Well, Richard, according to all of your test results,
you are what we in the medical field call healthy.
In fact, you've got kind of a glow about you.
- Oh, really? - Absolutely.
You know, if it were medically possible, I might even think that you were pregnant.
Of course, I thought my girlfriend was pregnant,
and I was sure wrong about that. Whoops!
Hey, give me that ring back!
Oh, what a mess.
What a mess that was.
So, been any big changes for you, diet or exercise?
Well, I actually got fired as CEO of my company.
I'm working now as the CTO under the new CEO, Jack Barker.
Wait a minute. You got a boss at your own company?
Yeah, I know that sounds bad, but honestly, he handles all the budgeting,
all the VC funding.
He just negotiated a great new lease on our new offices.
I don't know. I think this could be great for me.
Boy, I don't think I could have another doctor coming in here, being my boss.
No. It'd be like, "Hey, boss, is it okay if I listen to his heart?
"Can I do that? Oh, no? Sorry. No, I won't. Okay.
"Whatever you say."
- Funny. - It is funny. Yeah.
But listen, if it works for you, that's great.
Just one more thing. I've gotta check your testicles.
Oh, my God. Okay. What, for like a hernia or something?
No. I just wanna make sure they're still there.
Oh, wow. This is going to be our office? All of this?
Yeah, Jack said we have the whole floor.
Wow, look at that kitchen. This is great.
Richard, is that our new logo?
I like it. It's clean and elegant, but not without some danger.
Gentlemen, welcome.
I moved away from the flute-playing guy.
I don't know if you guys realized it, but that was a little phallic.
I didn't want to waste your time with it, so I just pulled the trigger.
Mari Sheibley did this.
Oh. Mari Sheibley. That must've set you back a bit.
No. She's a friend.
Yeah. I know her, as well.
Casually.
So, why don't I show you guys your new home?
Hopefully, it lives up to your standards.
Yeah, compared to the shit shack we're used to,
anything's an improvement.
Ah, an insult born of respect.
I'll worry when we start complimenting each other.
Fucking dick.
I assume you saw Hiroki putting in the water feature.
Good feng shui. Gotta have that.
This is the engineering area.
We're gonna work here?
That is a separate, professionally-catered micro-kitchen back there.
I want you hungry here, never here.
This is all great, but can we really afford all this?
Hey, step into my office, Richard.
- Here. - Okay.
I wanna show you something.
This is way better than Erlich's shithole.
"The Conjoined Triangles of Success"?
I invented that, and now it's taught at business schools.
You see what's on the bottom here? The foundation of the whole thing.
- Growth? - Growth.
The more brilliant people we can get working here,
then the faster we can get whatever is in your head out into the world.
Let me tell you a story.
In 1999,
Google was a little startup, just like we are.
And when they started bringing in chefs and masseuses,
we thought, "They're nuts!"
But they were attracting the best possible people,
and they were able to create the best product, and now they're worth over $400 billion.
And do you know the name of that company?
Uh, Google, right? You said it at the beginning of the story.
You're right. I did that wrong.
And the whole point is that all of this is a sound investment
as long as we are able to get the best people and make the best possible product.
All right. Winner gets the big monitor. Okay?
I understand how this works.
Ready? Ready?
- Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. - Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.
Suck it.
I should've known you'd throw rock.
That's all you know in Pakistan. It's in your blood.
Don't you guys call it "Rock, Rock, Rock"?
That's funny.
You should type up all your racist jokes on your tiny monitor.
Is that monitor not big enough? You need a bigger monitor?
You just put it on the list over there, and our purchasing guy will hook you up.
- Seriously? - Absolutely.
Jared, how about you? You need any new gear for the office?
No, I'm BYOC.
Let me know if you need anything.
Richard, do you think it'd be okay if, uh, I took this box?
I'm moving out of Noah's guest house after work.
And you want to sleep in that box?
No. I haven't slept in a box in years. Stop.
Now that, um, Pied Piper's funded,
I have enough money to move back into my condo.
Oh, congratulations.
I thought you sold it.
No, I've been AirBNB'ing it out to cover the mortgage.
But it'll be good to get home.
I've been missing my tub a lot,
and, uh, Noah's been using a lot of hate speech with me lately,
so, moving will be a good thing.
