Characters / Silicon Valley

List of major, recurring and minor characters from Silicon Valley.

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Main Characters

Richard Hendricks

Richard Hendricks

"Look, guys, for thousands of years, guys like us have gotten the shit kicked out of us. But now, for the first time, we're living in an era, where we can be in charge and build empires. We could be the Vikings of our day."

Played by: Thomas Middleditch

The primary coder and CEO of Pied Piper.

• Berserk Button: Has no tolerance for coders who use spaces instead of tabs despite there really being no difference. He ends up dating a girl that he quickly finds out uses spaces. He tries to be cool about it because he likes her but really can't let it go and goes off on her.
• Beware the Nice Ones: After taking a level in badass over the course of the series, he proves he can be quite the petty, cunning and egotistical manchild when he needs to be.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Meek, neurotic and passive as he might be, Richard is also surprisingly selfish, petty and vindictive to other people. While this is apparent from the beginning, it becomes more pronounced as he becomes more overconfident.
• Butt-Monkey: His social awkwardness, anxiety and confidence are constant struggles for Richard but at the same time, he can be an impulsive, childish and Ditzy Genius so he does bring some risky situations upon himself.
• Crippling Overspecialization: While Richard is a true wunderkind when it comes to programming, his poor people skills, impulsivity, and lack of business training make him a poor CEO.
• The Ditherer: He's very indecisive due to his constant neuroses and lack of confidence.
• Ditzy Genius: Richard is an extremely talented programmer who has the ability to redesign an entire platform literally overnight, but he also lacks basic common sense and has very poor decision-making skills.
• Extreme Doormat: Richard is socially awkward and extremely passive and uncomfortable when dealing with other people, not to mention so naive that it almost never occurs to him that someone may be trying to screw him or Pied Piper over. He usually needs Erlich's help when some charisma or sales skills are required.
• Heel Realization: His antics in Season 4 cause him to have one of these, though while he does try to keep Pied Piper as ethical as possible in the subsequent seasons, he does retain his more negative, petty and egotistical, traits for the rest of the series.
• Hot-Blooded: Described as a ticking timebomb of pent up rage. While he's generally a meek and insecure coward, Richard breaks into a passionate, angry rant almost Once an Episode.
• Jerkass Has a Point: In season 3, he arrogantly tells Gilfoyle and Dinesh that they cannot scale Pied Piper’s algorithm without him. The two dismiss him, call him an arrogant prick and aim to scale Pied Piper all on their own. But as it turns out, they are utterly baffled and confused by the machinations of Richard’s complex compression library, and realize that they really can’t do it without him.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: In "Customer Service", Richard ends up sleeping with Liz and according to her the sex was horrible in every single respect. It actually ends up saving her marriage with Dan because at least he isn't that bad. He pretends he thought was bad for him too and it's a case of No Sparks, but it's clear by the way he talks he thought it went fine. Played for Laughs when the exchange becomes an Overly Long Gag
  Liz: As bad as it was, you know, and it was bad, um...
  Richard: Okay.
  Liz: Like... really... awful.
  Richard: I get it.
  Liz: I just... If there's an upside to any of this, it would be that I realize now what I have in Dan.
  Richard: Silver lining, so that's nice.
• Lovable Nerd: While he's far from flawless, Richard is generally a likable and endearing guy due to a combination of his genuine devotion to his craft and overall awkwardness.
• One-Man Army: Purely in a coding sense. When properly motivated, Richard can accomplish tasks that entire teams of world-class coders can't do. Tellingly, when most of the Pied Piper Employees leave in Reorientation, Richard is able to finish their entire workload by himself.
• Mistaken for Gay: Richard is mistaken for gay by his ex-girlfriend, who overhears Jared telling Monica that he's Richard's (business) partner.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: Played With in the first season, as he says the wrong thing at the wrong time when a neighborhood mom and her preteen daughter walk by.
• Mr. Vice Guy: Richard is obsessive, has poor social skills, and is prone to making short-sighted mistakes, but he's also generally portrayed as a relatively decent and sympathetic guy whose desire to do good through the power of tech is genuine.
• No Social Skills: He's a socially awkward and timid nerd who's super intelligent but lacks people skills.
• Saying Too Much: Richard has a habit of telling people things they don't need to know. For instance, after Endframe fired their cybersecurity engineer, Seth, Richard goes to console him and tells him that they didn't do anything to break through his security.^note The CEO of Endframe had placed a post it note with his credentials on his desk and Gilfoyle took it when nobody was looking. This ends up causing Seth angrily threaten to hack into their system and sabotage their company.
  • Made worse later in the episode, when Seth ends up apologizing to Richard and saying he's not going to hack into their system. Richard is initially grateful but then lets it slip that Gilfoyle wasn't worried at all. This causes Seth to fly into an even greater rage and makes the exact same threats to Gilfoyle over the phone.
• Socially Awkward Hero: Richard's people skills are very bad, to the point where he can't even look most people in the eye when talking to them. He's gotten progressively better at it as the show continues, though he still has a bad stutter and a tendency of putting his foot in his mouth.
• Too Dumb to Live: He takes his secret skunkworks plans to the office, after a whole night of planning, and a specific directive to shred all evidence.
• Took a Level in Badass: It's subtle, but as he grows more confident with himself and more involved in the business side of Silicon Valley (especially its ruthless politics), he gets this. It culminates in Season 5 when he is able to inspire his new employees to believe in PiperNet and ultimately beat Gavin, Laurie and Yao at their own game in the season finale.
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • In the beginning of Season 3, where he lashes out at everyone. Entirely justified as he feels he's being screwed out of his own company and nobody, except for Jared, has his back. He gets even worse in season 4, where he dismisses his friends' work on their excellent video chat application because it's not his own idea.
  • Even worse in later season 4, when Richard tries to hack into every visitor of Hooli Con with the Pied Piper app, only to have it all messed up because he hacks his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend's screensaver, thanks to his jealousy and it's revealed that Richard is the one who's responsible for Keenan's VR company being acquired by Hooli, which causes Erlich to lose their deal along with his job at Bream Hall and almost kill himself, and he lies about the whole thing.
• Wild Card: Surprisingly, Richard has a tendency of acting spontaneously and recklessly during tense situations, which makes him an unpredictable opponent to his competitors. He has both benefited and suffered from this behavior at various points.
• Younger Than They Look: One character mistakes him for about a decade older than he is and a doctor diagnoses him with his organs aging severely due to stress.

Erlich Bachmann

Erlich Bachmann

"...if you're not an asshole, it creates this kind of asshole vacuum and that void is filled by other assholes."

Played by: T.J. Miller

A wannabe entrepreneur who runs an "innovation incubator" in his house and owns 10% of Pied Piper.

