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An HBO 'Silicon Valley' Reference Guide For Non Techies

This article is more than 7 years old.

Zach Woods and Thomas Middleditch (Credit: John P. Fleenor/HBO)

You don’t normally need a dictionary when you watch a TV show, but that’s because the vocabulary challenges involve around words like ‘smize’ and ‘fetch.’ Most entertainment's easily decoded, and when it gets complex, for instance, in the Big Short, the producers helpfully deconstructed complex terminology with audience camera asides featuring Margot Robbie in a bubble bath.

HBO’s satirical Silicon Valley series assumes its audience has a certain level of familiarity with startup culture, which allows them to craft pointed in-jokes (the type that fail if you need to explain them). Discussions about venture capitalists and Soylent are mainstream conversations today, but non-techies might find themselves struggling with the shows reference to ‘skunkworks’ and ‘the Haversack ruse.’

See also: Why Peter Thiel's Hulk Hogan Support Is Bad News For HBO's 'Silicon Valley' Writers

To help, I’ve created a handy reference guide to get you through some of the most questioned terms in HBO’s Silicon Valley.

Reference Word: Meinertzhagen Haversack Ruse

Season 3, Episode 3, ‘Meinertzhagen’s Haversack’

What you need to know:

In context of the show, the Meinertzhagen Haversack Ruse was a tactic used by Pied Piper so they could keep working on their algorithm, in direct opposition to ‘Action’ Jack Barker’s orders. Jared helpfully explained the concept to the team; ‘It’s a principle of military deception, essentially, it means you have to continue to act the part. As far as anyone knows, we’re still building a box that we hate, so we need to act like it.’

But Jared’ description is pretty surface level, the reality — and the history of the term, is far more complicated. In World War 1, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, head of military intelligence was troubled by the British army’s failure to take Gaza and Turkey. So far, two attacks had failed.

The Colonel was determined this wouldn't happen again, and he decided some subterfuge was in order. He doctored a bunch of war plans and placed them in a haversack filled with items to suggest authenticity; a battered watch, a sandwich, letters from a fake wife. During a manufactured skirmish he ‘accidentally’ dropped the haversack, and it was retrieved by the Turkish military. They were convinced the bag was authentic, and changed their tactics, thinking an attack would come from the South.

With their defenses heavy in the south — anticipated by Meinertzhagen, who used this misdirection to break the stalemate. In reference to the show, in light of Richard’s ‘accidental’ scattering of documents that viewers believed he didn’t want revealed, this could be seen as a double bluff; or that the viewers themselves were the victims of the haversack ploy.

Reference word: Skunkworks

Season 3, Episode 3, ‘Meinertzhagen’s Haversack’

What You Need to Know:

The phrase skunkworks originates with Lockheed’s (now Lockheed Martin) World War 2 Skunk Works project. Under cover of a circus tent in Burbank, California, a team of engineers were taken away from their regular jobs and given free reign to create and innovate. Their experiments resulted in the P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter, and the U2 spy plane. This concept was picked up by a number of tech companies, and the premise of small teams focused on unusual R&D in secret labs became a familiar part of product builds today. Some of the biggest skunkworks operating today are based in Silicon Valley, including Google X — which Bloomberg called the ‘search giant’s factory for moonshots.’

See also: The Real CEO Chairs Of HBO's 'Silicon Valley'

Reference Word: The Weissman Score

Season 1, Various episodes

What You Need to Know:

The Weissman Score exists in the strange space where fiction begets reality. The show uses the phrase to refer to the metric of how well their algorithm compressed data, but though the term was invented for the show, the rating structure's premise is workable. This is because the HBO team consulted with Stanford professor Tsachy Weissman and his PhD student, Vinith Misra, and asked them to create the algorithm and the rating method. The algorithm remains a piece of fiction, but in a chicken-egg situation, the Weissman score system they devised is a working benchmark for measuring compressions in the real world.

