History Series / SiliconValley

* MistakenForGay: Richard is mistaken for gay by his ex-girlfriend who overhears Jared telling Monica that he's Richard's partner (as in business partner).

* ArtisticLicenseLaw: One provision of a contract being found unenforceable does not void the contract (assuming there is a severability clause, which is standard. Instead, the court will simply ignore the offending provision and enforce the rest of the contract without it. Similarly, whether an employee or employer owns a specific invention is a much more complex determination than depicted. Negligible use of an employer’s equipment would not be sufficient to establish their ownership of the IP.

*** He included a non-compete clause in Hooli employment agreements and used it to support his argument that Richard and Jared knowingly broke a contract agreement. But because non-compete clauses are illegal in California, the judge in the binding arbitration declares that this null and voids thousands of employees' contracts, including Richard's. Because this means that Richard wasn't working for Hooli with a valid contract, the company has no legal right to claim ownership of any intellectual property that may have been created on Hooli property. The Hooli board, needless to say, is not pleased.

*** Gavin, infuriated by a minor slight by Jack Barker, goes insane trying to find out what other devious plans Jack has, and even goes so far as to buy Piper Chat so he can read Jack's chat logs. The data reveals nothing incriminating, and Piper Chat is highly toxic because of its underage userbase, giving Jack the leverage he needs to oust and replace Gavin.

*** Richard, having his own issue with the investor Maximo, proposes that Gavin give him Foxhole which would cause Maximo to divest due to being a foreign investor and allow Gavin to move to Belarus. Gavin rejects this offer because [[EvilIsPetty he doesn't want it to also benefit Richard]]. To add insult to injury, he buys out Jared's protege Gwart. Doing this reveals that Hooli is worth far less than they used to.
*** Since Gavin has two hours to veto any sale, Pied Piper decides to buy Hooli while Gavin is doing Hooli’s annual charity Triathlon. While Gavin finds out about the sale, he arrives too late.

* HypercompetentSidekick: Jared joined the Pied Piper team because he was inspired by Richard refusing Gavin's 10 million dollar buyout, which earns his UndyingLoyalty. Especially in those first few episodes Jared's business management was vital to them getting off the ground, and he is almost always ahead of the curve on problems that rise up. After him, Gilfoyle has both the technology infrastructure skills and unscrupulous attitude to get things accomplished after everything has fallen apart, most notably setting up an improvised in-house server using networked graphics cards after being blackballed by Gavin from all local server farms.

* PyhrricVictory: Gavin Belson is so outraged over losing Pied Piper he takes every opportunity he can to undermine their progress. Every little edge he gets ends up backfiring on him in some way, which makes a progressive downward spiral that eventually starts compromising control of his own company.

* CourtroomAntics: Played with in "Binding Arbitration." When Big Head is dramatically introduced, the back doors opening, Big Head is shoved in through a side door. Also, Big Head doesn't understand how to answer questions that begin "Is it not true..."

* ActuallyThatsMyAssistant: When the group attempts to confront [=EndFrame=] for stealing Middle-Out, the receptionist assumes Erlich is the CEO insead of Richard... and then thinks Richard's name is Erlich Bachman.

** Pied Piper acquires the services of Pete Monahan, a litigator who'll work on contingency. We're led to believe he'll be comically incompetent, especially because [[WithFriendsLikeThese the aforementioned Ron [=LaFlamme=] recommended him]], but he's actually quite skilled and professional. The reason they got him for so cheap is that he was ''disbarred after a downward spiral of drugs, criminal activity and eventually prison.'' He's a very capable litigator, except he can't practice in open court and seemingly can't stop bringing up his DarkAndTroubledPast at ''every'' opportunity.

** Russ Hanneman tries to be chummy by repeatedly saying of Jared, "This guy fucks!" which is funny because Jared is the last guy you'd expect to sleep around. In season 3, it's revealed that Jared is one of the most romantically successful members of Pied Piper. Dinesh muses that Jared really does fuck!

** Peter Gregory’s storage room at Raviga is full of callbacks, including sesame seeds, the self-driving car (which frightens Jared), and the photo of Peter Gregory and Gavin Belson when they were friends.

* ComicallySerious: Pete Monahan, Richard's lawyer, speaks in a matter-of-fact tone no matter the subject. He can rattle off a ridiculous list of criminal charges without ever changing his tone of voice.

* TheGhost: Due to the actor's passing, Peter Gregory is only ever referred to via his assistant for the last three episodes of season 1 before being killed off in the break between seasons 1 and two.

* MockMillionare:

* ArbitrarilyLargeBankAccount: Regularly defied. Numerous tech startups manage to score tens of millions of dollars in startup money but implode before they are able to produce anything of value. At a convention Dinesh and Garfoyle note a colleague who recently got a 280 million investment, but when talking to them he admitted they were about to implode in a month and asked ''them'' for a job.

** The infamous mean jerk discussion gives Richard an idea to improve his algorithm.

The show follows Richard Hendricks (Creator/ThomasMiddleditch), a meek computer programmer who develops a revolutionary lossless file compression algorithm.[[note]]which he creates when inspiration hits him after listening to his friends discuss the logistics of jerking off several hundred people (hypothetically)[[/note]] His invention quickly sparks a bidding war between Gavin Belson (Creator/MattRoss), the CEO of a Google-like MegaCorp, and Peter Gregory (Creator/ChristopherEvanWelch), a billionaire tech investor. Richard decides to refuse Gavin's quick payout of $10 million and use Gregory's investment capital to create a start-up around his new product. He soon finds himself in over his head as he struggles to build a potential billion-dollar business and beat a vengeful Gavin to market.