• Ambiguous Situation: His fate at the end of the series is left completely unanswered, with him seemingly disappearing from society completely. There is some evidence to suggest that Jian Yang killed him to assume his identity, but even that is inconclusive.
• Catholic School Girls Rule: Holds this opinion, as shown when Monica revealed she went to a Catholic school.
• Cold Ham: He's prone to making hammy, over-the-top statements without so much as raising his voice.
• Comically Missing the Point: Constantly, usually when he doesn't grasp how much of an overbearing jerk he can be and nowhere near as smart as he thinks.
  • When he was in college, he was nicknamed "Kool-Aid" and assumes it was because of how cool he was. It was actually because, like the Kool-Aid Man, he'd burst into other people's conversations and was fat and loud. Even after Richard shows the video and openly telling him, Erlich still doesn't get it.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Despite his usual idiocy, Erlich does have moments of genuine invaluable business insight. For example, while Richard is bemoaning Hooli's acquisition of EndFrame and the prospect of them getting a Middle-Out Compression platform first, Erlich points out that this acquisition proves that the platform has a concrete monetary value and thus he can use that as leverage to force Barker to change priorities. This while Erlich is utterly stoned off his ass.
• A Degree in Useless: Word of God says he went to a liberal arts school and got a "BA in Ultimate Frisbee" there.
• Delusions of Eloquence: Sees himself as erudite Steve Jobs-type when in reality he's a rude, pretentious and slovenly stoner.
• Driven to Suicide: Possibly near the end of "The Keenan Vortex". After Keenan Feldspar backstabs him, Erlich goes home and sets the palapa behind the Incubator on fire while he's sitting under the palapa. The attempt fails as the morning after shows that Erlich is completely unharmed but unresponsive.
• Erudite Stoner: He's definitely a stoner. He's not as erudite as he thinks he is, however.
  • He does have a philosophical side and once things get serious and you cut through his bragging he actually has provided Richard with a lot of useful advice and guidance.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: He doesn't take as much crap in the group as Jared, but between his overblown ego and generally abrasive personality, nobody really likes being around him. People usually only hang around him because he offers resources that they need but can't afford (like housing, beer, or weed). The season 2 episode "Homicide", in which Pied Piper partners up with an energy drink company owned by an old college acquaintance of Erlich's reveals that he was definitely this in college.
• Heroic BSoD: In "The Keenan Vortex", Erlich suffers from one after Keenan Feldspar backstabs him in order to work for Jack Barker at Hooli. He is seen to be in a non-responsive state near the end of the episode.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: He explains to Jian Yang how California laws that heavily favor tenants over landlords leave Jared unable to get his condo back from the guy he was renting it to on Airbnb... leading Jian Yang to realize that he can keep staying at Erlich's house for up to a year without Erlich being able to do a damn thing about it.
  • Erlich tricks Big Head into giving him access to his fortune and uses it to throw a big party celebrating himself, but in "Bachmanity Insanity" he discovers that Big Head was broke and his ploy has him on the hook for $1 million he doesn't have. He has to sell his shares of Pied Piper for $713,0000 debt, when they could be worth billions in a short while.
  • Subverted when these events lead to Erlich owning half of Pied Piper, though it's in worse shape than ever.
  • He later tries to use the students in Big Head's Stanford CS class as labor for See Food, they immediately realize what he's up to and steal his idea, rendering it worthless.
• Jerkass: Partially just because it's his egotistical personality, partially because he sees it as necessary to be one because Richard is too meek and trusting to be a good CEO on his own.
• Jerkass Has a Point: There are occasions when he can be quite insightful and good at picking up people's ulterior motives.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Erlich is a childish egomaniac looking to profit off of others' work and has no moral qualms about sleeping with other men's wives. But he is also protective of Richard and when he finds out that Richard is being bullied by neighborhood children, promptly goes out and beats up a boy who couldn't have been more than 13 years old.
• Kavorka Man: He's a boorish, egotistical stoner whose appearance has been compared to that of a manatee - but he has managed to convince more than one married woman to sleep with him.
• The Load: While he has occasional moments of brilliance, and his bravado at times compensates for Richard's timidity, Erlich is generally much more of a hindrance than an asset.
• Mushroom Samba: Takes a fistful of psychotropic mushrooms and trips balls while trying to think up a good company name.
• Occidental Otaku: Erlich is something of a Japanophile and attempts to copy aspects of Japanese business culture (which he says is the most advanced in the world), such as ritualized gift-giving.
• Put on a Bus: Is last seen sprawled on the floor of some unidentified Tibetan house smoking opium in "Server Error."
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: Clearly could have sold his company for far more but just thought about enough to live on and thus often fails to grasp that being rich has its costs.
  • It's best shown when he tricks Big Head into giving up control of the latter's $20 million fortune. However, Erlich has neglected to check the finances to discover that Big Head has already blown through his money on stuff such as moving his mansion pool and then moving it back to where it was. At a huge party at Alcatraz, Erlich is rocked to discover that thanks to his massive spending, he and Nelson are both broke.
• Small Name, Big Ego: In spades. He sold his company for just enough money to live on but continues to act like he's a fantastic Silicon Valley hotshot and genius who's a mentor to others. In truth, most in the business have no idea who he is and his "protegees" hate him.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Erlich sees himself as a sophisticated man with a taste for the finer things, which contrasts humorously with his crass manners and unkempt appearance. He'll wear kimonos and buy expensive artisan cheeses while swearing and ripping huge bong hits.
• Vision Quest: Erlich is fond of these; he says he found the name for his previous company, Aviato (actually he says it "found him") on one, and he tries again in the third episode of the first season when the team is considering re-naming Pied Piper.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: As noted above, he thinks he's a cultured and respected power player in the tech world when he's really a stoned egomaniac with barely any recognition.

Bertram Gilfoyle

Bertram Gilfoyle

"I just masturbated to heighten my focus. I have a 15-minute refractory period."

Played by: Martin Starr

The network engineer of Pied Piper who is known for his apathetic and sardonic personality.

