Hey, welcome to EndFrame.
Yes, hi. Um, would you just tell your boss
that the CEO of Pied Piper is here to see them?
That's the company that they ripped off.
Sure. And your name is, sir?
- Erlich Bachman. - Uh...
No. I'm Richard Hendricks. I'm the CEO.
- Oh. Really? - Yes.
Why would you assume that he's the CEO?
Well, he's... No reason.
Um, the guys are in a staff meeting right now, though.
They should be out shortly.
Would you guys like some water while you wait?
We have four flavors,
and the cartons are made from locally sourced, organic...
Yeah, we get it. You're funded, so...
They're good.
The market has been exceptionally volatile lately.
As a result,
many of the very aggressive positions we took at your specific request
have performed poorly.
Very, very poorly.
Do you understand?
Yeah. Would you fuck her?
If I weren't married, I suppose.
But, Russ, as your business manager,
I need to tell you something,
and you're not going to like it.
At all.
So, what's the plan here, Richard?
We're not gonna, like, fight them, right?
Uh... No, no. I don't... I just...
I mean, we got to do something.
I mean, even if it's just yelling at them,
telling them that they're not gonna get away with this.
But you know they are, right?
Well, not if I have anything to do about it.
But you sort of don't.
I support you, Richard, no matter how futile the effort.
Thanks.
Look who just right-swiped me on Tinder.
Karen.
She's cute.
Says here that she's looking for a man on the go.
You don't go anywhere.
What, are you getting that res on 4G?
- She's cute, right? - Wow.
Yoyodyne Wi-Fi?
Oh, that's the company next door.
Why is their Wi-Fi password saved on your phone, Dinesh?
Huh? Um...
I have a friend who works there.
Friend?
What friend? You don't have any friends.
Maroush Davidson Jones.
Okay, fine. Fine. You got me.
Uh... A couple of weeks back, I went on a few interviews, okay?
And Yoyodyne was one of them.
Jesus. Back off.
Outed by Wi-Fi.
It was when you said you were selling to Hooli.
And you know, as soon as you went with Russ, I blew them off. I...
You know what? Fuck this.
I'm not waiting anymore. I'm going in there.
Mr. Bachman's walking back to you now.
Uh...
That's not my name.
My name is Richard Hendricks.
Hey, remember us?
Oh! Hey, guys. What's up?
You know what you did.
Okay? I saw your live stream.
Okay? I saw your "algorithm."
That's mine. You stole it.
Stole? We asked you guys some questions a while back,
and you were very helpful.
See? Look.
These, the photos. These are the photos.
This is proof that you stole it from us.
No, those photos prove that you gave it to us.
Well, you're stealing it all wrong.
I mean, this is how you're gonna build the code book?
Honestly? This is bush-league.
And look at all these redundancies.
I mean, look, if you're gonna build it like that...
- Richard, no. - Richard.
Uh...
Hey, pen down, Dumbledorf.
Suffice to say...
There is something somewhere on this board
that is gonna strangle you at scale.
Don't write that down. Don't... Stop.
Hear me when I say this.
Your tech is always gonna be worse than ours.
That's fine.
How is that fine?
'Cause we have a finished platform and you don't.
Which means we're the only middle-out company currently in the marketplace.
And that's enough for my sales team.
Your what?
This is our sales team.
Okay.
Hear that sound, buddy?
That's the sound of us leaving you in the dust.
Gentlemen of the Hooli board, and lady.
Question, what is failure?
To the ignorant or those in conventional industries,
the recent Nucleus glitch may seem a failure
purely in the negative sense.
But we, in this valley, all know that "failures," just like this one,
are really stepping stones.
To bring us the iPhone, Steve Jobs first had to bring us...
The Newton.
To bring us Facebook,
Mark Zuckerberg also had to bring us Wirehog.
Before he brought us Digg,
Kevin Rose had to bring us a whole lot of useless things.
And after Digg as well, for that matter.
The point being,
what those in dying business sectors call failure,
we, in tech, know to be pre-greatness.
Uh, I'm sorry.