All right, guys, think I'm gonna take off
unless you need me to stick around, help the transition.
-L... - By doing what?
I could introduce you to some of the people that work here.
I made some major inroads with Hiroki.
- No. - Uh, why would we want that?
Fair... Yeah, fair point.
So, welcome to your new home.
Enjoy it, guys. I gave you this.
on.
Sorry. Sorry.
How was everyone's morning?
Let me tell you about mine.
I started my day, as I always do, by typing my own name into Hooli-Search.
I enjoy the ritual, which is designed to center me.
But lately, it's been doing the opposite.
Whose work station is this?
Observe.
These are all remnants of a time before I wrote Nucleus down.
Why are we allowing our own technology to dredge up our painful past?
Why is it that when I type my own name into my own company search engine,
the fucking Internet rains shit-bolts down on me?
I want this to stop!
These articles are part of the public record.
Your point?
Are you suggesting that we alter
the fundamental neutrality of the Hooli-Search algorithm?
That's a clear violation of the public trust.
Yelp is threatening to sue Google for this very thing.
I can't, in good conscience, order Hooli-Search engineers to do that.
I never suggested anything of the sort.
No Hooli-Search engineer
will ever be asked to alter the neutrality of the algorithm.
And so, Gavin doesn't want to see
any more negative mentions of Nucleus on Hooli-Search.
So, we're gonna alter the search algorithm?
Of course not. That would be unethical.
What are we supposed to do?
Promote other websites to outrank the bad Nucleus news?
Do you have any idea how big a fucking job that is?
Don't you swear at me.
We don't work here anymore.
For 10 more days you do!
Unless you'd all like to quit and walk away from your entire severance packages!
Amazing.
Whoa, whoa! Oh.
Jared. Whoa. What's up?
Hi. Um...
I'm sorry, I'm a little confused. You were supposed to be out on Tuesday.
Oh, I was, but plans have changed.
See, I can't really afford to move or pay rent, so I'm gonna have to stay a little while.
Okay, look, um...
I appreciate your situation, but you're breaking the terms of our contract.
Listen, I don't want to be a dick, it's just, I can't afford to live around here
'cause the rent is so high, because of the tech companies, right?
And you bought this place with the money you made
working at the tech companies, so, it kind of all evens out, right?
That... That makes no sense.
I know. Right?
Okay, look, I can give you a few days, uh, two weeks tops,
but if you're not out by then, I'm gonna have to take legal action.
This bums me out, man.
I thought you were, like, the one cool tech guy.
Me?
Are you sure?
Not anymore.
Well...
Well, the occupant of a residence in California has almost unlimited rights.
I have to get his permission to enter my property.
I can't turn off the power or the gas, and I have to hire a lawyer
to start a legal eviction.
That won't be cheap.
Jeez, man. I'm sorry. That sucks.
So, where did you sleep last night?
I did not. How was your sleep?
Uh... It was good, yeah.
I mean, I slept like a stone.
It's odd not having to do everything ourselves, isn't it?
Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm kind of loving it.
Hey, you ready to go to work?
Chef Amy asked us what we wanted for breakfast,
and I said, "Surprise us."
Could be anything. Let's go!
When was the last time you saw those two
-go anywhere before noon? -Indeed.
Well, let's go get some gluten-free waffles.
Sorry about the surprise.
- I don't care. - I asked Chef Amy to tell me.
I have too many dietary restrictions to leave breakfast to chance.
Makes sense.
Ah, two of my incubees off to eat the world.
Be well, work hard, and know one another.
Okay.
I recently helped them install a new CEO at Pied Piper.
I needed to take a more hands-off approach, focus on the future...
-Incubees, like yourself, with great ideas, like cataloging malware.
Sexy.
Uh, would you care for another coconut water?
They are the most expensive unpasteurized variety, if that's any concern.
Actually, my concern is the room.
It's kind of a dump.
Oh, sure, now.
But, uh, with a new coat of paint,
you'll hardly recognize the place when you move in next month.
Actually, uh, shit's pivoted.
I need a place next week.
Next week? Shit has pivoted.
Well, I'll talk to the current tenant.
Let him know that the time has come...
Mother fuck...
Uh... Yeah, put him on a slow boat to China, so to speak.
I'm sorry. lt just slipped out.