• The Ace: Gilfoyle is probably the smartest member of the main cast, he's the most consistently impressive at his job and he generally succeeds at everything he attempts to do well. Most attempts to outdo him don't end well for his rivals.
• Always Someone Better: Generally outdoes Dinesh at everything with ease and loves rubbing it in his face. Even Java, which is Dinesh’s self-proclaimed area of expertise.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: For all of his quirks, he's arguably the most skilled all-around member of the Pied Piper crew. He's proficient with both coding and installing hardware, and can be far more social than Richard or Dinesh when needed. Tellingly, when he considers finding a different job in Season 3, he is heavily recruited.
• Catchphrase: He's fond of telling people to "chortle my balls."
• Creepy Monotone: Always speaks in a flat voice to reflect his stoic personality. It's Played for Laughs.
• Deadpan Snarker: Almost every line out of his mouth is a cutting remark.
• Divergent Character Evolution: The situation with him and Dinesh is a little like this. Originally they were defined primarily by their rivalry with each other, but as the series has gone on they've developed more unique character traits distinct from each other. They're still in almost every scene together, though.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Ocasionally calls Richard "Dick". Although it is a common short for "Richard", wouldn't be surprising if he's actually calling him a dick considering its Gilfoyle we're talking about.
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite his openly nihilistic personality, there are a few times he shows limitations:
  • He doesn't appreciate people lying to him.
  • Along with Dinesh, he gets disgusted when Richard acts like a jerkass just to attain his goals.
  • He even considered Richard's accidental outing of Deedee (a gay CEO) as a Christian (considered a sin in the tech world) to be in poor taste.
  • In the series finale, Gilfoyle is the first to insist on destroying the Pied Piper Network, having discovered that it now has the ability to break strong encryption schemes, threatening global security. However, this probably has more to do with the threat of going to jail than being ethical.
• Freudian Excuse: While Gilfoyle's childhood is hardly ever touched upon, he has hinted at animosity towards his mother, referring to her as a "backstabbing bitch".
• Gadgeteer Genius: Pied Piper's hardware specialist. When Gavin Belson makes Pied Piper radioactive to every hosting provider they approach, Gilfoyle builds the company servers in the garage.
• Hollywood Satanism: Mostly averted. Gilfoyle is a self-described "LaVeyan Satanist with some theistic tendencies." And while he attends a "baptism" ceremony, no one there is portrayed as explicitly evil. In fact, the priest especially is a very nice man. On the other hand, while Gilfoyle seems to treat some of his co-workers as true friends (he appears to genuinely like and respect Richard, for example), he espouses an extremely nihilistic and cynical worldview, asserting that people are all just "animals in a pit" and saying he trusts nobody.
• Immune to Slapstick: In a show whose cast is primarily characters meant to be laughed at, Gilfoyle stands out as the one character that's never made the butt of the joke and comes across as meant to be laughed with, even with all the ridiculous things he says and does.
• Insufferable Genius: He's a highly-skilled coder who's almost entirely self-taught, and often looks down on others because of it. Lampshaded by his HR file.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Gilfoyle may be a cynical dick, but 9 times out of 10 he makes a good point. For instance, when Jian Yang buys a refrigerator, Gilfoyle correctly critiques that it's using technology to solve non existent problems (such as the feature to look at your food from a screen, something that has little to no practical purpose).
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's outwardly abrasive and cynical, but is loyal to the crew and has his moments of true kindness.
• Karma Houdini: Is the only one able to completely get away with being a Jerkass and nothing bad ever happens to him. This is Played for Laughs as he often enjoys other people's torments, Dinesh being his primary entertainment. The closest this gets to being averted is during Season 5 where he and the rest are kicked out of the Incubator by Jian Yang but he ultimately gets the last laugh as Jian Yang allows them back into the Incubator during the season finale thanks to him stupidly gambling all of his money away.
• Karmic Jackpot: In the finale it's Gilfoyle who discovers how potentially dangerous their product could become, and is the first one to advocate for ruining the code before it threatens world security. Whether Gilfoyle did this for moral reasons or pragmatic, in the end he and Dinesh come out on top after the falling out of Pied Piper, starting their own cybersecurity company and becoming rich in the process.
• Kavorka Man: Gilfolyle obviously doesn't put much effort into his appearance, but he has a gorgeous girlfriend who stuns the other Incubator residents. On a non-sexual level, he's demonstrated he also has the ability to quickly make friends with strangers if he wants to - he just usually doesn't try, probably because of his cynical views on people.
• Last-Name Basis: His first name is Bertram, but nobody ever calls him that.
• Living Lie Detector: He claims to have this ability in one third season episode, and at least on the nervous and awkward Jared it seems to work. It doesn't seem to work at the end of the same episode when Jared secretly pays a "click farm" in Bangladesh to artificially inflate Pied Piper's user base, but it's left ambiguous whether Gilfoyle really believed Jared or just chose to not call him on the lie for the sake of Richard and the company.
  • It’s worth noting that he and Dinesh worked out that they were using a click farm by looking at user activity. Was it his belief that Jared was lying to him that prompted him and Dinesh to check the user activity?
• Odd Friendship: With Monica in later seasons.
• Only One Name: Practically everyone calls him Gilfoyle.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: in the Series Finale, when Dinesh informs the Pied Piper that their plan to sabotage their own launch is compromised, he insists they trust him to upload the correct code into their network, despite telling them earlier not to trust him. When Richard fails to decide if he can trust Dinesh or not, Gilfoyle takes the initiative and grants Dinesh access back into the network. This marks the first time in the series that Gilfoyle has shown Dinesh any kind of trust.
• The Illegal: Gilfoyle is Canadian and was briefly in the US illegally. This pisses Dinesh off because he thought the guys immediately assumed it would be him. Once Gilfoyle quickly sorts things out, Dinesh is pissed off even further because of the implied racism and how long it took him and his family to legally earn their citizenship.
• Ship Tease: With Monica, as they spend a lot of time together in Seasons 4 and 5. He even tells that her he likes her, albeit in a platonic way.
• The Stoic: Very rarely emotes. Even when he does, he still talks in the same monotone voice.
• The Stoner: Keeps mushrooms in an ice cream carton in the fridge, and is seen smoking pot by the pool in at least one episode (leading to an argument with Richard about whether he was getting high at work or at home, since the Incubator house is also Pied Piper's offices).
• Those Two Guys: With Dinesh. They're in almost every scene together and ultimately open their own cybersecurity company together in the Distant Finale.
• Troll: Especially if the target is Dinesh. Most notably in Season 4 when he agrees with Richard's decision to promote Dinesh to CEO just so he can see Dinesh fail. Gilfoyle gets his wish later on when it's revealed that Dinesh didn't bother adding Terms of Service to PiperChat, thus making Dinesh's chat app in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and making Dinesh potentially liable of $21 billion in fines. Gilfoyle even pops a bottle of champagne in celebration of Dinesh's fuck-up.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Dinesh and Gilfoyle spend most of the first season as rivals trying to out-do each other, still give no sign of liking each other in the least, and argue and mock each other constantly, yet they never seem to be separated. When Jared points out that they are basically each other's best friend, they both immediately tell him to shut up.
• Xanatos Gambit: He sees his decision to back Dinesh as PiperChat CEO as this. While he’s counting on Dinesh failing, he admits that should Dinesh succeed as CEO, they will all become rich, so he benefits either way

Dinesh Chugtai

Dinesh Chugtai

"I didn't even shake a woman's hand until I was 17 years old. The idea of getting an erection around men I live and work with, it's just not something I can handle. The idea that I have a boner and you have a boner and he has a boner and we're all sitting there with boners in our pants..."

Played by: Kumail Nanjiani

A programmer specializing in Java and coder in Pied Piper. He is a hopeless romantic and often the victim of Gilfoyle's ridicule and pranks.

