The Cameo in HBO’s Silicon Valley

2 min read

Jul 15, 2016

HBO's Silicon Valley If you weren’t paying close attention, you might’ve missed it, but TINYpulse client Wpromote made a cameo in a recent episode of the tech-industry satirizing HBO series, Silicon Valley. The producers of the show chose Wpromote’s beautiful offices to shoot a scene for the ninth episode of season three “Daily Active Users,” which aired June 19.

If you don’t watch the show, here’s the gist: protagonist Richard Hendricks has invented a brilliant “middle-out” compression algorithm, which takes large files and shrinks them without any loss of quality. The show focuses on Hendricks’s efforts to build a company, Pied Piper, around the algorithm. In “Daily Active Users,” Hendricks seeks the assistance of a marketing/advertising firm to help make Pied Piper more appealing to consumers.

In real life, producers of the show were looking to shoot in an office reminiscent of the Google-like fantasyland campuses found in the actual Silicon Valley. Wpromote’s digs, located in southwest Los Angeles, fit the bill. In the episode, you see the exterior of Wpromote’s office and then an interior with their conference room where a TV displays the company name.

“They were going for almost a parody of Silicon Valley techie offices and we fit the look,” CEO and founder Michael Mothner told the Daily Breeze newspaper. “They had extras walking around carrying yoga mats and it was funny, because we actually have yoga three times a week.”

Unfortunately, the marketing plan for Pied Piper fails (hilariously) in the episode. The big idea from the fictional marketing team in the episode ends up making a clone of the paperclip helper “Clippit” from Microsoft Office circa 2001. Their version is called “Pipey,” and no one likes it.

Mothner told us that the company got a lot of attention from the cameo, seeing a huge spike in web traffic. And after the episode aired, Wpromote added a new client to its portfolio: Pied Piper. TINYpulse