Certainly he now also has the interests of 500 employees to consider. It is weird indeed, and a rare misstep from the show’s writers.īetween a rock and a hard place, Richard contemplates giving up and walking away with a good chunk of money - an opportunity he’s had and rejected so many times over the course of this show that Dinesh asks him if he has a sick addiction to giving up money. “We just spent the last hour bonding about how this business is comprised of backstabbers and cutthroats,” Richard sputters. They have a seemingly sympathetic conversation about their troubles, and then Richard comes up with a solution that could save both companies and benefit both equally. So it’s astounding that Richard lets himself forget that here.
They’ve gone back and forth with him over the seasons, but he’s always proven to be malicious above all. Now, the finale of the previous season had Richard and company triumph over Gavin precisely by remembering that he is ruthless and utterly spiteful. Hooli was once the show’s over-the-top parody of a tech behemoth - for my money, its Google stand-in - but it’s fallen on hard times in the last few episodes, as Gavin’s ego has run it into the ground. While contemplating the situation against the scenic backdrop of the Stanford dish, who should Richard run into but the show’s perennial villain, Hooli CEO Gavin Belson (Matt Ross). If Pied Piper tries to stay afloat by selling more shares, he’ll buy them and take over. Worse, the investor has bought stakes held by other people and gotten control of 30% of the company. Richard holds dear the thought of his pure and unspoiled new internet, but by this point in the show he’s done a lot of dirty deeds to try to make it happen.Īs the episode begins, the rejected investor has partnered with a rival of Pied Piper’s to poach away the game developer who was financially sustaining their company - but who was also making Richard’s promise to not surveil or exploit his platform’s users a lie.
So really… maybe you can put a price on principles. Or can you? Maybe $1 billion from an investor who wants to strip-mine your users’ data isn’t worth your principles, but by the end of last night’s episode, Richard and company save themselves by embracing spite, playing dirty, and recruiting a sacrificial sap who will lose some $40 million.
“He would have turned us into the worst possible versions of ourselves,” Richard tells CFO Monica (Amanda Crew) and fellow programmers Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) as he explains why he declined a $1 billion investment from a very bad man who would have made them all very, very rich. But while he may not care so much about money, the people he’s working with at Pied Piper certainly do. The show’s brilliant startup founder Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) sincerely yearns to see his tech brought to life and his idea of a decentralized democratic internet take off - and he really does care more about that than about becoming rich. And last night’s episode, “Hooli Smokes!,” comes at it more explicitly than ever. But poking at those lofty ideals is a close second. OK, maybe they like penis jokes a little more. The writers of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” love nothing more than to skewer the idea that companies here want to make the world a better place.
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