When we say that a television show is “realistic,” what do we mean? Must the drug corners on The Wire resemble the streets of Baltimore? Do the mimetic set pieces on Mad Men engender more cinéma vérité than its sexual politics? How representative must The West Wing be of the West Wing, or Empire of hip-hop, or MASH of Korea, or The Hills of hell? And does realism even equate with quality?

I cannot answer these questions. But this I can say: In the history of dramatic and comedic television, no show has more closely hewn to the real world than HBO’s Silicon Valley.

Hear me out.

Nearly anyone in west coast tech will attest to the show’s eerie verisimilitude, even when (or especially when) the fictional characters embody the worst traits of brogrammers, wantrepreneurs, and VC sociopaths. Silicon Valley is nearly a simulacrum of Sand Hill Road, or as the CEO of Snapchat described it “basically a documentary.”

As usual, the cofounder of Box, whose quips so often resemble those of a fictional character, nails the zeitgeist:

Even the Valley’s renowned venture capitalists seem bemused by the show’s hyperrealism, to the point of melding fact and fiction:

How did a half-hour comedy on premium cable peg the Valley so precisely? Through simple tautology: Hooli is Google, Bro is Yo, Nippler is Titstare.

The plots of Silicon Valley are certainly vivid, but the characters are where realism transcends its lifelike setting. More than mere composites of real people, the characters are often actual real people. Kara Swisher, Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg, Evan Spiegel, Walt Mossberg, and the Winklevii now have IMDB credits, as themselves. And it works in the reverse too: Fictional characters like Big Head and Erlich have real Crunchbase and LinkedIn profiles. In this slippery realm, betwixt fact and fiction, scientific papers are published about imaginary calculations and platforms like Quora are jammed with reality-bending threads, like “Is Richard Hendricks a good CEO?”

Perhaps the most evocative blurring belongs to Michael Arrington, the founder of Techcrunch Disrupt, who has a cameo in an episode at Techcrunch Disrupt, but then actually interviewed the cast at the real Techcrunch Disrupt, a competition the Pied Piper team won back in the fictional universe depicted on the show.

This season alone, Silicon Valley has consulted with over 250 tech insiders, and the show’s creators readily acknowledge their debt to real Silicon Valley. “The writers in that room are much more like journalists,” writer Dan Lyons recently told Recode (aka Coderag). “We don’t really have to make anything up. All we have to do is present what we see.” This is bananas for many reasons, including: Lyons is also a former editor of a tech blog, Valleywag, and the creator of a satiric Silicon Valley persona, Fake Steve Jobs, which… help! the walls of reality are collapsing!

Clearly, we need a cheat sheet to decode this farrago of fact and fiction. So here it is, The Official Guide to SVCU (Silicon Valley Cinematic Universe):

Our protagonist, Richard Hendricks, is one of the few characters of SVCU whose persona is mostly derived not from a single person, but an entire cadre of people — those on-the-spectrum Valley Boys who code their way to soylent and mana. (You know the type — the humorless gelded wunderkinds who will undoubtedly smear the “accuracy” of this article on Hacker News.) Because the hoodied typology shares traits with certain renowned tech totalitarians, like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, they together amass a sizable slice of the personality pie.

This season’s principal storyline, which involves Hendricks’ ouster in favor of a more experienced CEO, might lead your detective prowess astray, to consider a resemblance to Steve Jobs, who was once ousted from Apple. But as Hendricks himself opines in the first episode: “Jobs was a poser. He didn’t even write code.” The Wozniak is strong in this one.

But a spate of the evidence points toward a more modern exemplar of the Triumphant Return trope: Jack Dorsey, the Twitter cofounder who relinquished his CEO throne in 2008 only to vanquish his usurpers last year. In an uncanny blurring of fact and fiction, Dorsey defiantly replaced his Tweep foe, Dick Costolo, who then found employment as a writing consultant for Silicon Valley. (Costolo’s transition from executive to scribe is so incredibly bizarre, it defies almost any comparison. It’s like if Barack Obama became a Breitbart correspondent after his presidency.)

Proving that fact is stranger than fiction, but that fanfic conquers all, the (nonfictional) founder of Firefox, Blake Ross, wrote a (fictional) spec script of Silicon Valley in which Hendricks seeks out (nonfictional?) Dorsey to take over Pied Piper.

A tedious footnote: Many Quora contributors have observed that Hendricks bears a visual resemblance to the CEO of Quora, Adam D’Angelo, but that just illustrates how daft those Quora dweebs are.

Key Quote: "I dropped out of college. Maybe I should re-enroll and drop out again. Try and get the money."



“Fiction,” William Faulkner once observed, “is often the best fact.” Or in the case of Gavin Belson, the worst.

Belson reminds us that a mercenary business style is a prerequisite of the Silicon Valley Evil Genius, but also reveals another requirement: having your own personal Asian spiritual guru. Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, and Steve Jobs were all devotees of eastern philosophy — and a faith in alternative medicine even hastened Jobs’ death.

