Silicon Valley

Mike Judge worked as an engineer in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s and hated it, and the series is written from that and from extensive access to the current version. What it is about, specifically: the funding ladder from seed to Series A and what each round does to a founder's control, the valuation logic in which a company with no revenue is worth more than one with some, acquihires, patent trolling, the conference demo day, and the mission statements about making the world a better place. People in the industry treat it as documentary, which is the strongest evidence for the claim: the running joke is that its most absurd inventions kept being overtaken by real products.

Mike Judge's comedy follows a start-up founded on a compression algorithm, satirising the technology industry of the Bay Area, its investors and its culture, which Judge knew from working as an engineer there.