Fictional Problems at 'Silicon Valley' Get Real-Life Legal Advice
July 20 2016 - 12:55PM
Dow Jones News
By Christina Passariello
Pied Piper is getting some unsolicited advice from a few of
Silicon Valley's top legal minds.
The fictional startup portrayed in the HBO sitcom "Silicon
Valley" faced a management coup, boardroom drama, layoffs and
product-testing problems in its third season -- all of which could
have been mitigated with better legal planning, these experts
said.
In one episode, Pied Piper's engineers and executives clashed
over whether to make their product -- a revolutionary
data-compression algorithm -- available as a piece of hardware or a
platform.
"I really wanted to jump in and be the lawyer, and make them
think about all the things they didn't think about," said Jenn
Wall, commercial counsel for X, the division of Google parent
Alphabet Inc. that takes on moonshots such as self-driving cars.
(Hooli, a tech giant rival in "Silicon Valley," bears a striking
resemblance to Google.)
"I would sit down with the founder and CEO and start asking
questions," she said. "Do you have terms of service? Are you
exporting data? Are you importing anything?"
Ms. Wall was a participant in "Parody or Parable: A Legal
Perspective on HBO's Silicon Valley," a panel hosted Tuesday
evening by the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP in its Palo
Alto, Calif., office.
The discussions were a sign of how seriously Silicon Valley
takes "Silicon Valley" and its scrupulous skewering of tech
culture. The show's creator, Mike Judge, has gone to great lengths
to create a realistic depiction of life inside a startup, hiring
former Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Dick Costolo as a consultant on
the script.
"Most of the show is built around a company doing things wrong,"
said Tom Kellerman, a Morgan Lewis partner who works with tech
startups. While the panel covered the show's first two seasons, the
third season that ended last month provided much grist for debate
since Pied Piper finally became "a company with a product," he
said.
Though the discussion focused on the fictional Pied Piper,
lawyers in the audience also brought up the
truth-is-stranger-than-fiction problems faced by two nearby
startups: Theranos Inc. and Tesla Motors Inc. At one point in the
third season, Theranos's troubles end up in a punchline. (In an
earlier season, Tesla chief Elon Musk has a cameo.)
The panelists gave "Silicon Valley" credit for getting many
things right. Daniel Ahn, managing partner at venture-capital firm
Envision Ventures, expounded on the risks in replacing a startup's
founder with an outside CEO.
"There's a 50-50 chance the organism will reject the new CEO,"
he warned, something which -- spoiler alert -- came to pass at Pied
Piper, when the founding team was repelled by the new chief's
approach.
Chris Banks, a Morgan Lewis partner leading the panel, said
companies that misrepresent their growth -- like Pied Piper did by
padding its weak daily active users numbers -- could be charged
with fraud.
To the panel, it was clear Pied Piper's growth in the third
season warranted legal help, yet the show's main characters remain
engineers and investors. "I definitely think the show should have
more lawyers," said Lucy Wang, a Morgan Lewis associate.
Write to Christina Passariello at
christina.passariello@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 20, 2016 12:40 ET (16:40 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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