Are you telling us that the disastrous results of your Nucleus live stream
are a good thing?
No, I'm not telling you that.
History is telling you that.
Please, Gavin, enough spin.
A misstep of that magnitude, there's no excuse.
It's not like we can tell the shareholders
you've suddenly added new functionality.
Haven't I?
Have you?
We weren't told about this.
Well, if I told you about it,
it wouldn't exactly be a secret function.
Now, would it?
Secret function?
Are you saying you've added something new to the Nucleus platform?
Imagine, if you will, a function so game-changing
that its integration into Nucleus
will justify any miscue in the platform's rollout.
Imagine, if you will, a function so game-changing,
that its integration into Nucleus
will justify any miscue in the platform's rollout.
Seriously, imagine it,
and do it quickly.
You were all brought here to generate moonshots.
I need a moonshot now.
If there's any greatness in any of you at all,
now is the time to access it.
Please don't disappoint me.
Please, please, please don't disappoint me.
Maybe start after lunch?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Hello? Russ?
- Oh, my God. Is that shit? - Oh!
Is there dog shit on the floor?
Yes, it's shit.
God!
What happened to your painting?
That's what I wanted to talk to you about.
I've got some bad news, and you're gonna hear it eventually,
so you might as well hear it from me.
Sit down.
My accountant has informed me that, uh...
I'm financially ruined.
Holy shit. How?
Because of a series of bad investments
that my fucking money guy let me talk him into,
I've managed to lose over $200 million.
But... Wait. Didn't you start out with $1.2 billion?
I mean, you're not exactly broke, right?
I might as well be.
$986 million?
I'm not a billionaire anymore, Richard.
I'm a nine-hundred-and-eighty-sixionaire,
which isn't even a fucking thing.
I'm out of the Three Comma Club.
Functionally, I'm just like you.
Jesus, fuck, that's depressing.
Right. But you're still, basically, a billionaire.
Not if you round down.
If you round down, I have zero billion.
Forbes has taken me off their billionaire's list!
Instead, they'll probably put me on their close-but-no-cigar list,
which is ironic because I smoke a fuck ton of cigars.
Why the fuck do I buy so many cigars?
I remember the second I became a billionaire.
I was ass-naked, sitting right there,
just clicking and refreshing, clicking and refreshing,
watching my stock rise.
And when it happened, I popped a rod so fast,
I went blind for a full minute.
Nutted all over those cushions.
I was the king.
Now look at me.
Two shitty fucking commas.
I had to sell my McLaren.
Yeah, but there's a Maserati in the driveway.
Who gives a fuck?
That has doors that open like this.
Not like this.
Or like this.
So it's all fucked.
Well, it's not all fucked.
You did save $50,000 not paying for the charity ball tickets
that you gave me.
Quite an embarrassing moment for Jian Yang and I.
What? Richard, listen, my accountants tell me
I need you to start throwing off cash as quickly as possible, okay?
But you said generating revenue was exactly what we shouldn't be doing.
But now that I'm spelling billion with an
I'm saying do the exact opposite.
I need you to come back to me in 24 hours
and bring me a proposal that turns the entire operation
into a sales-based model,
just like you told me those assholes over at EndFrame have.
You're gonna dig me out of this hole, Richard.
- What? - You said it yourself.
EndFrame is built to grab a bunch of cash quickly,
and that's what I need.
Dad, where is Mom?
Your mom is with her friend Philippe.
They're in Napa. She's gonna be a few hours.
These guys are gonna watch you, okay?
Watch out for the dog shit. Okay?
I gotta hit the road. Daddy's going to Vegas.
Flying in a rented Citation Ultra.
Fuck me!
Hello.
Hey, buddy.
Russ wants us to convert to a sales model?
That's just not possible.
I mean, you saw the size of that team at EndFrame.
There were 40 people in that room?
Right.
Even if we fired all of the engineers we just hired...
Looking good.
Keep at it, Claude.
Absolutely. Your jobs are not at risk.
That's very comforting.
Even if we adjusted our workforce
and hired sales people instead,
Service Level Agreements like that are enormously complex,
they take a huge number of man hours.
