It might be a rare thing to get your tech company referenced on “Saturday Night Live,” but on “Silicon Valley,” it’s pretty much a weekly occurrence. Sunday night on the HBO comedy, the company of note was Seattle-based startup PitchBook.
The 9-year-old venture capital data company, with offices in Seattle, New York and London, got its mention during a scene with Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller), the doofus who leads the tech incubator on the show.
Bachman and his clueless venture partner, Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti, are confronted by two students during a computer science class at Stanford University, where Bachman has been trying to get students to scrape food images for an app he is creating called “SeeFood.”
Male student: “We searched your name on PitchBook, and that SeeFood app you got funded at Raviga popped up.”
Erlich: “PitchBook? How do you have access to PitchBook?”
Male student: “Your idea was so simple, it was like something you could come up with in the room during the meeting.”
Female student: “Which is what Garrett from Coleman Blair told us at the CS undergrad mixer on Friday.”
Garrett (from back of classroom): “Hey, Erlich! Here I am. Class of ’06. Go Cardinal!”
Bighetti: “Go Cardinal.”
Male student: “Anyways, we founded our own ‘Shazam for Food’ company, and he’s funding us.”
Garrett: “Mm-hmm.”
Bighetti: “Whoa, congrats!”
Erlich: “Wait, that’s stealing.”
Woman student: “No. That’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg did to the Winklevi in that Facebook movie Professor Bighetti had us watch. And he was the hero of that film.”
Male student: “And with all of us working together, we’ll easily beat you to market.”
Erlich: “So that’s how it goes, huh? You steal a man’s idea, rendering his company worthless? I’ve read a number of disparaging articles about your generation, in The Atlantic and Slate.com summaries. It’s all true. Trigger warning: F*ck you!”
PitchBook sells research and data — along with the tools to access this information — for people interested in private equity, venture capital deals, and M&A transactions. Media outlets, including GeekWire, also cite PitchBook data in stories related to investment dollars.
In an email to GeekWire on Monday, a PitchBook rep said, “If anything, it goes to show you the dominance of the platform in tech hubs as a way to keep the entire investing ecosystem informed and accountable.”
