The New Yorker: “How “Silicon Valley” nails Silicon Valley”

The show’s signature gag, from the first season, was a minute-long montage of startup founders pledging to make the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols, or to make the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints. This scene was set at TechCrunch Disrupt, a real event where founders take turns pitching their ideas, “American Idol”-style, to an auditorium full of investors. Before writing the episode, Judge and Berg spent a weekend at TechCrunch Disrupt, in San Francisco. That’s the first thing you notice, Judge said. It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of We’re making the world a better place, because it’s uncool to just say Hey, we’re crushing it and making money. After the scene aired, viewers complained about the lack of diversity in the audience. Berg recalled, A friend of mine who works in tech called me and said, Why aren’t there any women? That’s bullshit! I said to her, It is bullshit! Unfortunately, we shot that audience footage at the actual TechCrunch Disrupt.

Andrew Marantz

An older piece, but still remarkably fresh, especially now that HBO has renewed the show for a fifth season. After all, why not? Considering the realities of Silicon Valley, the writers will never run out of inspiration.

And Tables are like Pied Piper