Has anyone ever seen a really tight, clear, written for a 10 year old breakdown of all the various changes that Pied Piper goes through throughout the series? All the deals and ownership changes technical pivots and valuations etc. I would love to see it broken down in writing. An uncomplicated straight forward this happened then this happened then this happened and a little bit of why. It seems like something somebody would’ve done.
I don’t know of a site, but I can break it down briefly. LOVE the show of course.
Pied Piper started as a music searching app for finding copyrighted music that matches your own compositions on the web.
When Gavin, the CEO of Hooli, realized the value of the search algorithm Richard created, he tried to buy it for $10 million from Richard. Richard turns it down and decides to start his own company. He hires Dinesh and Gilfoyle.
They create an app focused on compressing all the files on your phone and storing them in the cloud, making them available anywhere. Like an improved Dropbox.
In season 4, pied piper app is released and at first seems like a hit, but the public doesn’t “get” it, so it dies off. (I always thought this was a weak moment in the show, they just needed a new interface) Dinesh meanwhile creates PiperChat, a video chat app that uses Richard’s algorithm and that starts to become very popular. Richard leaves the company eventually, since the new app is not his vision.
Richard’s new idea is a “new internet” that would connect all devices, use the compression algorithm, and share connections with everyone online without any ISP’s. This is the new Pied Piper.
PiperChat crashes and burns because it is full of underage users and there is no Terms of Service to prevent it. Luckily, Dinesh is able to sell the app to Gavin before getting burned for millions (maybe billions?) of dollars in fines.
While building the new internet, in the final season, the guys hire 50+ engineers from other various startups, and incorporate an AI into the optimization for communication. This AI leads to their downfall, as it eventually learns how to hack any and all encryption which would lead to the end of all internet privacy if their “new internet” were to go live. In the final episode, the guys decide to sabotage their own launch in order to save the world from their own creation.
I almost forgot about “the box” fiasco. While trying to build the Dropbox-style app, the new CEO of pied piper, Jack Barker, insists that they build a network appliance that would use Richard’s algorithm to do backup storage for datacenters. Richard had originally suggested this as a BAD example of what his algorithm could do. The guys decide to build the box but also secretly work on the app they want to build, until Gavin buys a competing company for $250 million, demonstrating that their app idea they call “the platform” is worth far more than “the box”. Barker quits and eventually Richard is named CEO again.