I'll ask Chef Amy to make you something else.
No, no, no, I want waffles.
I just wanted them to be a surprise, Jared. I wanted surprise waffles.
Who are these people?
Uh... I don't know. Did Jack hire engineers already?
These people are not in the engineering gene pool.
That's right, fellas. These are our new sales people.
They're the best in the business.
Sales? Uh, Jack?
Jack?
Shouldn't we hire engineers to build the platform
before we get people to sell it?
No. God, no!
The system, Richard.
Sales and engineering are the two pillars of the Conjoined Triangles of Success.
- Yeah. - Engineering and sales must work together
to decide what to build.
Who knows better what the customers need
than the people who actually deal with the customers every single day?
We're all gonna meet at 1:00, Richard.
You're gonna love these guys. They're the best.
So, while the Hooli lawsuit did hamper our ability to get funding,
it did not slow down the engineering.
Yes, question?
Yeah, Keith, Northeast Regional.
So, you don't foresee any technical debt issues
slowing our ability to scale?
Actually, no, uh, none whatsoever.
We've identified all our underlying issues, and we have a plan in place for rapid growth.
Uh, yes?
Uh, Don, Global Accounts and Systems Integration.
What kind of growth are you projecting here?
Uh... Well, this may sound a little bit grandiose, but it's not unrealistic
to think that we have the potential for worldwide penetration
on the scale of, say, Google or Facebook.
This is really great, Richard. Just keep going.
Sure. Yeah. Uh...
Well, in regards to the launch,
we are hoping to go wide, um,
get it into the hands of as many people as possible.
Jan, Director, Inside Sales. They call me "Jan the Man."
Oh.
When you say "people," you mean "companies," right?
- Yeah, we're business-facing. - Okay, just wanted to clarify.
Actually, no. No, sorry, uh, Jan the Man.
By "people," I do mean "people." Humans. Consumers.
Uh, Keith, Northeast Regional, again.
Jack told us we would be selling directly to businesses.
- He did? - Doug. I'm shadowing Keith.
- Yes, he did. - Definitely. I was there. Don, again.
Well, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, because, um, the plan has always been
um, entirely based on the freemium model, like Dropbox?
You know, you give the platform away free to consumers,
and then once you have a big enough user-base,
then you sell premium services to businesses.
If we're giving it away now and waiting until later to sell it,
what are we doing here now?
- I don't know. I don't know. - We could maybe ask, uh, Jack
when he gets back, uh, from wherever...
Sorry, one second. Just one moment.
Jack. Sorry, Jack.
Sorry. Excuse me, Jack. Uh, are you leaving?
Oh, I have this charity wine thing.
Sorry, I committed to it months ago, but you are killing it in there, Richard.
Uh... Well, actually no.
Sorry. They just said that you told them that we would be business-facing?
Oh, they filled you in. That's good.
I was under the impression that we would be consumer first.
My guys are pretty set on that.
Richard, I read your deck,
and you project it'll be four years until we get to revenue?
Uh... Yeah.
You know we're in a bubble right now, right?
Or maybe you don't know. You weren't around for the last bubble.
You were probably in diapers.
- I was 11. - Well, I wasn't in diapers.
I don't... I wasn't either.
- I was there. - Mmm-hmm.
And in March of 2000, do you know when a four-year plan ended?
April of 2000.
We gotta move, now.
We can't put all of our eggs
in the pot-of-gold-at-the-end- of-the-rainbow basket.
So, the pot of gold is in the basket?
Richard, these are the best salespeople in the world,
and when they tell me that business-facing is the play,
I gotta listen to that, okay?
- That's fair, but it's... - I'm just asking you
to talk to your guys about modifying your platform for enterprise.
I mean, just see how it feels, okay?
And no matter what happens, I promise you this.
I will never compromise the product.
Okay. Okay.
Uh, fine, I will talk to my guys, but they're not gonna be happy about it.
No, of course not. They're engineers.
I'll see you later.
I realize this is a Japanese tradition and that you are Chinese.
I'm not racist.
Yes, Japanese people racist. They are horrible.
No. No, no.
Jian-Yang, in every relationship, there are ebbs and flows.
- Ebbs? - Yes.
And although we have flowed,
our relationship now has come to a permanent ebbing.
- Flow. - No. No.