• Bad Liar: It's a serious problem of his.
• Butt-Monkey: Increasingly rivaling Jared for this status within the group, much to his own chagrin.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: It's a real problem for him.
• Casanova Wannabe: Most of his attempts to hook up with women end in failure. His most successful relationship ends when his girlfriend turns out to be a cyber-terrorist.
• Characterization Marches On: In the pilot episode "Minimum Viable Product" he was just as stoic and snarky as Gilfoyle was. Throughout the entire rest of the first season, he drops the act and becomes dorkier, a characterization he sticks with for the rest of the series.
• Divergent Character Evolution: The situation with him and Gilfoyle is a little like this. Originally they were defined primarily by their rivalry with each other, but as the series has gone on they've developed more unique character traits distinct from each other. They're still in almost every scene together, though.
• Hopeless Suitor: Tries to impress many girls but rarely succeeds.
• Ivy League for Everyone: Went to Caltech (practically a West Coast Ivy), and did graduate studies at Yale and Cambridge. You'd never guess by looking at him.
• Jerkass: Increasingly becomes one as the series goes on. He even admits to being vindictive and petty more than once.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite his self-centered and petty nature, he really is a nice guy and values his friendships. In the series finale, he distances himself from the plan to sabotage/launch Pied Piper - a move which Gilfoyle describes as both courageous and cowardly - but immediately acts when he finds out that the sabotage was detected minutes before the launch, making his way to the supernode at the top of their building and implementing the sabotage code just in time.
• Karmic Jackpot: Shared with Gilfoyle above, ultimately Dinesh was the one who sabotaged Pied Piper before it could threaten global security. As a result of the fallout, he's able to start his own cybersecurity company with Gilfoyle.
• The Load: Becomes more pronounced after Erlich leaves the group. Dinesh is a great programmer, but he's distinctly below Richard in and definitely below Gilfoyle, in terms of skills . On top of that, his personality frequently causes him to create new problems or make preexisting ones grow even worse, often without noticing.
• Mr. Vice Guy: Less pronounced than Richard but he has his moments of genuine kindness despite his self-centered nature.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: He has a tendency to cause this. At one point, he sneaks into the garage to have a go at setting up one of Gilfoyle's homemade servers and ends up breaking $50,000 worth of equipment (and blacking out the neighborhood) with the single flip of a switch.
• Only One Name: His surname is Chugtai, but this is virtually never mentioned.
• Straw Loser: Dinesh is only allowed to one-up Gilfoyle if it results in a Pyrrhic Victory for him.
• Those Two Guys: With Gilfoyle. They're in almost every scene together and ultimately open their own cybersecurity company together in the Distant Finale.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • In Season 3, he uses the algorithm to develop a video chat app for his personal use. The app is well received and so the team decides to pivot Pied Piper to that instead. In Season 4, when Richard decides to leave the company, he appoints Dinesh as CEO. However, Yank the Dog's Chain kicks in quickly (see below).
  • In the series finale, Dinesh ultimately saves the world from the monstrosity that PiperNet would have become after initially having himself removed from the plans to intentionally tank the company because he figured he'd be too selfish to actually go through with it.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Dinesh and Gilfoyle spend most of the first season as rivals trying to out-do each other, still give no sign of liking each other in the least, and argue and mock each other constantly, yet they never seem to be separated. When Jared points out that they are basically each other's best friend, they both immediately tell him to shut up.
• What Does This Button Do?: He can't stand not being allowed to help Gilfoyle build the garage server, and his obsession leads to disastrous results.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: After being thrown a bone his way as seen on the entry above, Dinesh and the entire PiperChat company gets hit with this hard in "Terms of Service" when he finds out that his video chat app is in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act due to not having any parental restrictions or age requirements which means the company could be fined up to $21 billion. He gets a brief Hope Spot when Richard tells him that since the company is technically a corporation, they might not have to pay for anything because the company isn't worth anything at the time. However, Jared then brings up the fact that since Dinesh purposely didn't include a terms of service to the chat, Dinesh could be personally liable for $21 billion. Then Gilfoyle pops a bottle of champagne to celebrate Dinesh's fuck-up.

Jared Dunn

Donald "Jared" Dunn

"Sorry if I scared you, I know I have somewhat ghost-like features. My uncle used to say, 'You look like someone starved a virgin to death.'"

Played by: Zach Woods

An ex-VP of Hooli who quits the company in order to join the Pied Piper team as its CFO and business adviser.

