveals himself to be a thoroughly ruthless opportunist who was just playing dumb.
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • The team having to resort to putting a livecam on a condor egg, which comes back in a quite unexpected way at the end of Season 2.
    • The "brain rape" meeting that set in motion the creation of EndFrame.
    • Season 3 is full of them, multiple things that seemed like one-off jokes end up becoming important, often saving the company from disaster at the last minute. These include Gavin ordering Hooli search to hide bad reviews, Gavin's tendency to use animals as props in board meetings, Erlich's reckless purchase of a tech blog, and Dinesh building a compression-based video chat system so he could flirt with a girl in Estonia.
    • In Season 4, Gilfoyle gets so annoyed by Jin Yiang's talking smart fridge that he spends the whole episode connecting it to the Pied Piper server so he can brute force the password and change the settings. At the end of the season, they find out that he also accidentally uploaded their decentralized data storage system onto a network of smart fridges, which saves the company when their cell phone-based system falls apart.
  • Comedic Sociopathy: Gilfoyle revels in the misfortunes of others, particularly Dinesh, to the point where he'll support things that would normally seem advantageous to others such as Dinesh being named CEO of Piper Chat, just to watch that person fail utterly.
  • The Comically Serious: Pete Monahan, Richard's lawyer, speaks in a matter-of-fact tone no matter the subject. He can rattle off a ridiculous list of criminal charges without ever changing his tone of voice.
  • Companion Cube: Gilfoyle names his server "Anton" (after Anton LaVey) and treats it like a person. Dinesh accuses him of having sex with it. He later names an AI "Son of Anton."
  • Conspicuous Consumption: Very common in Silicon Valley, both because of how many new millionaires the tech industry creates and how the culture of the industry is partially based on looking successful.
    • Discussed and displayed a number of times when successful entrepreneurs spend huge amounts of money on lavish parties to rub their success in the faces of rivals. The series opens on one such party, and Peter Gregory and Erlich both host later examples.
    • Russ Hanneman drives neon-colored supercars and wears expensive designer jeans covered in studs.
    • Gavin takes a trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, because he wants to take a walk and there's a nice trail near his house there. He runs into Jack Barker at the air strip and it turns out they're both going to the same place and coming back the next day. They agree to spend the flight playing chess online from their separate, private jets.
    • Jian-yang, after selling his app to Periscope, buys an obnoxiously fancy smart fridge simply so he can rub his success in Erlich's face.
  • Courtroom Episode: The second season's finale.
  • Crazy Prepared: Jared has various corporate management tools secreted throughout the house for whenever the growing Pied Piper needs to make a big decision.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
    • Jian-Yang is usually an idiot, but he occasionally manages to be quite savvy. When Erlich tries to kick him out, he hears Jared complain about California tenant laws and figures out how to exploit them. He also manages to steal Erlich's estate, including 10 percent of Piped Piper. Later, when a businessman offers to buy out his knock-off ventures in China, he wisely refuses to sell until he can find out why the man is interested.
    • Many characters at Pied Piper are rather clumsy, socially awkward goofballs, but they're all pretty smart in certain areas. Even Erlich has his moments, such as when he's the first member to realize the ramifications of Hooli putting a price point on middle-out compression.
  • Defictionalized: The Weissman Score, which describes a data compression algorithm's speed and compression ratio in a single number, made it into scientific literature. It helps that the computer scientists at Stanford consulted for the show.
could be called radio on the internet (radio station streaming on the web, Pandora, etc.) but because of that the audience has no idea precisely what Russ made.
  • Artistic License: Biology: : In Season 5, when Dinesh and Jared go on Ludicrous mode in the former's Tesla, their cheeks pouch out from the high speed. However, people's faces do this at high speed only as a result of wind resistance, while the guys are behind a windshield. It just looks funny.
  • Bad Boss: Gavin Belson. While he presents himself as a magnanimous boss who wants to make the world a better place, he's really selfish, ruthless, and constantly tries to engineer situations so he benefits and the blame falls on others.
  • Bait and Switch:
    • The beginning of the first episode opens with Kid Rock at what appears to be a concert. It pulls out to show that he is actually playing at a party for a bunch of bored-looking programmers, thus setting the tone of the entire show.
    • One episode has Russ' accountant telling him some bad news due to bad investments. Russ tells Richard it's bad as he's no longer a billionaire. Instead, his net worth is now... $968 million. He, of course, treats the news like an announcement that he's poor.
