Considering the huge impact that Silicon Valley has on our lives, I’m surprised by how rarely pop culture really gets it right. I can count the best stuff on one hand. The book Fire in the Valley did a good job of capturing what things were like back in the early years, and the relationship between Steve Jobs and me. (It was turned into a pretty good movie too.) Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve is terrific, and I was blown away by how much history and technical information he synthesized in his book The Innovators. It’s a tour de force.
But if you really want to understand how Silicon Valley works today, you should watch the HBO series Silicon Valley.
It’s about a small team of developers at an Internet startup called Pied Piper. You watch them struggle to figure out their strategy, build their product, raise money, and take on Hooli, the tech giant that bears an obvious but superficial resemblance to Google or Microsoft.
The show is a parody, so it exaggerates things, but like all great parodies it captures a lot of truths. Most of the different personality types you see in the show feel very familiar to me. The programmers are smart, super-competitive even with their friends, and a bit clueless when it comes to social cues. Personally, I identify most with Richard, the founder of Pied Piper, who is a great programmer but has to learn some hard lessons about managing people.
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