There's no way we could find clients, negotiate terms,
and push deals out the funnel fast enough to yield real cash anytime soon.
We're just not built for it.
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Oh. Karen posted another photo.
Sending it to you right now.
Wait. Why does it say "sent from my iPhone" at the bottom?
You just sent this from your computer.
It's so that I seem like I'm an out-and-about kind of person.
I put that in the signature
and then in the body, I'll write fun stuff,
like, "I'm at the opening of a secret restaurant."
Or, "I'm watching Jaws at the pool of an old hotel."
You know, keep it fun, vague, mysterious.
It is a mystery why you think you'll ever see a woman naked.
Dinesh, do you want a piece of advice?
No, thank you. Okay, I...
I know Karen is out of my league.
Okay? She's practically not my species.
I'm a guppy, and I'm trying to mate with a dolphin.
You guys are bottom-feeders.
You're like those fish that swim into other fish's mouths
and eat bacteria off their teeth.
There's no such fish. You made that fish up.
Okay, it's an analogy.
I'm not gonna debate the existence of the literal fish with you,
- 'cause it's not relevant. - Well, good, 'cause it doesn't exist.
That is a real fish.
Why don't you just send emails from your actual iPhone?
It's all the way in my room.
Wait, so you are trying to convince this girl that you run half-marathons,
but you won't walk halfway across this house to get your iPhone?
Basically.
Hi. Ls there a... A Russ...
Boy genius, what's up?
Hey, Russ. Uh...
Look, I've run the numbers 50 different ways,
and I just don't know how I'm gonna convert...
You don't need to know. I don't pay you to know.
- Know... Know what? - That's right.
I know, you don't know.
- I don't know what you know. - No, you don't know,
'cause I figured it out.
And you know what? It's what I do.
- What... - I put radio on the Internet.
I'm putting the third comma back into my net worth,
and you don't have to do jack shit.
Thanks. Come on, let's get some food. I'm starving.
Do you want your...
Richard, hey.
Good to see you again.
What is this?
This is the solution.
They're not a competitor if you're a part of them, right?
Hmm.
Pied Piper is gonna merge with EndFrame.
I mean, seriously, I'm a genius, right?
Where the fuck are you going?
You're gonna blow this deal.
You cannot be serious.
Those are the guys who ripped off my algorithm,
which they totally fucked up, by the way.
Okay, so now you can fix it.
You give them a better algorithm, they'll give you a killer sales team.
And in exchange for bringing you to them,
they give me a big fat buyout of my stake in your company.
I'm that much closer to re-billionizing.
Mmm. Those guys are clowns.
Clowns with commitments worth millions.
Did you know they have a deal on the table with Intersite?
Intersite? The porn company? Really?
I know. Awesome, right?
And they've done months of hard work.
All you have to do is show up and compress shit.
- The answer is no. - Wrong.
You do this deal, or I pull your funding.
Well, you can't pull funding because we have a contract, so...
Oh, we have a contract?
We have a fucking contract, Richard?
You wanna know what I have?
Uh...
A fucking car whose doors open like this.
Not like this, not like this.
These are not the doors of a billionaire, Richard.
FUCK you!
Fuck you in the ass.
So you wanna sue Russ Hanneman?
Yeah. Yeah, we had a contract.
He promised to give us $5 million and now he's welshing.
And you wanna sue EndFrame?
Yes, because they stole our IP.
Before or after you gave it to 'em?
Okay, we were tricked, so...
Richie, you're not a guy that should be worried about suing people.
You need to be worried about the guy at Hooli who's suing you.
If you don't mount a vigorous legal defense,
then you lose to Gavin Belson by default.
And you are stamped "Property of Hooli."
You let Hanneman walk, how do you plan on paying these cats?
I just paid them 80 grand.
As a retainer.
That retains them, now you gotta pay them.
Hold on. So I just paid them $80,000 for the right to pay them more?
Yeah.
Fucking lawyers, man, right?
Like it or not, Richie, you're stuck with Hanneman.
