The episode doesn’t bomb, but in the spirit of not dumping on my peers, I’ll restrict myself to providing a plot summary.
After a pathetically bad launch party, depicted with depressing verisimilitude, Richard, the 10x coder behind Pied Piper, fails in his first meeting with Peter Gregory aka Thiel. 10x is valley-speak for a coder who produces 10 times as much code as the average guy. Erlich advises Richard to be an asshole. Gavin’s, aka Sergey’s, assistant quits Hooli to join PP, bringing some business expertise, or at least knowledge of discounted cash flows, to the team. Team members jockey for stock and promote themselves, although Richard’s sub-1x coding best friend BigHead dumps on himself, and sets himself up to be fired. Before it’s done Gavin offers him $600k salary to stay at Hooli. That’s a big number. Seems high to me, and I’ve heard about ridiculous salaries for Engineering Directors. If it’s real, now you know where your advertising dollars are going. You are a hell of a product! Anyway, Richard learns to be more of an asshole. Gavin launches a project to reverse engineer Pied Piper based on a demo Richard had given the brogrammers.
Author of Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley
The Silicon Valley Novel 
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