Product Review

From the offbeat mind of Mike Judge (Office Space, Beavis and Butt-head), this HBO half-hour comedy takes viewers inside the world of tech start-ups €“ and the socially awkward underdogs who try to navigate its lucrative potential. Starring a talented ensemble of young comic actors (see below) and veterans, Silicon Valley charts the rising fortunes of Richard, an introverted computer programmer who lives in a €œHacker Hostel€ start-up incubator along with his friends Big Head, Gilfoyle, and Dinesh. These social misfits live under the watch of Erlich, a dotcom millionaire who lets them stay in his house for free €“ as long as he gets a 10% stake in their projects. Stuck working part-time at a large tech company called Hooli, Richard€s obscure website, Pied Piper, is going nowhere fast. But when a mid-level Hooli executive named Jared is apprised of the value of the site€s novel compression algorithm, Richard finds himself caught in the middle of an extreme bidding war between Hooli founder Gavin Belson and independent billionaire venture capitalist Peter Gregory.