I mean, technically, it's not even a merger.
EndFrame just absorbs you, and you're gone.
Right. So, basically, we end up working for EndFrame
after giving them our idea, which was way better than theirs,
and they end up making more money than us.
Fuck that. Assholes.
Fucking king-sized assholes.
Butt-holes indeed.
What if we didn't do that?
What if, instead, we got our own client like EndFrame has,
a porn company or something?
That's not really how it works, Gilfoyle. You can't just go get a client.
- Why not? - 'Cause it's not that easy.
Why not?
'Cause EndFrame worked that Intersite deal for months,
kicking every detail of the contract and SLA back and forth,
promising tons of custom features.
And you can't just make that stuff up.
What if I didn't have to make it up?
What if I had every detail of their deal on my computer right in front of me?
I'm sorry, um...
Are you just asking what if...
Or do you actually have this information?
Gilfoyle, please don't tell me
that you hacked into EndFrame's system.
Okay. I won't tell you that.
Well, did you hack into it or not?
My feeling is,
if you're the CEO of a company
and you're dumb enough to leave your login info
on a Post-it note on your desk
while the people that you fucking ripped off are physically in your office, it's not a hack.
It's barely social engineering.
It's more like natural selection.
Fucking ninja.
Okay, I was not in the room while this was happening.
This is way over the line.
This is crazy illegal.
We're not trading on stolen information.
- It's not worth it. - What if it was worth it?
It's not, so...
Gilfoyle, hypothetically, how much is it worth?
$15 million.
- What? - Holy shit!
Okay, I was definitely not in the room while this happened.
I've got it all right here with a bow on it.
Delivery dates, benchmarks.
They're promising to deliver high-quality 4K streaming video
at 20 megabits per second.
That's it? That's dog shit.
If we can put a half-decent build of our platform in front of Intersite,
I mean, we can shark this 15 mil right out from under EndFrame.
I... I don't understand.
How does Intersite have all this money to throw around?
It's pornography, Richard.
Adult content has driven more important tech adaption than anything.
I mean, the first fiction ever published on a printing press
was an erotic tale.
And from there, it was Super 8 film,
Polaroid, home video, digital, video on demand...
Credit card verification systems, Snapchat.
Pornography accounts for 37% of all Internet traffic.
38% when I'm on it.
Reducing Intersite server load by a tiny fraction
could save them tens of millions of dollars a year.
Hundreds.
$15 million is only like six hours of Intersite CDN bill, right?
But to us, that...
I mean, we could settle out with Russ, pay our legal fees,
have plenty of runway to get us to CES.
Minor detail. This is stealing.
You mean like lying and telling someone that you want to fund their company,
and then taking their tech when they meet with you?
Like that kind of stealing?
You wanted to do something, Richard.
This is something.
It's time to walk the left-hand path, Richard.
The statistics here are clear.
Protecting existing revenue streams in the current climate
is no longer a viable option.
We must run forward simply to stay in place,
by doing what the adult industry has always done, lead.
Pioneering cutting-edge interfaces
across new device platforms like Oculus and iWhack
will be the key to our survival as an industry.
And based on their recent investment patterns,
tech leaders such as Facebook agree.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future.
What is that on your computer screen? A fractal?
No, it's just pictures of art I've been sending Karen
from my mobile phone, which is charging over there.
I told her I just got back from a gallery opening in Hunter's Point.
Who painted that disappointment?
Jaden, age five.
I got it from his Montessori school website.
He's not online, he's never gonna find out.
What?
Crimes against children...
Really, so easy to get away with.
Oh, another text from Karen.
"In your 'hood. Can I come over?
"IDK, too soon, question mark."
Fuck.
What's the issue?
This is what you want.
You know, it's... The place is so dirty right now.
Probably another day is best for such activity?
Should I tell her I'm out getting Ethiopian tapas?
I don't see what the problem is here.
She wants to come over, and she acknowledged that it's too soon.
You've basically done the deed,
which for you is
ejaculating in your own pants all over your leg,
and then apologizing profusely.
Just maintain eye contact,
light some scented candles and throw in some Sade.
