Episode 22 provides a decisive and satisfying showdown between Jack’s Box plan and Richard’s consumer platform option.  Richard’s not-so-secret skunkworks project is dead, and the team sets to work on the Box believing that as soon as they deliver a working prototype, they will be free to build the platform.  But when they deliver the Box, they find Jack is prepared to double-cross them.  As Jared explains, Jack has negotiated a contract “with ’90s-era tech dinosaur Maleant Data Solutions that **exclusively** licensed the Pied Piper algorithm to Maleant for five long years!”  Jack calls a meeting of Pied Piper’s board expecting it to approve the deal.
Continue Reading Laurie & Monica Out-Action Jack…and Other Fiduciary Duties (Silicon Valley – Episode 22)

Episode 21 is a delightful maze of plots, plot twists and omens.  At Pied Piper, Richard fails in his attempt to go over CEO Action Jack’s head and have Laurie, the investor, force Jack to scrap his Box and build the consumer platform.  As a result of this failed coup, Jack warns Richard darkly, “if you’re going to shoot the king, you’ve got to be goddamn sure you kill him.”  Undeterred, the team opts for covert action:  they will build their consumer platform while pretending to build Jack’s box. They form a secret ‘startup within a startup,’ aptly/obviously codenamed “Skunkworks.” But before they can even get to work, Richard lets the Skunkworks plans fall into the enemy, sales team hands… and it seems like the entire scheme is blown!
Continue Reading Trade Secrets and Lies (Silicon Valley – Episode 21)

Episode 20 of Silicon Valley explores numerous classic conflicts: consumer-oriented v. enterprise business model; engineers v. sales; revolutionary vs. safe; long-term goals v. short-term profits; Erlich v. Jian-Yang … Richard’s plan has been to transform the world by giving away the basic version of Pied Piper’s revolutionary compression technology, rapidly building a huge user base, and hoping to charge for premium features one day (the consumer, “freemium” business model). However, CEO “Action” Jack Barker and his new sales team—preoccupied with implementing his “Conjoined Triangles of Success”—want an immediate focus on revenue and insist that Pied Piper make enterprise software they can immediately sell to big business customers. Worried even that won’t be easy enough to sell, Jack’s team strips away every cool and revolutionary feature until they’ve transformed Pied Piper into a business-facing appliance company selling Pied Piper Boxes that Jared deems “rectangular, glorified thumb drives that resemble nothing so much as old Betamax machines. ” Richard is horrified and dismayed.
Continue Reading Jack’s Box (Silicon Valley – Episode 20)

HBO’s Silicon Valley is back, but Richard is still out as Pied Piper’s CEO.  To recap how we got here:  in the closing moments of last season, the Pied Piper team triumphed by successfully livestreaming its condor cam video to 200,000 viewers—including Laurie, the head of Raviga Capital, one of Pied Piper’s two investors.  Laurie was so impressed with the technology that  Raviga Capital immediately bought out Pied Piper’s other investor, Russ Hanneman.  By doing so, Raviga Capital gained control of three of Pied Piper’s five board seats, and promptly used its majority control to remove Richard as CEO.
Continue Reading Success Is Not Always Founder Friendly (Silicon Valley – Episode 19)

This season’s finale of Silicon Valley provided Richard with only the briefest moment of victory before he once again faces losing Pied Piper.  First, the arbitrator rules that because Richard used a Hooli computer while developing Pied Piper, under the invention assignment provision of Richard’s employment agreement with Hooli, Hooli would have the right to Pied Piper’s technology.  However, because the employment agreement also contained unlawful non-compete provisions, the arbitrator held that the entire employment agreement was unenforceable, including the invention assignment portion.  Therefore, Hooli had no right to Pied Piper’s technology, and Richard won!  In the meantime, the Pied Piper team triumphs by successfully livestreaming the condor cam video to 200,000 viewers—including Laurie, the head of Raviga Capital.  Laurie is so impressed with the technology that once Hooli loses the arbitration, Raviga buys out Russ’s stake in Pied Piper.  Raviga now controls three of Pied Piper’s five board seats:  Russ’s two seats plus the seat filled by Monica as Raviga’s designee.  However, Laurie is also underwhelmed by Richard’s performance as CEO.  After gaining control of the board, Raviga promptly votes its majority control to remove Richard as CEO of Pied Piper. 
Continue Reading The Days of the Vultures (Silicon Valley – Season 2 Finale)

Episode 16 culminates with a disastrous end to the Intersite bake-off, and highlights an issue that’s cropped up in several episodes:  troublesome or under-performing board members.  To recap, Pied Piper is competing against nemesis Endframe in a “bake-off” to win a $15 million contract with Intersite.  In the course of the bake-off, Pied Piper’s (formerly) billionaire investor and board member, Russ Hanneman, unknowingly sets a tequila bottle on the delete key of Richard’s laptop causing the deletion of 9,000 hours of Intersite’s premium content, and Pied Piper loses the bake-off.
Continue Reading Board Games (Silicon Valley, Episode 16)

There are so many legal issues in Episode 15 that it’s hard to know where to begin, so I’m going to start at the end: porn.  Pied Piper is competing against nemesis Endframe for a $15 million contract from the online porn company Intersite.  If Pied Piper wins the contract it will allow Pied Piper to stay afloat and avoid being absorbed and obliterated by Endframe.
Continue Reading Other Peoples’ (Adult) Content (Episode 15)

Previously we’ve discussed Hooli’s reverse engineering of Pied Piper’s technology and the threatened lawsuit for ownership of the technology.  In Episode 14, Pied Piper faces a new threat:  Endframe, a Pied Piper competitor, has also stolen Pied Piper’s technology, in collusion with VC firm Branscomb Ventures.  This started back in Episode 10, when the Pied Piper team pitched to Branscomb and were “brain raped.”  The team shared the intimate, technical details of Pied Piper’s middle-out technology before realizing what was happening.  Branscomb/Endframe then used the information Pied Piper revealed to create their competing product.  But was there anything Pied Piper could have done to protect itself?
Continue Reading “‘Say it ain’t so, bro!’” (Episode 14)

Last post I mused that had Richard taken certain steps in the first season of Silicon Valley, he might now have ammunition to use against Hooli’s lawsuit.  What am I talking about?  To very crudely recap what happened last season, Richard invented Pied Piper, a music copyright search service that hid within it amazing lossless compression technology.  Richard shared his software with two “brogrammers” at Hooli, who (being slightly smarter than they appeared) realize the importance of Richard’s compression technology and informed Gavin Belson (Hooli’s CEO).  After Richard refused to sell Pied Piper to Hooli, Hooli reverse-engineered Pied Piper and used Pied Piper’s technology as the basis of Hooli’s competing product called Nucleus. 
Continue Reading VC’s running scared – Hooli is suing Pied Piper (Episodes 9 and 10) continued