Silicon Valley residents got to meet the actors behind HBO’s sleeper comedy Silicon Valley this past weekend. At SF Sketchfest, four of them took the stage as the “Pied Piper Panel” to field questions from the tech world.
Pied Piper is the fake company featured in the show, a startup that takes huge files and crunches them into nothing so that they can be downloaded super fast. Thomas Middleditch plays founder Richard Hendriks, T.J. Miller plays their crazy incubator head Erlich, Kumail Nanjiani and Zach Woods play Pied Piper employees Dinesh and Jared.
Re/code reports that Miller especially took to skewering the Valley. You might know him from his time on Chelsea Lately, where poking fun was the game of the day: “I love being in the Bay Area,” he said. “It feels like you guys have got a real handle on reality. Fairly representational of the United States as a whole.”
Apparently the audience loved it. Fans took to a Q&A session, which drove Miller to quip that the audience was the exact target they were making fun of in Silicon Valley. When talk turned to what Google owned around Mountain View, one audience member said that they bought his former elementary school to turn it into a charter school for employees’ kids.
“Oh that’s awesome,” Miller said. “Finally, some white kids get an opportunity.”
For those who may have missed HBO and director Mike Judge’s play on one of the most influential segments of our American culture today, the comedy will start up again sometime this spring.
Here’s the trailer from season one:
