'Silicon Valley' stars riff on satirizing tech world for the last time at SF's final season premiere

(L-R) Dick Costolo, Managing Partner at 01 Advisors, moderates a panel with actors Matt Ross, Thomas Middleditch, show creator Mike Judge, writer Alec Berg, actors Amanda Crew, Martin Starr, and Zach Woods onstage on October 16, 2019 in San Francisco, California. less (L-R) Dick Costolo, Managing Partner at 01 Advisors, moderates a panel with actors Matt Ross, Thomas Middleditch, show creator Mike Judge, writer Alec Berg, actors Amanda Crew, Martin Starr, and Zach Woods ... more Photo: Kelly Sullivan/FilmMagic For HBO Photo: Kelly Sullivan/FilmMagic For HBO Image 1 of / 32 Caption Close 'Silicon Valley' stars riff on satirizing tech world for the last time at SF's final season premiere 1 / 32 Back to Gallery

There was a lot of money in the room at Lucasfilm.

That was the consensus among the stars of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” who discussed the show’s final season in a room on Letterman Drive in San Francisco’s Presidio Wednesday night, while looking out into a room of tech personalities, CEOs and HBO execs.

Matt Ross, who plays the megalomaniacal Hooli CEO Gavin Belson on the show actually does live in the Bay Area, but that doesn’t mean he can relate to having that kind of wealth.

“The truth is, [being on the show] really hasn’t changed my life,” he said. “I’m not a billionaire — that’s the great tragedy. I’d love to change that.”

On a panel, held after the show’s final season premiere in San Francisco, Ross was joined by show creator Mike Judge, producer Alec Berg and four more of the show’s stars: Thomas Middleditch (Richard Hendricks), Martin Starr (Bertram Gilfoyle), Amanda Crew (Monica Hall), and Zach Woods (Jared Dunn). Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who served as a consultant on the show for HBO, led as moderator. (Kumail Nanjiani, now a “Marvel movie guy,” is currently filming 2020’s “The Eternals.”)

“Can we just go around and give our net worth?” Middleditch asked the audience. “Just to get it out of the way?”

In the final season, the actor plays Pied Piper creator Richard Hendricks, a now-scrappy tech CEO leading his fledgling company from operating as a start-up to building what he calls “a new internet.”

That role has netted him some real fans, and Middleditch says it has prompted some people to approach him.

“They either say, ‘Oh we have a Gilfoyle in our office,” he says, nodding to Starr’s deadpan engineer character. “[Or] it’s, 'I can’t watch it because it makes me relive the trauma from my startup [days].' I’ll take both of those.”

As Berg and Judge revealed, the production did try to understand the inner-workings of that Silicon Valley anxiety. They consulted tech employees — many of whom were in the audience — and toured several giant companies, like Google and Facebook.

The problem, they found, was that after the show had premiered, they got a different kind of treatment. At first, Judge recalled, they were briskly whisked through tech offices. Eventually, by the time companies caught on to who they were and what they were doing, they received tours from media relations — whom he calls the “spin people.”

The show has nevertheless been eerily successful in emulating Silicon Valley tech life, and in at least one case, guiding it. The show at one point had enlisted Stanford professor Tsachy Weissman — who was also in the audience — to create the “Weissman Score” with his graduate student Vinith Misra. The score purported to measure the effectiveness of compression software for Hendricks’ Pied Piper in the fictional “Silicon Valley," but it's ended up taking on its own life in the tech world since.

Such uncanny moments have led the series to take a more serious approach to satirizing the tech industry, as Berg explains.

“The first season of the show was about a small group of outsiders battling against a business that was smug and lacked self-awareness,” he said. “It’s become, in a weird way, about people literally trying to save the world from people trying to tear the fabric of the world. It’s a different objective. It used to be about making money; now it’s about preventing the destruction of society.”

The final season of “Silicon Valley” premieres on HBO Oct. 27, 2019.

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGate digital editor. Email: apereira@sfchronicle.com | Twitter: @alyspereira

