History Series / SiliconValley

* BigBrotherIsWatching: PlayedForLaughs in "Sand Hill Shuffle":

** Ariel, one of Pied Piper's "Octopipers," is in love with his AI android.

* When Jared calls out Jeff for being the Rat he says "What's with you and being a rat '''fuck'''?
* When a camper tells Dinesh to shut up, Jared casually leans over and says, "How would you like to die, motherfucker?"
* PretendPrejudice: Gilfoyle tells several racist jokes to Dinesh and Jian-Yang, especially the former, but he's not actually bigoted against any race, he just does it to piss them off.

* HidingBehindTheLanguageBarrier: In a sense; Erlich tries to hoodwink the investors by selling them a Shazam-like app for food, then silencing Jian Yang's objections by speaking to him in Mandarin. (Erlich does not actually speak Mandarin.) He has it turned around on him when another investor actually can speak Mandarin with Jian Yang.

** Erlich isn't immune to this, either. In Season 3, while trying to kick Jian Yang out of the Incubator, Erlich runs his mouth off and accidentally tells Jian-Yang of California's occupants' rights protections and how difficult it is for property owners to evict tenants, leading to Jian-Yang exploiting this loophole to become TheThingThatWouldNotLeave. He then has one of his companies stolen by the very students he was trying to use as free labor.

** Jian Yang states, "Yes, Japanese racist. They horrible people."

-->'''Jian Yang:''' "I don’t want to talk to Gilfoyle, he’s racist and a witch”

* InterchangeableAsianCultures: Erlich acknowledges up front that he's giving the Chinese Jian Yang a Japanese kimono. It's not because he thinks Chinese and Japanese are the same, as he did the same ceremony with Richard.

* PrecisionFStrike: When a camper tells Dinesh to shut up, Jared casually leans over and says, "How would you like to die, motherfucker?"

** Erlich states that Christianity is frowned upon in California. In Season 5, Richard asks Dee Dee if his parents know he's Christian. His answer? "Nope, they're from Palo Alto".

** While not as great a programmer as Richard or Gilfoyle, Dinesh is still a very talented coder. But his ego, especially in the later seasons, often end up making him do terrible decisions. Best exemplified when he forgot to port over the terms and services to Piperchat, resulting in COPPA fines totalling up to about 21 billion dollars.

* DrJerk: The unnamed doctor played by Creator/AndrewDaly is always cheerfully rude, condescending or otherwise upsetting to Richard.

** Richard Hendricks is an extremely talented programmer who has the ability to redesign an entire platform literally overnight. He also lacks basic common sense and has ''very'' poor decision-making skills.
** Jared Dunn is a highly skilled business manager, who speaks with a high vocabulary, and is essential in keeping Pied Piper work productively and professionally. But he is helplessly clumsy and is quite inept when it comes to casual human conversation. His ExtremeDoormat nature, out of nowhere references to pop-culture and utterly bizzare recollections of his DarkAndTroubledPast often make him a complete social alien.

* UnsympatheticComedyProtagonists: The Pied Piper gang become this as the show goes on. With all of them, yes even Jared, resorting to some incredibly shady things and backstabbing to get their company running.

* HollywoodHomely: The inhabitants of the Hacker Hostel are mostly meant to be seen as rather unattractive to the point that it's quite a big deal when one of them gets a girlfriend. The main actors however, really aren't all that ugly.
** Gilfoyle in particular is played by Creator/MartinStarr, who gives the character a subdued [[NerdsAreSexy hot nerd]] vibe, with the only "ugliness" being his unkemptness.
** Jared is seen as almost anorexically thin in-universe, some characters even say he's akin to a skeleton. Making it a shock when it turns he's TheCasanova. But his actor Creator/ZachWoods looks like a relatively fit person.
** Richard is described as ugly by many characters but Creator/ThomasMiddleditch looks average at worst.

** InUniverse, Pied Piper changes their corporate focus about OnceASeason as they try to find the optimal market to utilize the algorithm. They started with cloud based compression, but knowing they couldn't keep up with Hooli's diverse functions Richard created Middle-Out and they shifted to livestream optimization in an attempt to build brand awareness and capital, while the third season they focused on building a "platform" in the sense of a functional operating system but only finding modest success in the videochat function. The last three seasons saw them working out the details of a [[TheAlternet decentralized internet]] after working out a proof of concept in a decentralized server database.

* TeenGenius: Kevin "The Carver" is a teenager who hacked into the Bank of America and took down the system. [[spoiler:[[SubvertedTrope Subverted.]] Turns out he was actually just a consultant there who accidentally crashed the entire system from the inside. Though even then, this subversion is actually {{Downplayed}}, as his skills on the developing the cloud remain impressive.]]

* GrammarNazi: Richard spoils his own triumphant moment over Endframe when he corrects the Intersite CEO's use of "who" instead of "whom."

* ChromosomeCasting: The first season Monica was the only female cast member, and she and Laurie in season two remained for the rest of the series. It's mentioned several times that programmers are overwhelmingly male, about 95%, and the show acknowledges this every time they introduce a female coder.

* TeenGenius: Kevin "The Carver" is a teenager who hacked into the Bank of America and took down the system. [[spoiler:[[SubvertedTrope Subverted.]] Turns out he was actually just a consultant there who accidentally crashed the entire system from the inside. Though even then, this subversion is actually {{Downplayed}}, as his skills on the developing the cloud remain admired.]]

* TeenGenius: Kevin "The Carver" is a teenager who hacked into the Bank of America and took down the system. [[spoiler:[[SubvertedTrope Subverted.]] Turns out he was actually just a consultant there who accidentally crashed the entire system from the inside.]]

** Another exchange when Erlich outs Monica smoking: