There I was sitting watching a box set of the excellent Silicon Valley the other night when I suddenly thought “HAUD OAN A MINUTE!”.
For those not familiar with the show, its a light hearted fictional story that basically follows a rag-taggle bunch of Application Coders and Software Engineers who write a new application named Pied Piper and hope to make it rich and become the next Facebook\Mark Zuckerberg style success story.
As always, theres thrills, pills and belly aches along the way.
Its a recommended watch, especially for anyone in I.T but, as I will show below, also for fans of Scottish football.
So there I am..watching the show and the build up plotline ( spoiler approaching alert!!) is as follows
The guys have demo-ed their app at a conference and had a great success.
The Venture Capitalists start making offers and the world is their oyster.
A large corporation making a similar application suddenly sue the guys for Intellectual Property theft.
The Venture capitalist run away in fear without handing over a penny.
The guys face closure if they dont get immediate funding from someone very rich!
( Can you see where this is going yet?)
The main guy, Richard, decides enough is enough and as he walks towards the office to concede defeat, suddenly a miracle happens. A billionaire investor named Russ Hanneman arrives claiming hes happy to help and says that he is so hands off its unbelievable!
(Surely you see where this is going now?)
After some drinks and a nice meaty meal, the nice Billionaire offers them $5m to help out
The main man Richard agrees despite clever business people saying “Hes a horrible human being!”
The Billionaiire duly hands over a cheque for $5m.
The Application guys proudly publically announce how the nice Billionaire has helped saved the day.
They deposit the cheque.
(Guess what happens next!)
It bounces.
The business-world naive coders then ask the nice Billionaire “Whats happened with this cheque?”
He calmly tells them “Oh That one cheque is just for show, I will give money in monthly chunks after due diligence”.
He then hands them another cheque for an undisclosed but very small amount, to meet running costs.
They look at the cheque and realise its even less than needed for payday. They say “Why so low?”
He smiles, pauses and then says “Well now that Im on the board, I’ve went and took an executive decision. Ive ordered lots of advertising from one of my Marketing companies and Im also gonna order merchandise material from one of my other companies. They needed paid up front but hey dont worry, I got you a great deal of course!”
They cry and feel like this.
He laughs and gets 2 seats on the board and shares and they are beholden to him forever.
Everyone in the business world say “We told you so!”.
I really cant wait to see whats next!
(If you didnt see where this was going, you’re wearing red white and blue)
Desi
We always saw it as soap opera. Maybe we just did not see it as an American fantasy. Oh, I forgot. Where did Robert Sarver and Bill Miller come from? I can assure there is no need for IT skills to understand this story unless you are member of the Ursidae family – not sure there is a red, white or blue one mind.
Back to second half.
H H
Good read. Looking forward to eating jelly & Ice-cream while watching the “season climax” – : Armageddon again…
https://youtu.be/-v6zx-ckWg
I particularly liked the scene in the house where Richard explains to the team how loans from millionaires ready to own your company operate…
Usually vids load straight away but i tried this one from my phone and it gave an error.
https://youtu.be/-v6zx-ckWgI
Sorry Desi seems I missed an “l” off of the end of the url.
Please try this one now.
Hope you like the clip.
If it’s not allowed, sorry, please remove my comment
Thanks Mr Desi. That’s another pair of pants in the bin. hh