Larry Ellison, who, like Belson, has a reputation for relentlessly lawyering up (Oracle v. SAP, Oracle v. Google, Oracle v. HP, etc.), would certainly have compelled Hooli to sue Pied Piper into oblivion. Plus, Oracle bears a prosodic similarity to Nucleus.

But Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO who is militant about meditation, receives the largest pie portion, mostly for the promotional video in which Belson discusses his vision for Hooli while saving children in Africa:

Even Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti asserted that Belson is “clearly patterned” on Benioff. Plus, there is this clever boolean: Beni__off__ || Bels__on__.

But of course the tenacious cofounders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are in sum the ultimate influence, with Sergey receiving an extra point for donning five finger trainers.

(Sidenote: One pivotal Belson scene is cribbed from legendary venture capitalist Tom Perkins. The KPCB cofounder wrote an actual op-ed to the Wall Street Journal comparing the treatment of tech billionaires to the Jews in Nazi Germany. In the show, Gavin Belson practically recites the letter, adding “One could argue that billionaires are actually treated worse, and we didn’t even do anything wrong.”)

Key Quote: "I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are."



Denizens of the Valley meatspace love to ask, “Is Peter Gregory more like Peter Thiel or Paul Graham?” Or to put it in pseudo-pseudocode:

(Peter Gregory == Peter Thiel) || (__P__eter __G__regory == __P__aul __G__raham)

Scant evidence exists to support the PG == PG theory. For starters, unlike Thiel, Graham actually believes in college, and he’s not a member of the three comma club. Plus, Peter Gregory was an angel investor, whereas Graham founded a startup accelerator (huuuuge difference!). However, Graham still gets π² of the pie for embodying the role of circumspect philosopher king, despite occasionally propagating economic fucknuttery.

The Silicon Valley rivalry between Peter Gregory and Gavin Belson is a textbook high-tech clash, resembling countless broheim brouhahas through the ages. In this case, we’ll give π² points to Paul Allen, not only for an oddly similar feud with nemesis Bill Gates, but for another ominous real-world coincidence: the actor who played Peter Gregory died of cancer, whereas Paul Allen survived stage four lymphoma. While he thought he might die, Allen wrote a book deeply criticizing Gates, which is a total Peter Gregory dick move.

But of course, the eccentric libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel is the real wizard behind Ayn Rand’s curtain. Just as fictional Peter Gregory created the micronation island Arallon, real Peter Thiel launched the Seasteading Institute. And if the TED Talk announcing the Gregory Fellowship seems spookily legit, that’s because a real Thiel Fellowship offers $100,000 to kids who will drop out of college. (Even their speech patterns seem similar.)

In recent episodes, a new storyline in which Gavin Belson scrubs search results of negative press and threatens to sue Coderag (note: 50% Valleywag / 50% Recode) seems remarkably similar to Gawker Media getting sued by Peter Thiel, who is actually quasi-real person Hulk Hogan.

Man, this is confusing.

Key Quote: "College has become a cruel expensive joke on the poor and the middle class that benefits only the perpetrators of it."



If you put Raviga Capital’s managing partner Laurie Bream on stage with a 200-slide deck, the punctilious venture capitalist might resemble Mary Meeker, the renowned KPCB partner who releases her internet trends presentation every year with cybernetic precision.

Ellen Pao, another KPCB VC, likely influenced Bream too, but in ways that again elide fact and fiction. During its first season, Silicon Valley was heavily criticized for unequal gender representation, which happened to coincide with Pao suing her venture firm employer for sexual discrimination. Although she doesn’t physically or tonally resemble the fictional Raviga partner, Pao’s suit against KPCB mirrored the show in an uncanny way.

But the plurality of points must be apportioned to Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO who enunciates in a similar alien voice, makes cutthroat decisions based on metrics, and has difficulty holding eye contact with subordinates. And so, a majority of this pie turns #780099 (Yahoo hex purple) in her honor.

Key Quote: "This exchange is now over. Thank you."



This one’s peculiar.

After being ousted as the CEO of Twitter, a $10 billion Silicon Valley company, Dick Costolo became a writing consultant on Silicon Valley, a cable TV show. That’s weird! But then he allowed his demise at Twitter to metastasize into plot fodder this season. That’s really weird!! But we’re not even to weirdest part: Costolo’s fictional doppelganger is a pointy-headed villain!!!

Jack Barker is undoubtedly an amalgam of the many sinister tech henchmen who replaced founders — a few bytes of John Sculley, the Pepsi exec who became CEO of Apple after Steve Jobs was ejected, and a whole lotta Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO who was the quintessential salesman without product vision. Whereas Barker peddles “The Box,” Ballmer notoriously dismissed the iPhone while focusing on, ugh, enterprise sales. (It’s also gleefully easy to imagine Barker chanting developers, developers, developers.)

