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What "Silicon Valley" tells you about life, business and success

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Vikram Johri
Vikram JohriDec 22, 2014 | 11:50

What "Silicon Valley" tells you about life, business and success

The reason Silicon Valley, a new sitcom that premiered in the US this year, became so famous so fast was its brilliant simulation of the life of young geeks hoping to chance upon the next big technology product. The show reminded me of everything that my peers at B-school had drilled into my head about the cult of Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt. From its socially awkward geeks to its tales of sudden success, Silicon Valley channels into our collective expectations of what those nerds get up to when they are put before a couple of computers to work up the magic.

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Like every other year, talk of eight-figure salaries as the placement season got going at IITs and IIMs started making the rounds of newspapers. If at one time it was the banking and FMCG space that jumped the queue to pick up the best and the brightest, now the companies offering the most mindboggling perks come from the frontline of technology. It is not uncommon to see the likes of Google and Facebook being offered the highly coveted Day-Zero slot by campuses keen to exploit the corporate rush. Who was it that said it is love that makes the world go around? Clearly, he had never been to Silicon Valley.

In episode one of the show, we meet Richard who is being given grief by his VC over a product called Pied Piper. The product, as envisaged by Richard, can help a musician figure out if his composition violates any copyright by comparing it with a database of hundreds of thousands of songs. Of course, the product has little salability but the algorithm behind it, which can search through compressed files, is new and possibly - we hear this word a lot - "game-changing". By the end of the first season, we find ourselves cheering for Richard who, under intense scrutiny, chose to sell only part of his stake in Pied Paper rather than cash out.

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Silicon Valley is a comedy but watching it can be disquieting. It has a bunch of young engineers fresh out of college - or better, dropouts - who move around in a haze of expectant success which is promised to them by every guy next door running an incubator. Most of these men - they are no more than adolescents really - are great at coding, but are at sea when it comes to the commercial applications of their ideas. And this is where they open themselves up to misuse and manipulation. Their journey from tyros to millionaires happens in no time and it is only later that they wonder what hit them.

The show was especially disconcerting for me because the milieu, though so different, was also strikingly similar to my experience at B-school. Talk of money on the show was as loose as the desire to measure one's success by it was on campus. The two years I spent there were a lesson in how to spend every waking moment thinking ahead to that day when companies will hunker down to select the best among us. It was a sort of Hunger Games, with the best prize reserved for the most ruthless.

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Offered mega-bucks for his idea, Richard at first loses his bearings and has to be rushed to a doctor. Which is funny, since the desire for lucre is the premise on which the tech industry is based. Similarly, the discovery of one's financial potential is the bedrock of a B-school education. Curiously, both are couched in humanistic balderdash, the word "change" in particular done to death.

It is proper then that the makers of Silicon Valley see through the cracks and end up not endorsing the mercenary nature of the tech trade. Worried perhaps that the tone might get too scornful for comedy, they choose to redeem the show by the close of Season One. Richard, innocence lost, has by now come to fully accept the rules by which Silicon Valley plays and is prepared to dive headlong into the commercial potential of Pied Piper. But as he battles it out with a competitor for supremacy, he lights upon an idea that takes him back to his coding roots - one that is gratifyingly accepted by his enterprise customers.

It is a nice touch because it retains some of the initial promise of the show and prevents it from nodding vigorously to cynicism. The real world? That's another matter. On campus, you may have been the star student who arrives at estimates with a negligible margin of error. You may have spent entire semesters discussing the merits of p-value, a tiny monster that determines the validity of a hypothesis. But come placement day, and if you cannot convert your academic rigour into silken swagger, you will be gratefully shown the door.

Last updated: December 22, 2014 | 11:50
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