“It is essentially the compression ratio and the ratio of the log of the compression time,” Misra told Spectrum IEEE, “but it then normalizes that number against an industry standard compressor used for the same data. For music, say, we’d use might use FLAC.” The Weissman score is now used in a number of universities.

Reference Term: Mole People

Season 3, Episode 3, Meinertzhagen’s Haversack’

What You Need to Know:

The phrase mole people generally refers to homeless people or tribes who live underground, often in tunnels, aqueducts or abandoned shelters. The phrase was famously the title of reporter Jennifer Toth’s book, which investigated the subterranean dwellers of New York City in the early ‘90’s. In context of the show, it’s how the team, refer to the data center dwellers, whose job it is to keep the box running, 24 hours a day. Also characterized by small, pale people whose existence seems devoid of sunlight.

Reference Term: Three Comma Club

Season 2, Episode 7, ‘Adult Content’

What You Need to Know:

This phrase obliquely references an individual's net worth; there are three commas in a billion dollars. Russ Hanneman, the a-hole investor (played by actor Chris Diamantopoulos), uses the term to indicate wealth status when Monica, Erlich and Richard visit his house. In typical fashion, he also has a huge wall painting with three commas, just to draw attention. "I'm in the three-commas club," Russ says. This is also an in-joke in the valley as it also refers to Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban’s ‘Three comma club’, an apparel line designed for the ‘aspiring entrepreneur.’ They sell t-shirts, sweaters and baseball caps with  the three comma design.

Reference Word: Stanford Robotics ’Bambot’

Episode Mentioned Season 3, Episode 1, 'Founder Friendly'

What You Need to Know:

In the first episode of Season 3, a stressed out Richard slams into something in the middle of the road. “Did I just hit a deer?” he asks Erlich. They investigate and it turns out they an into a robotic dog wearing antlers, an animatronic metallic creation that eerily trotted away. “F**ing Stanford Robotics,” Erlich said, aiming kicks at it.

However, this robot wasn’t actually Stanford-related, and the show used a hybrid of analogies to weave this scene together (as Stanford’s the closest techie University in the Valley). This was actually a Boston Dynamics Robot, Spot, who was initially built to scout for the U.S. Marines. There’s not actual Bambot in existence, as the addition of antlers was strictly for the show. But for an additional blending of unreality, the ‘Stanford students’ who ran out to protect their robot were actually Boston Dynamics Technicians.

Reference word: RIGBY

Episode Mentioned: Season 3, Episode 1, ‘Founder Friendly’

What you need to know:

RIGBY is an HBO designed acronym that enabled engineers Gilfoyle and Dinesh to talk smack about Richard without feeling guilty. It stemmed from their disillusionment of being asked by him to leave Pied Piper because he’d been fired. Repeatedly using the phrase, “Richard is nice but y'know,” was too cumbersome so they shortened it.

“What if we use a dictionary patch to compress all the nice stuff?” Gilfoyle suggested. So Richard Is Great But Y'know became RIGBY. It’s pretty self-explanatory in the episode but if you second screened through this section it would be pretty hard to decipher.

Reference word: CEO coaches

Episode Mentioned: Season 3, Episode 1, ‘Founder Friendly’

What You Need To Know:

Richard is angry about losing the CEO role, and begs to get it back, telling Monica he’ll even, ‘Go to one of those CEO coaches like that guy at f***ing Twitter.” What’s he’s referencing is common knowledge to the tech circle, but might not be as instantly familiar to those outside it. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and founder of payment startup Square, recently returned to Twitter as a CEO, and continued to head up Square at the same time.

Dorsey’s known for regularly consulting with a CEO coach, to help improve his strategies. “He got coaching and spent a lot of time reflecting on what he needed to do to pull the total picture together. He learned, learned, learned from all the mistakes of those around him,” Dorsey’s confidant Tim Kidd told The Wall Street Journal.

Let me know any more terms you'd like decoded, and I'll update this post as the season progresses.