Silicon Valley (Season 1)

Comedy Drama

TV-MA

English

April 6, 2014

28–47 minutes

Season: 1

Episodes: 8

Status: released

Trailer, Teaser & Videos

Where to Watch Silicon Valley (Season 1) Online (Stream)

HBO Max

Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Comedy, Drama
Season	1
Episodes	8
Release date	April 6, 2014 – June 1, 2014
Running time	28–47 minutes
Age rating	TV-MA
Starring	Thomas Middleditch Josh Brener Martin Starr Kumail Nanjiani Amanda Crew Zach Woods Matt Ross
Created by	Dave Krinsky John Altschuler Mike Judge
Directed by	Mike Judge Tricia Brock Maggie Carey Alec Berg
Written by	Clay Tarver Carson Mell Matteo Borghese Rob Turbovsky Ron Weiner Jessica Gao Dan O’Keefe Dave Krinsky John Altschuler Alec Berg Mike Judge
Produced by	Chrisann Verges Alec Berg Mike Judge Carson Mell (Co-Producer) Jonathan Dotan (Co-Producer)
Executive Producer	Clay Tarver Tom Lassally Peter Phillips Michael Rotenberg Dave Krinsky John Altschuler
Cinematography by	Jim Denault
Edited by	Tim Roche Brian Merken Paul Zucker
Music by	Jeff Cardoni
Casting by	Jeanne McCarthy Nicole Abellera
Production Designer	Richard Toyon
Production Company	Alec Berg Inc. Judgemental Films Altschuler Krinsky Works HBO Entertainment 3 Arts Entertainment
Distributor	HBO

Silicon Valley (Season 1) TV Series Cast & Character:

Thomas Middleditch as Richard Hendricks
T.J. Miller as Erlich Bachman
Josh Brener as Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti
Martin Starr as Bertram Gilfoyle
Kumail Nanjiani as Dinesh Chugtai
Christopher Evan Welch as Peter Gregory
Amanda Crew as Monica Hall
Zach Woods as Donald “Jared” Dunn
Matt Ross as Gavin Belson
Jimmy O. Yang as Jian-Yang
Ben Feldman as Ron LaFlamme
Bernard White as Denpok, A Guru
Andy Daly as Doctor
Aly Mawji as Aly Dutta
Scott Prendergast as Scott
Jill E. Alexander as Patrice
Brian Tichnell as Jason

Storyline:

Richard Hendricks, an employee of a tech company named Hooli, creates in his spare time an app called Pied Piper that contains a revolutionary data compression algorithm. Peter Gregory acquires a stake in Pied Piper, and Richard hires the residents of Erlich Bachman’s business incubator, including Bertram Gilfoyle and Dinesh Chugtai, along with Jared Dunn, who also defected from Hooli. Meanwhile Richard’s best friend, Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti, chooses to accept a substantial promotion at Hooli instead, despite his lack of merit for the job. Gavin Belson instructs his Hooli employees to reverse engineer Pied Piper and develop a similar product called Nucleus. Both companies are scheduled to present at TechCrunch Disrupt. Pied Piper rushes to produce a feature-rich cloud storage platform based on their compression technology. At the TechCrunch event, Belson presents Nucleus, which is integrated with all of Hooli’s services and has compression performance equal to Pied Piper. However, Richard has a new idea and spends the entire night coding. The next morning, he makes Pied Piper’s final presentation and demonstrates a product that strongly outperforms Nucleus; he is then mobbed by eager investors.

About Silicon Valley (Season 1) TV Series:

The first season of the American comedy television series Silicon Valley premiered in the United States on HBO on April 6, 2014. It consists of eight episodes and concluded on June 1, 2014. The season received positive reviews from critics.

The first season was released on DVD and Blu-ray on March 31, 2015; bonus features include eight audio commentaries and three behind-the-scenes featurettes.

Silicon Valley (Season 1) Episodes

Silicon Valley S1, Episode 1: "Minimum Viable Product"

April 6, 2014

Richard Hendricks is a low-level programmer with futuristic internet giant Hooli. He is often taunted by his more successful work colleagues, and his ideas are dismissed by egotistical entrepreneur Erlich Bachman, who owns the tech development incubator where Richard lives with fellow programmers Nelson "Big Head" Bighetti, Bertram Gilfoyle and Dinesh Chugtai. However when Hooli stumbles upon the music copyright service that Richard is working on, entitled Pied Piper, they discover that hidden within the useless application is the best file compression algorithm in the world, and news spreads quickly. Eventually Richard is caught between a $10 million buyout by Hooli CEO Gavin Belson, and a $200,000 investment from eccentric billionaire Peter Gregory; he must decide whether to give up his program to the highest bidder, or to take the investment and create a business out of it himself. After having a panic attack and vomiting, Richard runs into Peter's assistant Monica, who tells him that she believes in him and his idea. Richard decides to take the investment, and run the business himself.

Silicon Valley S1, Episode 2: "The Cap Table"

April 13, 2014

After rejecting Belson's offer and siding with Peter Gregory, Richard is overwhelmed by the amount of work that needs to be done in establishing the business to Gregory's satisfaction. Luckily, Belson's former PA, Jared Dunn, arrives at the incubator begging Richard to hire him, as he sees huge potential in the Pied Piper idea, and he is hired due to his business expertise. However, in evaluating the Pied Piper team, Jared discovers that while Gilfoyle and Dinesh are brilliant coders, Big Head is comparatively mediocre, and Richard is pressured by everyone to fire him as he brings nothing to the table. After much arguing, Richard refuses to do fire him, but Big Head announces that he was given a huge raise and promotion at Hooli, as Gavin Belson wants to publicize Big Head as co-founder of Pied Piper. Later, Big Head tells Richard that Hooli has begun reverse-engineering Pied Piper to create a similar product: Nucleus.

