Silicon Valley was one of Mike Judge’s first forays into live-action TV, following the success of Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, Idiocracy, and the incredibly famous Office Space. Judge has always had a taste for comedy, and he brought that to a world with a lot of attention but not a lot of satire—tech startups. Read on to learn everything Silicon Valley gets right about the tech industry.
Ridiculous CEOs
The most telling aspect of the tech world that Silicon Valley gets right is the eccentric and deified CEOs. The average layman doesn’t know about all the inner workings of Facebook or Tesla, but they know the people behind them: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc. These larger-than-life personas lead their companies and are the faces the public sees, and those faces are pretty ridiculous at times. The CEOs in Silicon Valley say their phones will make the world a better place while indulging in daily private flights or multi-million-dollar bonuses. One off-the-wall example is a CEO from the show using ‘blood boys,’ fit young men giving him blood transfusions to keep him more youthful and healthier, something real-life tech billionaire Peter Thiel wants to do.
The Content
One of the things that Silicon Valley gets incredibly right about the tech world is the technical aspects. The series could have gone in the direction of focusing on entirely outlandish and nonsensical topics in our technological world, but they didn’t. Instead, they deal with compression algorithms, marketing to users, and the dreaded cloud.
For outsiders, the cloud may seem easy to use, but it often leads to stress for tech professionals. One thing that may not be the most accurate is that the characters in Silicon Valley turn to a child to take care of all their cloud management headaches. In reality, they would turn to a cloud management system.
Tech Campuses
An incredibly notable aspect of the tech world that the public knows of is their elaborate campuses. If you work somewhere like Google or Apple, it has become somewhat of a joke just how many perks and amenities you can explore. Silicon Valley‘s creators are also aware of this and ensured that the different tech campuses in their show would be similarly ridiculous. You have the ‘brogrammers’ who frequent the gym and smoothie bars and those who enjoy nap pods to escape their computer monitors. One aspect the show may have taken a little too far is the communal bike meetings, where a team pedals a shared bike while going over their daily goals.
Silicon Valley got a lot right about the tech industry and helped make the public more aware of how ridiculous the tech and entrepreneurial world is. Sadly, the series could not give the world 10+ years of content like some of Judge’s other works, but this one didn’t need that time to leave the same impact.