• Abusive Parents: Possibly. He doesn't know who his birth father is, or when he was born exactly. Various comments about his childhood, such as pretending Harriet Tubman was his imaginary friend and the two of them were building an underground railroad to freedom, suggest his childhood was not a pleasant one. It's later revealed that his birth parents not only were well-off and happily married, but actually gave him up due to first-world inconveniences (like travel seating with a third child)... then they decide they really did want a third baby, and instead of trying to get their child back, just decide to have another, giving him the exact same name as the one they gave up.
• Adopted to the House: Becomes Richard's roommate after squatters take over his apartment.
• Ambiguously Bi: Although he's probably had sex with more women than anyone else in the hacker hostel, he has a strange relationship with Richard that borders on homoerotic.
  "And then his eyes went dead, like when I tell him I love him."
  "I let my desire to be around Richard, and to be needed by him, turn me into some kind of a craven yes-man, and it clouded my judgment, and I led him down a horrible path."
  "HE'S MY PARTNER!"
• Apologizes a Lot: Jared is constantly apologizing and self-deprecating due to his vulnerability and insecure nature. He appears to be able to put up with virtually any level of abuse.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Jared might be the nicest member of Pied Piper team, but even he can lose it sometimes, like when he calls Gavin's blood boy a dick three times for disagreeing with Richard's idea for him and Gavin's collaboration, when he angrily confronts Richard for messing up his team's big plan to hack their app into every phone of Hooli Con visitors (that Jared has been against from the first place and reluctantly agrees because it's "for the greater good") by hacking his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend's screensaver, on account of his jealousy, and when he hits Melcher harshly with his shoe to defend Richard who had sex with Melcher's fiancée.
• Bilingual Bonus: Jared speaks unsubtitled German in his sleep. Various internet commenters have differing interpretations as to what he's saying (his accent is apparently atrocious), but all agree that the gist is disturbing and suggests that mild-mannered Jared has a well-hidden dark side.
• Break the Cutie: He reaches a tipping point when Richard ruins their plan to unethically download Pied Piper into the phones of unsuspecting Hooli Con visitors; he tears up as he angrily confronts him and in the following scene his eyes are noticeably red from crying.
• Butt-Monkey: The whole company has had more than its share of misfortune, but Jared has probably suffered more individual mishaps and abuse than anyone else - the time he was accidentally "kidnapped" and sent to a floating island by Peter Gregory's self-driving car is probably the biggest example.
• The Casanova: Yes, seriously. "Bachmanity Insanity" reveals he's actually very skilled at picking up women and having sex with them (doing it twice during the episode). He just chose to take a break from dating this whole time so he could focus his energy on Pied Piper. In the next episode "Build a Better Beta" when everyone is trying to decide which friends to send Beta invites to, he's heard muttering the names of multiple women.
• The Comically Serious: He's an intelligent, diligent and mild-mannered person and he's also a socially awkward weirdo.
• Crazy-Prepared: Jared has "booby-trapped the house with corporate resources."
• Creepy Good: While he's by far the outright nicest member of Pied Piper and ultimately means well, he can say and do some pretty creepy things at times, such as his inopportune mentioning of his Dark and Troubled Past or his habit of shouting German in his sleep.
• Dark and Troubled Past: From what little we hear of it, he didn't seem to have had a very pleasant childhood.
• Embarrassing Nickname: He mentions that his aunt used to call him "glasshole" because of his fragile body. In season 2 he's given the nickname "OJ" (short for Other Jared) when the company considers hiring another Jared.
• Expansion Pack Past: The only information we get about his past are details he randomly mentions in passing. These become increasingly mysterious, convoluted and creepy with each passing episode.
  "What's gone is not necessarily lost. I found my retainer in my high school dumpster. I found my biological father in a militia in the Ozarks. This should be no problem."
  "As a product of forced adoption, I can assure you there are consequences."
  Richard: You're always telling me how you spent your entire childhood pretending that everything going on around you was okay.
  Jared: Ah, Uncle Jerry's game...
• Expy: He's essentially a much kinder version of Zach Woods' other character Gabe Lewis from The Office (US).
• Extreme Doormat: Has even less of a backbone than Richard, if that's possible.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: None of the Pied Piper team is very inclined to showing much affection or respect for their colleagues, but Jared is treated with open contempt by nearly everybody during the first few seasons in spite of his real contributions to the company. He's more accepted by the company as time goes on, but he remains inadvertently creepy.
• The Generic Guy: Subverted heavily. The show makes you think he’ll be this when he’s first introduced, due to his bland voice and goody-two-shoes nature being seemingly less interesting than the over-the-top personalities of the Hacker Hostel, but is eventually revealed to be completely and utterly strange.
• Green-Eyed Monster: He gets extremely jealous of Richard's new assistant, Holden, apparently wanting to keep Richard dependent on him. This culminates with Holden's mysterious disappearance shortly after Jared returns to Pied Piper.
• Hidden Depths: Jared comes across like a milquetoast Extreme Doormat, but a Running Gag has him constantly implying a Dark and Troubled Past as well as other eccentricities. He's also revealed to be a very successful ladies' man.
• Innocent Blue Eyes: He's got large blue eyes and is by far the sweetest member of Pied Piper. However, it's subverted at times when you realize he's had a much more troubled past than he lets on and that he's not above dubious means to help the company succeed.
• Kavorka Man: Season 3 reveals that he has an inexplicable, preternatural talent for picking up women, to the point he is able to get them to spend the night with him while still living in Erlich's garage. A fact that shocks the other Pied Piper members given his gangly stature and pretty plain looks. He explains that he had voluntarily stopped dating for a while to focus on his work at Pied Piper.
  Russ Hanneman (upon meeting Jared for the first time): Whoa. I'm just going to say it: this guy fucks, am I right? 'Cause I'm looking at the rest of you guys and this is the guy in the house doing all the fucking, am I right? You know I'm right. This guy fucks!
• Large Ham: While he does try to be a peaceful, sensitive and polite gentleman but he can also an emotionally intense and neurotic Cloudcuckoolander.
• Mistaken for Gay: His comments on and around Richard border on this.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: When pivoting Pied Piper to a family with a toddler, he comes up with a rather strange lie. The parents call the cops, and Hilarity Ensues.
  "How much would it be worth to you if I told you I had a GPS app called "Pied Piper", tracking the location of your child? I can follow your child anywhere and there is nothing you can do to stop me. Most missing children are never found. Interested, very interested, or very interested?"
  It gets worse when the cops find out he has Adderall: "An underage child gave it to me after I lured him into my house."
• Multiple-Choice Past: His background is colorful to say the least, with him making offhand remarks about dozens of traumatizing experiences with foster families across the series. Zach Woods himself has admitted that he makes no attempt at any consistency when improvising these anecdotes.
• Never Had Toys: He tells Richard and his girlfriend Winnie that she shares a name with his childhood stuffed animal, except it wasn't really one, but rather a ziploc bag stuffed with newspaper with a smiley face drawn on it.
• Nice Guy: Easily the nicest and most openly caring member of Pied Piper by a wide margin.
• The Not-Love Interest: Becomes more pronounced after Erlich leaves the cast, where his relationship with Richard, which has distinctly homoerotic undertones but never grows beyond being a good friendship, becomes the closest thing the series has to an emotional center.
• Odd Friendship: With Monica.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: His Undying Loyalty to Richard begins to waver after Richard decides to hijack Hoolicon to upload their code onto users' phones and Richard's subsequent unethical decisions lead to him deciding to quit Pied Piper.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: His real name is Donald. Gavin Belson called him Jared once by mistake and Donald/Jared was too scared to correct him.
• Parental Neglect: He eventually finds his real birth parents in season 6. When he meets them, they claim that they just weren't ready for him in their lives, but as they talk he discovers that they are a very wealthy couple who actually had four children (he was the third, and they kept the other three). Specifically, he was given up for adoption to make travel arrangements easier, since having a third child would mean the whole family couldn't fit in a single row of first-class (although they soon changed their minds after giving Jared up).
• The Pollyanna: He may be intense sometimes but he's still a positive and supportive person under a lot of stress or hardship.
• Talking in Your Sleep: Jared talks in his sleep... in German. Oddly, he denies knowing any German. (His poor accent and grammar mean his mutterings can't be perfectly translated, but the general gist of it seems to be about cutting throats and other violent acts... possibly a sign of repressed rage at the insults he constantly endures.)
• Team Mom: A nurturing, sensitive and supportive presence to the Pied Piper team, especially Richard. Like many moms, he does Kegel exercises and finds romcom characters played by Julia Roberts highly relatable. It's deconstructed a bit in that he kinda needs someone to take care of out of a codependent desire to feel needed.
• The Teetotaler: Jared's been shown to dislike alcoholic beverages throughout the show. He'll accept a drink to toast or to just fit in, but usually just holds it if he doesn't immediately set it down afterwards.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: In the third season, it's revealed that he's only living in Erlich's garage because he's been renting out his condo on Airbnb to cover his mortgage while Pied Piper couldn't afford to pay him. After he starts drawing a decent salary again when Pied Piper is funded, he tries to move back into his condo and discovers that his Airbnb renter doesn't want to leave, and California's landlord-tenant laws mean it could take a year or more to get the guy thrown out. After his squatter leaves, Jared continues living in the garage out of solidarity.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Season 3 is pretty good for Jared:
  • He's revealed to be a lady's man and gets a number of dates. He states humbly that he's just been voluntarily "taking a break" from romance for a while.
  • Richard nominates him to replace Erlich on Pied Piper's board, which causes him to emotionally break down.
  • He is later promoted to Pied Piper's Chief Operating Officer.
• Undying Loyalty: To Richard. Jared makes it clear that he'll follow Richard wherever he goes. However, the loyalty gets seriously tested and strained in Season 6 due to conflicts in their individual visions.
• Yandere: In a way, Jared’s devotion to Richard. In season 4, when Jared finds out Richard has been considering hiring Jared’s former Hooli co-worker to work with him and Gavin, he tells Richard he’d do anything to get his back- including killing anyone who gets in his way with knives, guns, his hands, or a talk into suicide. When Richard asks if he would really stab someone, Jared laughs it off.

Monica Hall

Monica Hall

"People may take credit for your idea and try and sue you. How awesome is that?"

Played by: Amanda Crew

An employee of Raviga Capital and associate partner. She later starts her own VC firm and eventually joins Pied Piper as its CFO.

• Aborted Arc: Both her teased romantic subplots go nowhere.
• Must Have Nicotine: Admits that she "smokes like a chimney" whenever she's stressed out. It has been shown several times. Most notably after Pied Piper gets a $10 billion funding offer from a Chilean billionaire of questionable origins. She proceeds to light a second cigarette not long after lighting a first and alternates between smoking them.
• Nice Girl: She goes beyond her duties to give Richard helpful advice - even telling him herself that she has his back no matter what happens, and she sticks up for Pied Piper when they need her the most.
• Odd Friendship: With Richard, Jared, and Gilfoyle. Especially Gilfoyle in the last two seasons.
• Only Sane Man: Far more "normal", level-headed, and socially well-adjusted than any of the Pied Piper guys (or either of her bosses at Raviga).
• Reassigned to Antarctica: She falls out of favor with Laurie and is moved to an office where she gets a clear view of the men's room and all that goes on inside it.
• Ship Tease: It looked a little like the show was moving towards her and Richard having a romantic relationship in the first two seasons. Then there's the last two seasons with her and Gilfoyle...
• Sixth Ranger: Officially joins Pied Piper as its CFO near the end of Season 5.
• The Smurfette Principle: In Season 1.
• Springtime for Hitler: She attempts to screw over her coworker Ed Chen by turning him onto Jian Yang's SeeFood app, believing that the app's failure will put her back on top at Raviga. Unfortunately, Ed manages to spin the situation so that she becomes the point person and puts himself into a position where he can claim credit for successes or shift the blame on her for failures.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Jared tried to make her the girly girl to programmer Carla Walton's tomboy during Season 2.
• Women Are Wiser: Granted, the bar is set low by the fact the male Pied Piper employees are all basket cases in their own unique ways.

