If you caught the most recent episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley, Richard Hendricks was faced with a difficult decision based on an action by one of his employees, Bertram Gilfoyle.
A new competitor in the compression space named END | FRAME emerged the previous episode when the Pied Piper team backed out of a partnership with the energy drink company Homicide. However, after looking up the company, the Pied Pier team quickly recognized the END | FRAME team as the ‘vulture’ capitalists that ‘stole’ Pied Piper’s technology during an investor meeting.
Outraged, Richard and team went to END | FRAME’s offices and confronted them. Greeted in a meeting room with pictures and drawings of Pied Piper’s team and technology, the END | FRAME team quickly noted that it doesn’t matter if their technology was inferior, since they were the only middle-out compression technology actually on the market. The scene quickly cut to the Pied Piper team shown something they lacked by design, a giant END | FRAME sales team already working a large number of enterprise deals.
Later in the episode, as the Pied Pier team discussed an option to be ‘dissolved’ into END | FRAME, an effort initiated by their eccentric ‘billionare’ investor, Gilfoyle proposed going down the ‘left lane’ as he had all the details to END | FRAME’s largest contract deal (~$15M) with a porn company named Intersite, requiring months of product and Service Level Agreement negotations. The source of this information, as the picture indicates, came from the END | FRAME CEO’s office, where Gilfoyle snatched a post-it note that had the username and password to his email account.
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