We have come to a permanent ebb.
Do you understand?
So, you want me to leave the house?
Yes. Yes. Very much so.
And so, I thank you for our today.
Now you bow.
Bow.
All the way to the waist.
No.
Okay.
Thank you, Erlich.
Goodbye, little one. I'm gonna miss you.
Can't say it wasn't fun, Jian-Yang, you little Cantonese bastard.
- Hey, you like this? - What are you doing?
Hi, my name's Erlich Bachman. I'm a lying fuck!
Who... Who are you yelling at?
We're the only two people in the fucking house!
Erlich a liar!
You're not gonna get me to change my opinion about myself.
- Liar! - Take that outta there.
I don't know, Richard. I don't think it's that big a deal.
Really, you don't? You're okay with being business first?
Granted, it's not what we would do if we were in charge,
but, you know, Jack seems to know what he's doing.
This is fucking amazing.
I feel like I'm in Minority Report.
And in reality, you're just a minority.
Richard, relax. We're still building the neural net.
We still get to do all the cool stuff, right?
Yeah, of course.
We're not scrapping any peer-to-peer delivery?
No, no, definitely not.
So, we're still doing the same stuff, just in a different order.
Yeah, I guess you're right.
Well, the eviction process is officially underway,
but my attorney says it may take up to a year.
- Where are you gonna stay? - Well, I always have my trick.
All right, I'll bite. What's your trick?
I simply imagine that my skeleton is me,
and my body is my house, and that way, I'm always home.
Okay. Well, uh, we are now business-facing. I don't know if you heard.
That means we have to rewrite our entire deck.
I just hope it doesn't put us way the fuck behind.
Behind who? EndFrame sucks and Nucleus shit the bed, remember?
Yeah, yeah. You're right, you're right.
Wow.
This is endless.
If we'd worked this hard on Nucleus in the first place,
we probably wouldn't be scrubbing it right now.
- Dude, are you done? - Yup.
How'd your script digest all those strings so fast?
I don't know. It's just a predictive loop.
Actually, it's sort of like a context tree.
Holy shit.
What's up?
Hey, Jared, why don't we knock off for tonight
and just pick this back up tomorrow morning.
Mmm. Agreed.
I'm going on close to 40 hours without good sleep,
and the edges of things are starting to get a little dancey.
What?
Erlich, thank you again for allowing me to occupy
a corner of your cozy garage.
It is my hearth and my home.
What the fuck?
Jian-Yang, Jesus Christ.
Don't sneak up on people like that, you devious little bastard,
especially if they're cleaning glassware.
You kick me out, but you let him stay. He's not even an incubee.
No, he's not, and he's not staying in the house.
He's in the garage, like a sad bag of potting soil.
Have some compassion.
I mean, the guy rented his place to some fuckhead tenant who won't leave.
Jared is fucked, Jian-Yang.
He can go to the police.
It's useless. California law gives landlords, literally, no recourse.
So, he can go to court.
Of course, he's going to go to court, you four-eyed turd.
But in America, the legal system doesn't work very well,
so it will take at least a year for the proceedings to even begin.
Do you understand that?
Yes. I stay here for one year.
I pay no rent. You have no recourse.
That's not always the case.
I mean, sometimes court systems can move faster,
-especially if you have the money for... - I'm going to smoke in my room.
- Special occasion. - Oh. Mother fuck.
If we stack that same loop on top of the bit-level encoder
that we took from Hendricks,
and then we tethered it to the routine we were trying to use...
That would be a huge jump in speed.
This is mega.
This is what Hendricks did at TechCrunch Disrupt.
I think we just cracked middle-out.
We should probably tell Gavin, right?
Why? He fired us.
You know how much we could get paid if we took this somewhere else?
Fuck off.
Okay, let me get this straight.
First you talked me into going business-facing,
and now you want to eliminate the entire neural net from the platform?
Jan, Director, Inside Sales. They call me "Jan the Man."
Yes, we know, "Jan the Man."
Listen, uh, we have to do neural net for deep learning.
Look, once we get enough data flowing through the system,
it will be able to recognize long-range patterns and actually learn.
It will be able to optimize our algorithm on its own,
increasing our already superior speed and efficiency.
Right? Pretty cool, huh?
But it won't be able to do that if we delete it.