Jian Yang

Jian Yang

"Eric Bachmann. This is you as an old man. I'm ugly and I'm dead. Alone."

Played by: Jimmy O. Yang

Another tenant of Erlich's incubator, but has no involvement with Pied Piper. He and Erlich have frequent disagreements.

• Ascended Extra: At the beginning of the show Jian Yang mostly serves to be a prop in Erlich's B plots and doesn't have much importance. Around Season 5, after Erlich has been Put on a Bus, is when Jian Yang starts to gain a lot more prominence.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He starts off as a silly one note character who irritates Erlich. However as the series goes on he ends up creating an app that sells for millions, fakes Erlich's death to own his house, kicks out the Pied Piper crew, and is working on making Chinese ripoffs of American websites including Pied Piper. By the Distant Finale he has apparently become a crime boss in South East Asia and stolen Erlich's identity, whom he may or may not have killed for it.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: After spending most of the series as an innocuous-seeming Funny Foreigner, the later episodes reveal him to be disturbingly ruthless, self-serving and manipulative, employing downright despicable actions such as extortion, violence and slave labor simply to make a buck.
• Faking the Dead: The Distant Finale shows that he faked his own death and has apparently assumed Erlich's identity.
• A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: Ran into this after squandering the money he gained from his SeeFood app.
• Full-Name Basis: Everybody calls him Jian Yang. In season 5, he states Jian is actually his last name. Though the guys in the incubator probably neither know nor care.
• Funny Foreigner: He comes from rural China and annoys Erlich by leaving fish carcasses in the sink and burning trash. He's usually paired with Erlich, who constantly struggles to get concepts through to him. He later uses this position to screw Erlich over.
• Kick the Dog: Throws out the Pied Piper residents after he gets ownership of the incubator. He also has no qualms exploiting other people, even children (with fake camp scams), to run his businesses.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After everything he put the Pied Piper crew through during Season 5, he ends up being forced to let them back into the Incubator due to stupidly gambling all of his money away in the season finale.
• Laughably Evil: After he fakes Erlich's death and kicks out everyone out of the incubator, he quickly becomes one of the most vile people on the show. Resorting to extortion and slave labor to all for the sake of greed. His silly nature and Funny Foreigner attitude are still present though, making him this trope to a T. However despicable his actions become, one can't really take them seriously.
• Malicious Misnaming: Always calls Erlich "Eric". While this initially seems to simply be a result of his accent, his behavior in later episodes heavily implies that he does it deliberately just to spite him.
• Prank Call: After Jian Yang realizes that Erlich has almost no power to evict him, he begins to amuse himself by repeatedly attempting to prank call him in a completely inept fashion. (Calling from his own number and from the next room.)
• Satellite Character: Basically only exists as Erlich's occasional sidekick/foil. Averted in season 4, as he founds SeeFood and becomes independently wealthy.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Erlich has trouble getting rid of him due to California state law giving little power to the landlord.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: As his relationship with Erlich grows more hostile, Jian Yang begins actively attacking Erlich and revels in his misfortune.
  • In Season 5, he fakes Erlich's death, obtains his house and 10% of Pied Piper, and kicks out all the other residents of the incubator.

Pied Piper Employees

Carla Walton

Carla Walton

"My best friend's name is cunty."

Played by: Alice Wetterlund

• Blackmail: In Season 3 when the team tries to recruit her for the skunkworks to build under Jack Barker's nose, she not only refuses to help but then immediately demands thousands of dollars in exchange for not going to Barker and blowing the lid on their plan.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Serves as a member of the Pied Piper team briefly during season 2, but leaves not too long later.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Parodied. Jared attempts to invoke this relationship between her and Monica during her time in Pied Piper. Naturally, neither one of them is into it.
• Troll: She spends most of the first episode she appears in messing with Dinesh and Gilfoyle's minds by making them think she's getting paid more than them.
• Two Girls to a Team: She (correctly) assumes that people will try to get her and Monica to be friends simply because they are the only women associated with Pied Piper, and is annoyed by it.

Holden

Holden

Played by: Aaron Sanders

Richard's assistant in the PiperNet offices.

• Break the Cutie: Jared's constant monitoring of him creeps the poor kid out and psychologically breaks him by the end of Season 5.
• Character Development: Holden starts taking on Jared's domineering characteristics toward his underlings once Jared leaves Pied Piper.
• Extreme Doormat: Jared is able to passive-aggressively push him around.
• Nice Guy: On the whole, he's a nice and well meaning guy.
• Older Than They Look: Monica thinks he's an intern when she first meets him. He's in his mid-20s and has a law degree but looks 15.
• Riddle for the Ages: He disappears shortly after Jared returns to Pied Piper. When Richard asks what happened, Jared only says that he was "a bitch" and dismisses the topic.
• What, Exactly, Is His Job?: Nobody knows what he does there aside from being Richard's assistant. It's even more baffling when Monica finds out he has an advanced degree from a law school.

Pied Piper Associates

Big Head

Nelson "Big Head" Bighetti

"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 broken. We tried to put a Mr. Potato Head in it, and it did not like that."

Played by: Josh Brener

Richard's best friend who works at Hooli. Despite having little skills as a programmer, he often finds himself being promoted and finding success.

• Born Lucky: For much of the show, no matter what happens to him, Big Head always somehow manages to come out of it even more successful than he was before, despite not ever really doing anything or being particularly skilled. It seems to catch up with him in Season 3, but it gets subverted once again in the Season 3 finale, when Bachmanity purchases Pied Piper, making Big Head one of the company's owners. And then it's Double Subverted in Season 4 when he ends up at Stanford. At first, after looking at his qualifications, the interviewer nearly laughs him out of the office, but upon hearing he was on the cover of Wired, asks to talk to him more. He's so dumb he assumes he's a student, but upon going to his first class, realizes he's a guest lecturer. The Distant Finale reveals that he becomes the president of Stanford.
• Decoy Protagonist: Set up as Richard's best friend and right hand man in the first episode, but gets demoted to a side character about halfway through it.
• The Ditz: Post-Flanderization. He's this show's equivalent to Kevin Malone.
• Dumb Is Good: Big Head is hands down the nicest person on the show. He's also by far the stupidest, lacking both common sense and coding ability.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: Positioned as one by Gavin in Season 2, who emphasizes his connection to the Pied Piper team to make his involvement with Nucleus seem more promising. It sticks, and he remains a respected public figure into Season 3, despite being an oblivious, talentless idiot.
• Flanderization: In the first episode, he makes wry and sarcastic comments about life in Silicon Valley, and his coding skills are said to be unexceptional. As the first season progresses, however, he gets dumber and more clueless, until he settles into the childishly innocent moron he remains for the rest of the show.
• The Fool: Easily the ditziest character on the show, yet everything tends to work out perfectly for Big Head.
• Kindhearted Simpleton: A very stupid but nevertheless friendly and outgoing coder who is repeatedly shown to have absolutely no idea what he's doing.
• Nice Guy: Genuinely pleasant to everyone he meets, wishes no ill will upon anyone, and seems almost incapable of getting angry. Richard even refers to him as one of the nicest people he has ever met in the middle of ranting about how much of an idiot he is.
• Nice Guys Finish Last: Subverted frequently for laughs.
  • During the arbitration between Hooli and Pied Piper, his mild-mannered honesty convinces the judge that Big Head was responsible for Pied Piper's algorithm and is just too modest to admit it.
  • He buys a huge house, and decides to share it with up-and-coming programmers just to be nice. His inhabitants are so grateful that they willingly give him a share of their companies.
  • This is shortly later played completely straight as Erlich talks him into partnering up to form a VC firm called "Bachmanity". It becomes apparent in "Bachmanity Insanity" that it's just a ploy for Erlich to make Big Head his platonic sugar daddy. By the end of the episode, Big Head is completely broke after Erlich goes on a spending spree, having been given access to Big Head's bank account. This becomes subverted itself when the blog that Erlich buys sets forth a small series of events that end up with them each owning half of Pied Piper.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Is always called Big Head. Gavin sometimes calls him Bag Head.
• Reassignment Backfire: Gets frequently promoted by Hooli for publicity reasons.
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: Not surprisingly, when he ends up with a $20 million buyout, Nelson soon blows through the money on frivolous things such as moving his mansion pool and then moving it back to where it was. His big mistake is letting Erlich take control of his finances and it takes about two days for him to render Nelson bankrupt.
• Spanner in the Works: Used as a pawn by Hooli in order to support the lawsuit against Pied Piper. The only things to come out of it is Big Head informing Richard.
• Token Good Teammate: During his time work for Hooli he was the only one from that company to be a Nice Guy which contrasts with the other employees who are total Jerkasses.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Rarely seen without a Big Gulp in hand.

