With Silicon Valley once again returning to its former glory of the 2000 era, we're seeing an unprecedented amount of startups being started and funded. This is in tangent to the mass media glorifying and turning startup founders into rock stars. It's no wonder then that Mike Judge's TV series ‘Silicon Valley' has turned into a runaway success, with a cast of zany characters and startup jokes that anyone working in tech can relate to. Judge has also taken time to illuminate what it's like to be a first-time startup founder, and it's not pretty.
The show follows the main protagonist, first-time founder and engineer, Richard Hendricks. Richard gives up his cushy job as a software engineer at a big tech company called Hooli, to make it out on his own, as the CEO and founder of a compression algorithm company, Pied Piper.
It’s Not All Cupcakes and Rainbows
What makes the show so endearing is that this is Richard's first company, and as a result he goes through many familiar obstacles that founders face. There's a huge public misconception that being a tech founder is easy. All you have to do is come up with an app idea, build it over a couple of weeks, spend a few months getting users and then you can sell it to Google or Microsoft.
Judge goes out of his way to illustrate that it's not as simple as many would like to believe. Along the way throughout season 1 and 2, Richard encounters numerous problems, often times with nobody but himself to rely on when it comes to making the hard decisions, such as firing your best friend.
‘Silicon Valley' more than anything highlights the many dark and rarely discussed parts of the startup world. First-time founders are lulled into a nativity that everyone in Silicon Valley believes in the spirit of innovation and pushing the world forward. The reality is that there are many people who are simply looking to get rich off of the backs of founders who are overworked and rarely see the day that they are compensated for their work.
More Money, More Problems
Richard and his team at Pied Piper go through many trials and tribulations, the most difficult being navigating the dynamic between investor and founder. Richard naively takes money from anyone who offers it to him, and as a result is often put in difficult situations where investors are either overstepping their bounds or simply wreaking havoc on the Pied Pipers growth trajectory.
The show best illustrates this when Richard decides to take money from Russ Hanneman, an eccentric billionaire who drives fast cars, and is obsessed with being a part of the “Three commas club”. As an investor in Pied Piper, Russ consistently oversteps his bounds. His worst offense occurs in “White Hat/Black Hat" (S2E8) when he leaves a bottle of tequila on the delete key of a computer, causing many important files to be deleted, resulting in a lost contract with a big client.
Beware The Bigger Fish
Not only are there venture capitalists to watch out for, startups also have to be vigilant of big tech companies who might want to squash the little upstarts. In the tv series, Hooli is painted as this monolithic company who decides to set its eyes on getting rid of Pied Piper as a competitor, either through acquisition or lawsuit. Belson, the CEO of Hooli, attempts numerous times to acquire the company and even ends up resorting to suing the company to get his way.
Getting Thrown Out Of Your Own Kingdom
Finally, with the season 2 cliffhanger, we witness one of the worst things that can happen to a founder - being ejected from the CEO seat unwillingly. Without control over the board, Richard is at the mercy of Raviga Capital, and now has much less control over the direction of his newly funded startup.
This is something that occurs much more frequently than most Silicon Valley insiders would like you to believe. This shouldn't come as a surprise, as many 20-something-year-old founders are often reading a term sheet for the first time in their life. For many founders, all they see is the big cheque that they are about to cash, without really thinking about the long-term consequences of being venture funded.
If there's any takeaway that you should get from the tv series ‘Silicon Valley' it's that being a tech entrepreneur is hard, especially if it's your first time. While being an entrepreneur, especially one in tech, is currently deemed as in vogue by the general public, it's not the rockstar lifestyle that many assume it to be. If season 3 is anything like the past two seasons, we'll continue to see Richard getting knocked down again and again, with the hope that he'll be able to get back up.
Whether Mike Judge wants to end the series with a realistic conclusion, that Pied Piper fails and Richard tries to start a new company or goes back to work at Hooli, remains to be seen.