"You're hot, you're sued, then the guy suing you offers you a buyout, am I right?" Enter billionaire Russ Hanneman (Chris Diamantopoulos), driving a bright orange McLaren, a kind character who's in the vein of a hot-air blowing Mark Cuban idiot. And he's summarized the plot correctly.
Though Richard was prepared to throw in the towel and accept a Hooli buyout, Hanneman convinces him, over some $800 Korean beef, to do what he wants rather than what's advisable. As Richard tells the Pied Piper team, parroting Hanneman, that's to be "a self-centered irrational asshole that doesn't compromise on anything at all ever." Yes, Hanneman wants to invest $5 million in Pied Piper, despite the lawsuit, which doesn't faze him. “I got three nannies suing me right now," he says, "one of them for no reason.” With Hanneman onboard, Pied Piper is saved, for the moment.
Monica re: Russ.
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Hanneman is a horrible person. Dinesh later describes him as "the worst man in America, and now he owns us." But that provides an interesting antidote to the ways others typically exert their wealth and power in Silicon Valley and the region it describes. As Hanneman puts it, "Guys in this town don't have the balls to drive a car like this. They're billionaires and they drive fucking Priuses. Why?" To that, Richard mumbles in response, "I think mostly environmental concerns."
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Yep, being a billionaire ain't easy, and the best part of Episode 3 is basically a direct retelling of one of the crazier incidents in recent Valley history. Tom Perkins, a founder of the venture capital boys club Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, famously sent a letter in to the The Wall Street Journal last year that read: "Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its 'one percent,' namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich.'"
So, yeah, it's a gimme to have Hooli CEO Gavin Belson deliver that same sentiment at a conference with Kara Swisher, the real-life co-executive editor of Re/code. "Billionaires are people too," says Belson defensively, "We are leaders in technology and industry. Look at history. Do you know who else vilified a tiny group of financiers and progressive thinkers called the Jews?" In fact, when pushed, he continues. “You could argue that billionaires are actually treated worse, and we didn’t even do anything wrong.” In an apology effort later, Belson meets with a group of Jewish leaders and tells them he's hoping to build a replica of the Yad Vashem Holocaust wall of names "right next to the bike shop.”
Meanwhile, Hanneman meets with Pied Piper, where he interacts terribly with everyone except Erlich, who actually wants to be his bro and traigi-comically for Erlich, Hanneman completely ignores him. “Hey what’s up Al Qaeda?" he says to Dinesh right off the bat. "No, I’m totally kidding, I’m defusing the tension with humor . But seriously, no beheadings though.” Although he says he'll be a be a "fly on the wall," Hanneman is actually a nightmare in the boardroom. “Do you really talk like that?” he asks Richard. “Like how you’re talking, is that real? Wow.”
When Richard explains that he'd like to release a subscription model, Hanneman jumps at the business faux pas. "Why would you go after revenue?“If you show revenue, people will ask how much, and it will never be enough. “It’s not about how much you earn but what you’re worth. And who's worth the most? Companies that lose money. Pinterest, Snapchat, no revenue. Amazon has lost money for the last 20 years, and that Bezos motherfucker is the king!" As long as Richard and Pied Piper don't seek success in the traditional business sense, they can say they're "pre-revenue," leaving the rest up to the imagination.
For better or worse, and it certainly looks like it's for worse, Pied Piper is now partly Russ Hanneman's company. Laurie Bream isn't happy about it, and in fact no one is. I'm not particularly happy about it myself, because although the point of Hanneman is to be an annoyance, he succeeds all too well. It's difficult to watch him onscreen, and his boorishness is pretty repulsive. I prefer the Prius drivers, I guess?
"Do you know what that means?"
"Does it mean taking a stack of cash and lighting it on fire?"
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— Silicon Valley (@SiliconHBO) April 27, 2015
Previously: Silicon Valley Recap: Bros Disclose