Ron LaFlamme

Ron LaFlamme

Played by: Ben Feldman

Pied Piper's lawyer, who likes the guys and wants to feel like he is "part of the team." Though young and extremely laid-back even in pressuring situations, he is a very competent and intelligent lawyer.

• Affectionate Nickname: Immediately starts calling Richard "Richie", and bonds with him quickly. Hilariously, when circumstances mean that they may be on opposing sides of a legal dispute, he threateningly refers to Richard as "Mr. Hendricks."
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite his eccentricities, he's an excellent lawyer.
• Ivy League for Everyone: Went to Yale for undergrad, and (not Ivy but still an excellent school) UCLA for law school.
• Nice Guy: Contrary to most lawyers in the Valley, he's affable, in no way confrontational, and a genuinely good person.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Seems to be incompetent when you first look at him. As it turns out, he's the opposite.
• Omnidisciplinary Lawyer: He's knowledgeable about all kinds of law, which proves helpful in later seasons.
• Surfer Dude: Generally a toned-down version, but he uses a fair amount of surfing slang and is very laid-back.

Pete Monahan

Pete Monahan

Played by: Matt McCoy

A disgraced former attorney who aids Pied Piper whenever they are unable to afford a real attorney. Despite being a skilled lawyer, Pete often finds himself on the wrong end of the law thanks to his drug and alcohol addiction.

• All for Nothing: Pete gets sober, finds religion, is released from prison and redeems his career when Pied Piper defeats Hooli in arbitration... then immediately goes on a bender and winds up in jail again.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer
• The Bus Came Back: Returns in Season 4 after winding up in jail in the Season 3 premiere.
• The Comically Serious: Part of what makes him so funny is how he recounts the most ridiculous situations he’s been in with a straight face and genuine conviction.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Which he constantly brings up.
• Drink-Based Characterization: Pete's preferred drink (a tampon soaked in grain alcohol, inserted into his rectum) certainly says a lot about him.
• Drunk Driver: Leading to him winding up in a figurative (and literal) ravine.
• Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: Winds up working at a car wash in Season 4 after his parole violation.
• Hookers and Blow: Pete's lifestyle before he went to prison.
• Intoxication Ensues: Accidentally breaks his sobriety drinking what he assumed was non-alcoholic kombucha, leading to another bender.
• Just Got Out of Jail
• Prison Rape: He implies he has been the victim of this in the Season 3 premiere.
• Recovered Addict: Though he does fall Off the Wagon after the events of Season 2.
• Reformed Criminal: Guiding Pied Piper to victory against Hooli is Pete's attempt to get his life back on track.

Colin

Colin

Played by: Neil Casey

One of the "Octopipers" that helps Pied Piper get established in Season 5 - it is his online RPG (and its 80,000 subscribers) that saves Pied Piper from being destroyed by Hooli and Yaonet in the 5th season finale. However, the 6th season reveals him to have almost the exact opposite ideals as Richard - he unabashedly records and implements user data to improve his game, is immune to blackmail (after Richard discovers all of Colin's own recorded and compiled admissions of vice and threatens to reveal them, Colin reveals the compilation himself as an example of how Pied Piper can handle data expression, and the vice data points are basically laughed off), and eventually implements voice-activated adware into his game; it's the final straw for Richard, and he eventually manages to cut ties with Colin.

Gwart

Gwart

Played by: Nandini Bapat

A strange woman whom Jared inexpicably becomes friends with in Season 6.

• Birds of a Feather: Parodied in her relationship with Jared, whom inexpicably dedicates himself to her wholeheartedly. She never speaks a single word to him and barely seems to acknowledge his existence.
• For Want Of A Nail: She betrays Laurie and gives Pied Piper the information they need to save Russ Fest because Laurie stole and ate her artichoke.
• The Speechless: She's never seen speaking a single word on-screen, though she does communicate with Jared via text.
• Womanchild: She behaves more like a weird, giant, silent baby than anything else.

Venture Capitalists

Peter Gregory

Peter Gregory

Played by: Christopher Evan Welch

The socially awkward billionaire founder and CEO of Raviga Capital as well a 5% equity owner of Pied Piper after his $200,000 investment. Despite his death in the Season 2 premiere, he continues to play a large role in Pied Piper's and Raviga's future.

• Character Death: Christopher Evan Welch died before shooting for Season 1 was complete, forcing the last several episodes of the season to be rewritten so his character is only referred to without appearing. His death was written into the show as a major plot point at the beginning of Season 2.
• Cloudcuckoolander: His personal behavior and business strategies are unusual, to say the least.
  Laurie: I've been reviewing his files. He was pursuing a number of extremely dubious positions. Are you aware that we own a $30 million ostrich farm in Morocco, or that we are the majority stakeholders in three companies that specialize in invisibility? This box is filled with napkins covered with notes detailing Peter's conviction that genetically-modified cranberry fungus would become the next cotton.
• Eccentric Mentor: To the Pied Piper team before his death.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: He's an odd guy, but he's quite tolerant with the Pied Piper crew and does genuinely want them to do well.
• The Wonka: Interacting with this guy is weird even for the Pied Piper crew. He spends most of his screentime in one first season episode analyzing every item on the Burger King menu (he's never been there before), much to the dismay of the start-up team trying to get him to pay attention to their investment pitch. At the end of the episode he reveals that this has allowed him to come up with a brilliant plan to make a huge profit from sesame seed crop futures and fund the start-up team.
• We Used to Be Friends: With Gavin Belson.

Laurie Bream

Laurie Bream

"Monica, you have certain values. And I see no reason you should not work with companies that share them. Similarly, I should work with companies that share my values."

Played by: Suzanne Cryer

The replacement for Peter Gregory as CEO of Raviga Capital, and later co-founder of Bream Hall Capital with Monica. Like her predecessor, she is highly intelligent and socially inept.