Silicon Valley S1, Episode 3: "Articles of Incorporation"

April 20, 2014

Richard and Jared discover that the Pied Piper business name is already in use by an irrigation company in Gilroy, California. While Jared, Dinesh and Gilfoyle begin brainstorming new names for the application, Erlich decides to find a new name for the company. He embarks on a vision quest in the Sonora Desert, but ends up having a panic attack after consuming too many hallucinogenic mushrooms. Adamant on keeping the original name, Richard attempts to prove that he is a good negotiator by convincing the irrigation company to give up the name Pied Piper. Initially the company's owner asks for $1000, but after reading about the technology's success on the web, he angrily demands a much larger sum. He ends up driving to Palo Alto to confront Richard, and after much arguing, Richard manages to keep the name for almost the original price. Erlich, still in the aftermath of his vision quest, returns with a child by his side, convinced he has found another version of himself. Meanwhile, Peter Gregory becomes obsessed with Burger King products, leaving his assistant Monica in a difficult position with one of their clients, who need an urgent cash injection or risk firing hundreds of people. Biding his time, Gregory ends up investing in sesame seed production, earning a huge profit in stock and solving the situation to Monica's and their associates' relief.

Silicon Valley S1, Episode 4: "Fiduciary Duties"

April 27, 2014

Peter assigns an attorney, Ron LaFlamme, to the Pied Piper venture, who accidentally reveals that Richard's project is only one of eight file compression ventures that Peter has invested in. This impacts Richard, who suddenly panics that he has no sense of where the company should go and what it should be doing. Meanwhile, Big Head is removed from Hooli's copycat project, named Nucleus, because of his utter lack of understanding of what Richard actually did to create Pied Piper. He is not reassigned to anything, and joins the other unassigned employees that spend their days biding their time on the company's roof. During a toga party organized by Gregory, Richard gets drunk and mistakenly appoints Erlich to the Pied Piper board of directors. Richard initially reverses the decision, but after Erlich elaborates during a meeting about Pied Piper's direction causing Peter to continue funding, Richard permanently appoints him on the board.

Silicon Valley S1, Episode 5: "Signaling Risk"

May 4, 2014

Erlich hires a convicted felon and graffiti artist, Chuy, to create a new logo for Pied Piper and to paint it on the incubator garage. However, Chuy's creation depicts Dinesh having sexual intercourse with the Statue of Liberty, because he believes Dinesh is Latino. Pied Piper gains entry to the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield, a technology conference that pits unseeded startup companies against each other, with $50,000 as the grand prize. The only problem is, Pied Piper is not unseeded, and this angers Peter. Richard suggests withdrawing from the Battlefield, but Belson beats him to it and announces the release of Nucleus will take place at the Battlefield, and due to Peter's intense rivalry with Belson, he refuses to allow Pied Piper to withdraw. Peter tells the team to have a finished demo for the Battlefield in eight weeks, instead of the initial five months.

Silicon Valley S1, Episode 6: "Third Party Insourcing"

May 11, 2014

Pied Piper is nearing completion, but Richard is having serious issues coding the cloud-based integration modules for the application, so much so that Jared, Gilfoyle, Erlich and Dinesh pressure him into hiring Kevin "The Carver" (Austin Abrams), an Adderall-addicted teenage programmer who specializes in cloud integration. The Carver ends up accidentally destroying all of Pied Piper's code, forcing the team to stay up all night fixing his mistake. Meanwhile, Gilfoyle's long-distance girlfriend, Tara (Milana Vayntrub), visits the incubator. Gilfoyle wrongfully tells Dinesh that Tara wants to have sex with him, and that this prospect sexually arouses both Tara and Gilfoyle. Jared gets stranded on Peter's automated island due to a programming error.

Silicon Valley S1, Episode 7: "Proof of Concept"

May 18, 2014

The team arrives at the Battlefield. However, Pied Piper still isn't finished, and Richard is having trouble concentrating due to the presence of an ex-girlfriend at the conference; after much drama, the situation is eventually resolved. Dinesh meets an attractive girl, Charlotte (AJ Michalka), who appears to be proficient in Java, but when Gilfoyle tells him that the Java code was in fact written by him, Dinesh loses interest in Charlotte. Erlich panics when it transpires that one of the judges of the Battlefield is the man whose wife he had an affair with years earlier, and in an attempt to remedy the situation, Erlich ends up having sex with the judge's new wife, which results in the judge attacking Erlich on stage, preventing the Pied Piper Battlefield presentation.

Silicon Valley S1, Episode 8: "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency"

June 1, 2014

Desperate to avoid litigation after the brawl, TechCrunch offers Pied Piper a ticket straight to the final Battlefield stage, but the team is despondent after watching Hooli's presentation. Not only is Nucleus' Weissman compression quality score 2.89—the exact same as theirs—but it also has a number of additional features which makes it a much better application than Pied Piper. Jared suggests pivoting the company, which results in him being arrested by the police after an incident involving Adderall. The PP team retreats to their hotel room where they mock up a mathematical model for Erlich to give handjobs to every male in the Battlefield audience instead of doing their presentation. The discussion gives Richard an epiphany about compression algorithms, and he stays up all night to code. He deletes most of the Pied Piper features and leaves only one – the all-important compression engine, which, using Richard's brand new compression code, achieves a Weissman score of 5.2. Pied Piper wins the Battlefield, embarrassing Belson and Hooli. After learning from Monica, amidst some flirting between the two, that Pied Piper will be fielding business interests and that things will only get harder, Richard has another panic attack and vomits into a dumpster in the alley.