HBO's Silicon Valley writers visit San Francisco startups before every season
Ed McManus · The Technical Advisor for Silicon Valley on HBO: Ed McManus · Y Combinator · May 17, 2017 · at 5:54
Ed McManus, technical advisor for HBO's Silicon Valley season 3, explains how the show's writing team prepares and stays authentic to tech culture.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 13.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Before every season, they actually come up to San Francisco for, I think, like a week or two weeks and meet with a bunch of startups. So they, like, every writer goes through this kind of like you know, crash course to get up to speed.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ed McManus
McManus: Silicon Valley's fictional Middle Out algorithm is technically plausible
“The surprising thing with Middle Out is that, like, there is actually a technical background for it, and like, it is actually the result of a lot of sort of machine learning developments applied to compression. So the sort of, like, the theory behind the tech,…”
McManus: Mr. Robot is the gold standard for television technical accuracy
“One is Mr. Robot. And even when I was on Silicon Valley, I kind of said like, this is the gold standard for both playback and technical accuracy.”
McManus: Shorter TV season orders enable higher technical accuracy
“Season orders are going down, right? So, like, now instead of, like, producing 20 episodes a season, they're only doing 10. Which just means that the quality of every episode is so high that they can, you know, afford to Take the time to reach out to the consu…”
McManus: Silicon Valley's beta storyline was based on his startup Yard Sale
“They ended up pulling directly from our experience with Yard Sale launching a beta, and sort of, like, not being totally sure at first, like, whether this thing is working or not.”
McManus: Silicon Valley Only Parodied Figures Already in Major Headlines
“I think that, that like we, the show would not go after anyone unless it were sort of like already kind of like a big story. A lot of what the writers end up using is, is, You know, stuff that gets pulled from the headlines.”
McManus: GitHub account made for Silicon Valley character Winnie accidentally went viral
“I actually, I created a GitHub profile for playback purposes, right? So just, like, we wanted an authentic looking GitHub profile. The best way to do that is just to make a GitHub profile for that person. Yeah. So I made one for Winnie and we had to populate i…”