The early stuff, though,
before her arrangements got too baroque.
Okay, that is sad.
But I can do this. Um...
She would never sleep with a guy who lives like this.
I don't even know where to start.
Do you guys want to help me clean up a little bit real quick?
No, don't do that.
- Miss Kendall. - Yeah.
Excuse me.
I am data compression.
I do data compression,
and I know that, um, EndFrame is telling you
that they can lower your bandwidth and storage costs
by delivering your new 4K video stream at 20 megabits per second.
- Who the hell are you? - Sorry. I'm Pied Piper.
I am Richard Hendricks of...
- You're the CEO. - Yes.
- Uh, thank you. - I saw you at TechCrunch.
How do you know the specs of my EndFrame deal?
I can't... I don't...
Okay. I don't like this at all, Richard Hendricks.
I'm sorry. Goodbye.
I can save you millions in bandwidth.
My... My algorithm is lossless.
I can deliver the same 4K video at seven megabits per second, 60 fps.
We are faster and have a higher quality than EndFrame
at a third of the bit rate.
- Bullshit. - I can prove it.
Before you spend a dime, let me prove it.
You know I'm on the board of two charities
and a no-kill animal shelter with Gavin Belson, right?
The man who is suing you for stealing his IP.
That lawsuit's bullshit.
I have a very complicated deal in place with EndFrame.
Why should I back out and take a risk on you?
Back there, you said
that your business needs to do whatever it takes in order to survive.
Well, so does mine.
And this is it.
If I don't get this deal, my company is dead.
So this is your place?
Yes.
I know it's weird that a guy like me would live here,
but, honestly, this is just where I rest.
Out there is where I live.
Did you get my link to the Catalan animation festival?
Oh, did I?
Where do you stand on the subtitling v. Dubbing debate?
'Cause to me, dubbing is boorish.
'Cause every language, to me, has its own...
Hey, how'd you get on our Wi-Fi?
How does your phone know the password?
Did it?
Yeah, it connected immediately.
- It's an alpha-numeric... - Oh...
Long password.
Um... I...
Okay, this is really weird.
Karen?
Erlich. Hey.
I didn't realize that it was you, Karen,
the Karen that Dinesh...
You two know each other?
In a sense. Yeah.
- What... - Outed by Wi-Fi.
is the specifics of the "sense"?
Uh...
You never... You never called.
I got super busy.
Hey, we all do.
Well, we should probably head to the festival, so...
So did you ever find my earrings?
I... I don't know.
Should we check the old lost and found?
Okay.
So, here goes.
By wearing this standard Hooli earbud headphone,
modified with a small piezoelectric sensor,
the user can control their Hooli phone
solely with their neural impulses.
Point, click, drag, even type,
all using only brainwaves.
Think it and it happens.
Holy shit.
- Seriously? - Seriously.
This is great.
Fuck, yes, team!
So what's our timeline here?
I mean, when can we start testing this?
How long before we can integrate this into Nucleus?
Not long.
It'll probably happen in our lifetime.
We just have to figure out how to make it work.
But I really believe that our grandchildren
are going to grow up taking this technology for granted.
Our grandchildren?
I know you're single, but you know, you might meet someone.
No. No! No! What...
What do you have that's ready now?
Well, mmm...
Truth be told, we kind of put all our eggs into this basket.
But we do have the kick-ass potato cannon, though.
Although, actually, this one is... ls broken.
We tried to put a Mr. Potato Head in it,
and it did not like that.
Still in there, eh?
What do you think? Will they ever find those earrings?
Funny thing about lost items,
always in the last place you look.
Thanks for coming in, guys.
I look forward to working with you.
Us, too.
Come on back. This way.
We're right in here.
Hey, Mark.
Good to see you again.
What is this?
This is a bake-off.
I'm gonna give EndFrame and Pied Piper the same video library to compress.
In a week, I'll review
and award the contract to whoever does a better job.
What?
- Um, whomever. - What?
Whomever does the better... But okay, yeah. Never mind.
Welcome to the left-hand path, my friend.