The show follows Richard Hendricks (Creator/ThomasMiddleditch), a meek computer programmer who inadvertently creates a lossless file compression algorithm. His invention quickly sparks a bidding war between Gavin Belson (Creator/MattRoss), the CEO of a Google-like MegaCorp, and Peter Gregory (Creator/ChristopherEvanWelch), a billionaire tech investor. Richard decides to refuse Gavin's quick payout of $10 million and use Gregory's investment capital to create a start-up around his new product. He soon finds himself in over his head as he struggles to build a potential billion-dollar business and beat a vengeful Gavin to market.

* ArtisticLicenseLaw: One provision of a contract being found unenforceable does not void the contract. Instead, the court will simply ignore the offending provision and enforce the rest of the contract without it.

** Gilfoyle was highly annoyed at the smart fridge that Jian bought for the house, and had to figure a way to brute force his way into the OS system in order to change the settings and underlying programming as a prank war revenge. [[spoiler: Because he used the Pied Piper software to do it, he inadvertently uploaded the code into the smart fridge network and they served as the decentralized network for the insurance company. After an episode scrambling to keep the network up at all costs and failing, this not only saved them from losing their only customer but was the first proof of concept that their system was working]].

* StatusQuoIsGod: After four seasons, Pied Piper is still the same small group of programmers trying to scrape by in Erlich's house. TJ Miller cited this trope as the primary reason he left the show and hoped Erlich's departure would shake things up for the better. Things change a bit in season 5, when Pied Piper finally gets substantial funding, their own offices and a staff of programmers that last more than two episodes.

* TheEndOrIsIt: The final scene of the series is [[spoiler: Richard sharing with a documentary crew that he still has a copy of the original Pied Piper code (which, unknown to the world, can render all encryption useless). However, he can't find the thumb drive and the final shot is him open ymusing "where is it?"]]

** When Pied Piper manages to develop a platform for their algorithm to shine, they start passing it around to a number of close friends for beta testing. They get glowing reviews across the board, except for Monica who expresses concern about being over engineered. Figuring she was an outlier they release the platform to the public, only to find that despite high downloads few people were not sticking with it. It turns out in their beta testing they passed it around to the people they know, which was almost exclusively tech engineers who were able to recognize the significance of what they had built. To regular people, like Monica, the system was so advanced they couldn't comprehend what they were dealing with. No amount of advertising and group surveys could fix the fact the general public couldn't see it for what it was, the only feature that took off was the video chat because the technical improvement was more recognizable.

* PragmaticVillainy: After Peter Gregory's death, Laurie Bream takes him places as the main venture capitalist advisor for the group. While very competent in her own right Monica has to warn Richard that she lacks Peter's more balanced sensibilities and is more interested in the projects than cultivating the people (she overbids for Pied Piper to keep working with them, but in doing so if they dip in value one quarter it may implode their stock at whim). She uses shrewd business manipulation to replace Richard as CEO for a time because she was concerned about his list of mistakes, and generally becomes more antagonistic as the series progresses until they officially cut ties. [[spoiler: In the TimeSkip of the GrandFinale she is shown to be in prison, but it is never explained why]].

* PragmaticVillany: After Peter Gregory's death, Laurie Bream takes him places as the main venture capitalist advisor for the group. While very competent in her own right Monica has to warn Richard that she lacks Peter's more balanced sensibilities and is more interested in the projects than cultivating the people (she overbids for Pied Piper to keep working with them, but in doing so if they dip in value one quarter it may implode their stock at whim). She uses shrewd business manipulation to replace Richard as CEO for a time because she was concerned about his list of mistakes, and generally becomes more antagonistic as the series progresses until they officially cut ties. [[spoiler: In the TimeSkip of the GrandFinale she is shown to be in prison, but it is never explained why]].

** Ron [=LaFlamme=], Pied Piper's corporate lawyer, is a solid example, as he is eccentric and [[MellowFellow super laid-back]] but still an excellent lawyer.
** Pied Piper acquires the services of Pete Monahan, a litigator who'll work on contingency. We're led to believe he'll be comically incompetent, especially because [[WithFriendsLikeThese the aforementioned Ron [=LaFlamme=] recommended him]], but he's actually quite skilled and professional. The reason they got him for so cheap is that he was ''disbarred after a downward spiral of drugs, criminal activity and eventually prison.'' As stated, he's a perfectly capable litigator, except that he seemingly can't stop bringing up his DarkAndTroubledPast at ''every'' opportunity.

* PerpetualPoverty: The first four seasons of the show has the Pied Piper team as always having barely enough funding to last until the end of the season, and demonstrates repeatedly how similar companies can get millions of dollars just before imploding. In the second episode Richard started buying some things for the team on credit believing he was about to get a $200,000 investment from Peter Gregory, but realized he needed to properly incorporate Pied Piper as well as buy the rights to the name from a farmer. This forced him to return a margarita maker so he had enough money to buy the name, and THEN get the investment funds.