- Do you get that? - But you just said it.
It requires a central repository of data, right?
Businesses want to protect their data.
They're huge pussies when it comes to security.
Okay, well, we're not cutting machine learning. We're not.
If we cut that, we might as well cut peer-to-peer delivery,
and all the efficiencies of the cloud.
Are those still in?
No, those have to go also.
- What? - Keith, by the way.
I know your name, okay? I know everybody's name.
Look, uh, we can't cut everything about this platform that makes it revolutionary
just because that's a little harder for you guys to sell, all right?
If we want to sell out, let's just sell all the way out.
Let's just take the algorithm, jam it into a metal fucking box,
stick it in the back of a data center somewhere,
so it can't connect to anything,
and it just sits there and no one even knows it's there.
Doug, still shadowing Keith.
When you say "metal box,"
you're talking about a rack-mounted server-type appliance?
No, no, no. lam using it as a rhetorical example of a bad idea.
That's fucking stupid.
Oh, my God.
I just need to find Jack. One second.
- Where's Jack? - He had to go meet his vet.
His vet? In the middle of the day? Okay, uh, well, what's the vet's address?
Jack, excuse me. Do you mind telling me...
Holy shit. What is that?
- Oh, mother of God. - Richard, what are you doing here?
What do you mean? It's 2:30. What are you doing here?
My number one breeding mare went into heat. Sorry, she's not much for schedules.
Oh, God.
Thoroughbreds, Richard. Natural cover only.
Now, you don't see that very often, do you?
Nope.Uh“.
I had a meeting... I had a meeting with the sales guys
and, uh, Jan the Man...
Uh... You know what? Can we talk over here? This is just hard for me.
Look, Jack, uh, you and I have a problem.
Okay, your salespeople are telling me to cut everything cool about the platform
just because it's a little bit harder for them to sell.
But don't you think, because they are such amazing salespeople,
that it would be okay for them to sell the harder stuff?
No. It doesn't work that way.
The way you keep the best salespeople is, you need to give 'em something easy to sell.
Otherwise, they'd just go somewhere else.
Okay, well, uh, Pied Piper could honestly be the global standard
for file compression and storage.
Every mobile device on the face of the planet could be able to access their data
as if they had a fiber optic cable plugged into it.
People in the desert, people in refugee camps,
people who have nothing could suddenly have access to everything.
You know, everybody in this industry,
they say they want to make this world a better place,
but we could actually do it.
We could do it and make billions of dollars.
- Richard, listen... - No, you listen to me, Jack.
You promised me that you would never compromise the product.
So, do you feel like taking some action and backing me up on this,
because me and my product feel pretty fucking compromised right now.
Richard, I don't think you understand what the product is.
The product isn't the platform, and the product isn't your algorithm, either.
And it's not even the software.
Do you know what Pied Piper's product is, Richard?
Is...
Is it me?
Oh, God! No!
No. How could it possibly be you? You got fired.
Pied Piper's product is its stock.
Its stock?
And whatever makes the value of that stock go up,
that is what we are going to make.
And maybe sometime in the future,
we could change the world and perform miracles,
and all of that stuff, and I hope we do.
But, like I told you before,
I'm not going to mortgage the present for that.
I need to move the needle today.
And now, if you will excuse me.
I paid $150,000 for the semen that's about to come out of that stallion,
and I would very much like to be there
to see that it happens.
- Oh. Hey, Richard! - Yes?
I just got a text from Keith, Northeast Regional.
He says the guys love your idea.
What idea?
It's a big world,
but thanks to modern technology, it's smaller than ever.
Today, business moves at the speed of light.
You can access your company's data anywhere, anytime.
But if you can get your data, who else can get it?
Spies, thieves, criminals, and foreigners.
What if there was a way to take all of your company's data
and back it up in a protected enclosure completely isolated from the world at large?
Oh, no.
The ultimate enterprise data storage solution.
Think inside the box. Powered by Pied Piper.
Now, that's what I'm talking about.
This is the game we're playing, team, so, let's win it!
You guys, check it out.
Chef Amy hollowed out a watermelon and filled it with watermelon Jell-O!
Look, that's actual rind.
The fuck is that? Is that a VCR?
Why does it say "Pied Piper" on it?
Why is everybody so happy?