Erlich Bachman may not be around to cause chaos when Silicon Valley kicks off its fifth season, but Pied Piper CEO Richard still has plenty of fires to put out… and wastebaskets to throw up in.
Sunday’s premiere begins with Richard getting talked out of a depressingly tiny, fluorescent-lit office space — Gilfoyle compares it unfavorably to a CIA black site — and reluctantly splurging on an expensive new set-up for Pied Piper. He’s worried about spending Laurie’s money too fast (“She’s eleven months pregnant, and highly irritable”) and nervous that they’ve only hired three coders so far, when they need 15 to work on his decentralized Internet. To be fair, Dinesh and Gilfoyle are rejecting all of his candidates for highly relevant reasons like “his beard hair looked like head hair, and his head hair looked like beard hair.”
Even Mr. Beard Hair isn’t an option after Richard runs into Gavin Belson at a fancy gala and discovers that Gavin has hired every coder that Richard’s interviewed so far, just to screw him. Pied Piper’s attempt to acquire struggling start-up Optimoji goes sideways when the annoying guy behind an annoying pizza-delivery app — Sliceline! Get it? — lets it slip that Gavin’s poached all of Richard’s coders and he’s desperate. Then the Sliceline guy swoops in and hires all of Optimoji’s coders before Richard even has a chance to, enraging Richard to the point where he walks out with a stack of their pizzas as retribution.