    • Gavin announces that he's moving the company to Georgia to cut costs. Hoover and Denpok, not thrilled, attempt to make peace with the decision and start looking forward to Southern cooking and attending Freaknik, only for Gavin to clarify that he meant Georgia the country.
  • Batman Gambit: Gavin Belson sues Pied Piper for copyright infringement, knowing that even though he has no case, the pending lawsuit will scare away other investors and prevent Pied Piper from mounting an adequate legal defense. It appears to work until Russ Hanneman steps up.
  • Being Evil Sucks: Gavin's life is often shown to be rather sad and lonely. He needs to keep a sycophantic guru and a security officer around to tell him what to do. When he retires and opens the floor up for reactions, no one has anything to say. They don't even care enough to yell at him.
  • Berserk Button: Richard loses it every time someone uses spaces instead of tabs on a coding project. It causes him to leave his girlfriend.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: In Seasons 5 and 6, Extreme Doormat Jared shows that he might be a very bad guy to cross. He systematically terrorizes Richard's new assistant Holden and seems very comfortable threatening the life of a camper who yells at Dinesh.
  • Big Bad: Gavin Belson is consistently Pied Piper's most direct form of competition. He starts to fit into the role more traditionally as Pied Piper begins to overtake Hooli, causing him to become progressively more cartoonishly villainous and ineffectual.
  • Big in Japan: In-Universe. Pied Piper's video compression becomes especially popular in the Philippines after Manny Pacquiao tweets about it to his millions of followers.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Dinesh is a native Urdu speaker, like his actor Kumail Nanjiani, and he speaks it several times in the series. The funniest example is, by far, when he says the proper word for a "male dildo" to try to convince people to not download his Pakistani cousin's app.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The series ends with Pied Piper having to kill their product for the greater good, just as they were on the cusp of becoming billionaires. But the core characters are able to move on and find contentment in new ventures. They end the series reuniting at the old incubator and happily playing "Always Blue!" with their old Hoberman Switch Pitch.
  • Black Comedy: Happens very frequently, as it's the main genre the show falls in. Some iconic examples include Dinesh and Gilfoyle's "Let Blaine Die" SWOT board and Gavin's "penis logo."
  • Bland-Name Product:
    • The production team said that one of the hardest parts of character design was the company names. Nearly everything they came up with was taken. They settled on things like "Hooli" which sound like "Google" being twisted around a bit.
    • In Season 2, the guys stop by a porn conference and viewers are treated to fake names like "Non Consensual Santa" and "Poop on My Wife", reflecting Rule 34 and just how hard it must have been to find unclaimed names/fetishes.
  • Born Lucky: Big Head. No matter what, he fails upwards, constantly getting promoted, receiving an expensive severance package, and eventually becoming the president of Stanford University. All of these things simply happen to him.
  • Brick Joke: In Season 3, Gavin Belson speaks to five Hooli executives about the possibility of firing the 20% of Hooli employees are who underperforming. One of the five executives suddenly announces that he wasn't listening to what Gavin was saying, and the other members of the board glance meaningfully at each other. In the next board meeting, that executive's chair is empty.
  • Bunny Ears Lawyer:
    • While Richard has No Social Skills, he's still a brilliant programmer.
    • Ron LaFlamme, Pied Piper's corporate lawyer, is eccentric and super laid-back but still an excellent lawyer.
    • Pied Piper acquires the services of Pete Monahan, a litigator who'll work on contingency, during Gavin's lawsuit. We're led to believe he'll be comically incompetent, especially because Ron recommended him, but he's actually quite skilled and professional. The reason they got him for so cheap is that he was disbarred after a downward spiral of drugs, criminal activity and eventually prison. As stated, he's a perfectly capable litigator, except that he seemingly can't stop bringing up his Dark and Troubled Past at every opportunity.
  • The Bus Came Back:
    • Due to his popularity, Russ Hanneman pops in for a brief appearance in each season after the second, when Pied Piper severs their business association with him.
    • Despite being sent back to prison shortly after his debut, Pete Monahan proved popular enough to keep making occasional appearances in the third and fourth seasons.
  • Butt Monkey:
    • Most jokes involving Jared are about how incredibly pathetic his life is, staring with the fact that his name isn't even Jared (although it is his middle name), but he's too meek to insist that people use his real name.
    • Dinesh almost always gets the worst of his exchanges with Gilfoyle. Occasionally, this can lead to others piling onto him as well, as seen when even Jared starts piling on Dinesh during the episode in which he bought a gold chain necklace.
  • Call Back:
    • Big Head's Nip Alert app from the first episode is mentioned in court during the second season finale.