A bit of repressed Google lore: the search giant once shipped an enterprise search server dubbed the Google Search Appliance. It was a box. And cha-ching, before his stint at Twitter, Costolo worked at Google for two years.

Key Quote: "I paid $150k for the semen that's about to come out of that stallion and I'd very much like to be there to see that it happens."



Erlich Bachman is 0% Steve Jobs, though he desperately wants to be 100%.

Bachman started the incubator Hacker Hostel, seemingly based on the real hacker hostel (which was notably created by two women). His love of the ganja is reminiscent of party boy Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and former president of Facebook, who has made large investments in pot legalization.

Dave McClure, who runs a startup accelerator (actually) called 500 Startups, and who starred in a reality show about startups (actually) called Bazillion Dollar Club, also seems an influence, as does angel investor Alexis Ohanian who emerged from the accelerator Y Combinator and helped create the flight-booking site Hipmunk, which is vaguely similar to Bachman’s Aviato.

But for our reality-blurring purposes, the most provocative moment for this character occurred outside the show. At an awards show (actually) called The Crunchies, emcee T.J. Miller smashed the fourth wall by essentially recreating Bachman’s crass sexism on stage. The satire was widely rebuked, perhaps because the fiction was too real.

Key Quote: "If you're not an asshole, it creates this kind of asshole vacuum, and that void is filled by other assholes."



The youngest associate partner in Raviga’s history, Monica Hall bears a remarkable resemblance to a real venture capitalist, Megan Quinn, who has worked at both Spark Capital and KPCB. Others have apparently noticed the resemblance:

But the pedigree of another figure looms: Jessica Verrilli (aka @jess), who checks off two boxes — running corporate development at Twitter and a stint at Google Ventures. She also “can’t disagree” about the likeness:

Lauren Goode, a reporter at Recode, was also in the running, but took herself out of contention and surrendered her delegates to Quinn:

Key Quote: "People may take credit for your idea and try and sue you. How awesome is that?"



This pie chart is easily sliced.

Mark Cuban joined the three comma club after selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo during the first dot-com bubble, while Russ Hanneman made his billion by selling his “radio on the Internet” to AOL. Hanneman has his own liquor brand, Tres Commas Tequila, whereas Cuban actually sells the three comma t-shirt on his website.

Here is how fictional character Russ Hanneman described making his billion on the show:

I remember the second I became a billionaire. I was ass-naked, sitting right there, just clicking and refreshing, clicking and refreshing, watching the stock rise. And when it happened, I popped a rod so fast I went blind for a full minute, nutted all over those cushions.

And here is how real person Mark Cuban described becoming a billionaire on a podcast:

Literally, I was sitting in front of a computer, naked, hitting the refresh because we were close — waiting until my net worth hit that billion when the stock price got to a certain point, and then I kinda screamed and jumped around and then got dressed.

Eerie. It’s almost personality plagiarism. This case file looked closed, until…

…oh yes, viral clown Dan Bilzerian. Like Hanneman, he drives a McLaren. And there’s just some je ne sais douche about him.

Finally, one-sixth of the pie must be apportioned to Sean Parker, but not the real Sean Parker — the one that Justin Timberlake personified in The Social Network. How different are they? At this point, who the fuck knows! But his inclusion crucially places the Social Network within the Silicon Valley Cinematic Universe, making Timberlake something of the Tommy Westphall of this world.

Final note: The character’s name is certainly a devil-horned salute to heavy metal god, Jeff Hanneman, the Slayer guitarist who died in 2013.

Key Quote: "I got three nannies suing me right now, one of them for no reason."



At this point in reality’s deconstruction, no one should be surprised to learn that [real] Google placed a reference to [fake] Hooli in their announcement of Alphabet, or that [real] Wired published a profile of [fake] Big Head after his promotion to run the research lab Hooli XYZ. A masterwork of self-parody, Big Head’s Wired profile bears the unmistakable hagiographic tone of countless Googler profiles, granting them all shares of Big Head’s pie.

Prior to his peter principle promotion, Big Head was “resting and vesting,” which tracks perfectly with Google’s secret bench of executives who are called up from the bullpen in case of emergency.

Key Quote: "This house has, like, nine bedrooms. You have any idea how scary that gets at night?"



Slight biz dev ninja Jared Dunn is the only character within the SVCU constructed from other fictional characters. Zach Woods, the elvin actor who plays Jared, is actually performing as himself performing as other characters, including Ed Webster from Veep and Gabe Lewis from The Office. Here is a lineup all of the characters he has portrayed:

Key Quote: "My name's only Jared because Gavin called me that on my first day. My real name is Donald."



Despite what Salon says.

Key Quote: "Anytime you're near a woman it is important to explain why. Otherwise they get nervous."



Key Quote: "Every day feels like I've died and gone to hell."



Rex Sorgatz (@fimoculous on Hooli+) is a based upon a true story.