I just saw that the 8 episodes of SV would be 1- Minimum Viable Product, 2- The Cap Table; 3- Articles of Incorporation; 4- Fiduciary Duties; 5- Signaling Risk; 6- Third Party Insourcing; 7- Proof of Concept; 8- Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency. In episode 2, our hero has to give equity. A typicial start-up dilemma. Richard Hendricks is the founder. He is backed by Erlich Bachmann, « owner of the incubator ». He has three developers, Bertram Gilfoyle, Dinesh Chugtai, Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti. Jared Dunn has left Houli to help and write the business plan so that Peter Gregory, a billionaire venture capitalist (who is also paying students to drop out from school…) will invest $200k for 5% of the company. (Richard has declined a $10M offer for his algorithm…) Where we see that Friendship and Business do not often go along…

In order to negotiate his equity, here is a quote of the nerd talking to the business guy:
“While you were busy minoring in gender studies and singing a cappella at Sarah Lawrence, I was giving crude access to NSA servers, I was one click away from starting a second Iranian revolution,
– I actually went to Vassar
– I provide cross-eye scripting, I monitor for ddos attacks, emergency database rollbacks and faulty transactions. It’s not magic, it’s talent and sweat!”
(I am really not sure of the technical terms…)

Richard Hendricks & Jared Dunn interviewing the 3 developers, Bertram Gilfoyle, Dinesh Chugtai, Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti

Peter Gregory and his assistant