    • On Laurie's advice, Monica dresses "ugly" to ease the pain of the announcement that Raviga will be distancing itself from Pied Piper. Later, when she has to give a negative evaluation of Pied Piper's beta platform, she wears the exact same outfit. In season 4, Jared wears the same outfit.
    • Peter Gregory’s storage room at Raviga is full of callbacks, including sesame seeds, the self-driving car (which frightens Jared), and a photo of Peter Gregory and Gavin Belson when they were friends in their teenage years.
    • Richard's contempt of engineers who use spaces instead of tabs is brought to light in season 3. Later in season 4 Jared is terrified Richard is going to hire a vile old co-worker, but Richard assures him that he rejected him for using spaces.
    • In season 4 Richard and Erlich try to sell their new product to an insurance company, only to find that the CTO is the Techcrunch judge whose wives Erlich slept with, who is now engaged again. Erlich gets him to agree to buy their product by threatening to sleep with his third wife after his second divorces him. But then, Richard sleeps with her.
  • Character Development: Jian-Yang serves mostly as a clueless lackey to Erlich during the first few seasons. After Erlich leaves, however, Jian-Yang reveals himself to be a thoroughly ruthless opportunist who was just playing dumb.
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • The team having to resort to putting a livecam on a condor egg, which comes back in a quite unexpected way at the end of Season 2.
    • The "brain rape" meeting that set in motion the creation of EndFrame.
    • Season 3 is full of them, multiple things that seemed like one-off jokes end up becoming important, often saving the company from disaster at the last minute. These include Gavin ordering Hooli search to hide bad reviews, Gavin's tendency to use animals as props in board meetings, Erlich's reckless purchase of a tech blog, and Dinesh building a compression-based video chat system so he could flirt with a girl in Estonia.
    • In Season 4, Gilfoyle gets so annoyed by Jin Yiang's talking smart fridge that he spends the whole episode connecting it to the Pied Piper server so he can brute force the password and change the settings. At the end of the season, they find out that he also accidentally uploaded their decentralized data storage system onto a network of smart fridges, which saves the company when their cell phone-based system falls apart.
  • Comedic Sociopathy: Gilfoyle revels in the misfortunes of others, particularly Dinesh, to the point where he'll support things that would normally seem advantageous to others such as Dinesh being named CEO of Piper Chat, just to watch that person fail utterly.
  • The Comically Serious: Pete Monahan, Richard's lawyer, speaks in a matter-of-fact tone no matter the subject. He can rattle off a ridiculous list of criminal charges without ever changing his tone of voice.
  • Companion Cube: Gilfoyle names his server "Anton" (after Anton LaVey) and treats it like a person. Dinesh accuses him of having sex with it. He later names an AI "Son of Anton."
  • Conspicuous Consumption: Very common in Silicon Valley, both because of how many new millionaires the tech industry creates and how the culture of the industry is partially based on looking successful.
    • Discussed and displayed a number of times when successful entrepreneurs spend huge amounts of money on lavish parties to rub their success in the faces of rivals. The series opens on one such party, and Peter Gregory and Erlich both host later examples.
    • Russ Hanneman drives neon-colored supercars and wears expensive designer jeans covered in studs.
    • Gavin takes a trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, because he wants to take a walk and there's a nice trail near his house there. He runs into Jack Barker at the air strip and it turns out they're both going to the same place and coming back the next day. They agree to spend the flight playing chess online from their separate, private jets.
    • Jian-yang, after selling his app to Periscope, buys an obnoxiously fancy smart fridge simply so he can rub his success in Erlich's face.
  • Courtroom Episode: The second season's finale.
  • Crazy Prepared: Jared has various corporate management tools secreted throughout the house for whenever the growing Pied Piper needs to make a big decision.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
    • Jian-Yang is usually an idiot, but he occasionally manages to be quite savvy. When Erlich tries to kick him out, he hears Jared complain about California tenant laws and figures out how to exploit them. He also manages to steal Erlich's estate, including 10 percent of Piped Piper. Later, when a businessman offers to buy out his knock-off ventures in China, he wisely refuses to sell until he can find out why the man is interested.
    • Many characters at Pied Piper are rather clumsy, socially awkward goofballs, but they're all pretty smart in certain areas. Even Erlich has his moments, such as when he's the first member to realize the ramifications of Hooli putting a price point on middle-out compression.
  • Defictionalized: The Weissman Score, which describes a data compression algorithm's speed and compression ratio in a single number, made it into scientific literature. It helps that the computer scientists at Stanford consulted for the show.