• Big Bad Ensemble: In later seasons after she and Monica go their separate ways, she essentially shares Big Bad status with Gavin Belson. Especially apparent in Seasons 5 and 6.
• The Comically Serious: Her stiff and emotionless demeanor makes her this when contrasted against the more animated characters.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Since she only looks out for her own business interests, she can either be supportive of the Pied Piper team or an obstacle towards their operations.
• Iron Lady: She's a very unflappable and emotionless woman. Monica can't believe she's had four children.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While she's generally a strict businesswoman with only the financial success of her firms as her main goal, she has her moments of kindness, such as considering Monica her best friend and empathizing with Richard when it comes to stressful situations.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: The Distant Finale shows that she's been in prison for a while due to some unethical practices she engaged in. She doesn't seem too bothered by it though.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: She's basically a female version of Peter Gregory, although less empathetic and kind, more pragmatic, and less of a Cloud Cuckoolander.
• The Unfettered: She seems to lack any kind of goals or moral sense other than the financial success of her firm. This is thrown into focus when Erlich is desperately in debt, and she uses her authority over stock transfers to prevent him from selling to anyone but her, then buys him out at a fraction of what his shares are worth. When Richard asks about this, she talks about it without hesitation or evident embarrassment. After all, it was a profitable move for the firm.

Russ Hanneman

Russ Hanneman

"I can tell, and as much as you want to be, you're not. It's like this. You're trying to date a woman, but deep down in your heart you know you're gay. Deep in your soul, you know you would rather be plowing a dude!"

Played by: Chris Diamantopoulos

A brash, loud and fiery billionaire investor who provides Pied Piper with their Series A.

• Advertised Extra: For some reason, Chris Diamantopolous is credited as a series regular in seasons 4 and 6, despite appearing in only a handful of episodes of each.
• AM/FM Characterization: The Nu Metal that he blasts from his supercars tells you all you need to know about this Manchild Disco Dan.
• Deus ex Machina: As much of a load that he can be, he does show up a couple times to get Pied Piper out of some tight spots, even if it ends up causing problems down the line for them
  • First when Gavin sues Pied Piper, in an attempt to scare all the VC firms away, Rush steps in at the last minute to provide funding.
  • Second after Gavin confesses to his misdeeds at Hooli in an attempt to saddle Pied Piper, who now owns Hooli, with a congressional investigation which pretty much would derail their current plans. Rush shows up and happens to have dirt on the Congressman leading up the inquiry which he gives them in exchange for helping him with Russfest, something Richard initially does not want to do
• Disco Dan: He's always blasting Nu Metal from the late 1990s and early 2000s in his supercars.
• Incoming Ham: "Knock knock, who's there, this guy!"
• Jerkass Has a Point: He is the only person who realizes Richard is not pleased with Pied Piper's current direction and gets him to realize what he actually wants to do with the algorithm, albeit with a profanity-laced, sexually explicit analogy he makes while standing in front of an elementary school.
• Jerkass to One: Despite acting friendly to everyone else, he conspicuously and utterly ignores Erlich, despite (or perhaps because of) the latter's repeated attempts to suck up to him.
• The Load: Funds Pied Piper, but proves to do way more harm than good.
• The Social Expert: Russ is surprisingly observant of the people around him. He identifies Jared as a Casanova the second he meets him, identifies when Richard is struggling with Pied Piper's direction without Richard telling anyone, and outright ignores the ass-kissing Erlich. Of course, being Russ Hanneman, he almost always uses this social savvy for his own gain.
• Nouveau Riche: Waves his money around, buys and drives around in neon colored sports cars, has rather tacky fashion sense (wearing designer jeans decorated with studs) and generally possesses no class.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He is a rather thinly-veiled parody of Mark Cuban.
• Riches to Rags: Parodied for a brief arc in Season 2. He takes a hit on a recent investment that plunge his net worth all the way down to... $968 million, meaning he's no longer a billionaire. He acts like he's gone bankrupt.
• Small Name, Big Ego: He thinks of himself as a hotshot innovator, but has spent decades coasting on his one good investment and is seen as something of a joke figure in the valley.

Hooli Employees

Gavin Belson

Gavin Belson

"You know, a hundred years ago, men like me could've had people like that killed. Just like that. You think captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie or Cornelius Vanderbilt would've batted an eyelid? Please. (sighs) Times sure have changed."

Played by: Matt Ross

CEO and founder of Hooli.

• Ambiguously Gay: Gavin doesn’t have a wife, girlfriend or show romantic interests towards any of the female characters on the show. His awkward interactions with Peter Gregory feel like the results of a messy breakup. In the epilogue, it’s implied he’s sort of married to Rod Morgenstern.
• Animal Metaphor: Tries to make these frequently to Hooli execs, with varying degrees of success.
• Bad Boss: His underlings are terrified of him for good cause. In one Season 5 episode, he makes an offhand remark that "The bear is sticky with honey" before leaving, sending his panicked employees into long meetings to try to figure out what he meant rather than simply ask him.
• Big Bad: He's the Pied Piper team's most frequent enemy. Whether he's actually the team's most powerful enemy at any given time tends to vary, though, as, particularly later on, he has to constantly scramble to maintain his position as the tech industry's top dog.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Is honestly surprised when his engineers quit and reveal they were part of a team he fired and then re-hired with absolutely no idea they were the same guys.
• Can't Take Criticism: To a ridiculous degree. When Nucleus fails, he reassigns the team to reprogram the Hooli search engine to block negative news stories about it. When that scandal is exposed and Hooli is beset by bad press and protesters, he asks his legal team for permission to have his critics killed!
• Complexity Addiction:
  • When his attempt to bug the gang is hit by a tracker that overloads his phone and laptop, Gavin demands to shut down power to the building despite his techs telling him it's contained on his personal devices.
  • He's convinced Jack had to have his flight delayed twenty minutes simply as part of an overall plot to throw off Gavin's plans and create a huge power struggle. That Jack just wanted a stopover to see his kids doesn't occur to Gavin.
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: One major character trait is that he'll use every underhanded tactic he can to his advantage. Exemplified when he organizes a charity triathlon and does things like jump the gun, order his bodyguards to knock out competitors, and bring in a ringer when he gets too tired.
• Enemy Mine: A brief one with Richard in Season 4 after he's ousted as CEO of Hooli by Jack Barker.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • Moves Jack Barker to a tiny sub-basement office after Jack has their flight from Shanghai diverted to Jackson Hole, which causes a twenty-minute delay. Even worse, Gavin instructs one of his stooges to take the company jet on that route six times just to prove Jack wrong.
  • In Season 5, he buys out all of the 63 coders Pied Piper had approached to hire just to spite them.
• Fatal Flaw: Gavin's is his egotism and need to be in control of everything. Richard eventually recognizes this flaw and exploits it in the Season 5 finale by offering Gavin a handwritten contract giving him full control of Pied Pier just to keep Gavin from deleting Piper Net. Gavin falls for it, to only realize too late that the contract is a ruse to stall him while Piper Net regains control of its network.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Gavin's attempts at taking down Pied Piper all blow up in his face in increasingly spectacular disasters.
  • By trying to roll out Nucleus first, he forces the team to use a hastily put together algorithm that doesn't work and he's left scrambling to find a scapegoat while the Hooli board threatens to replace him.
  • His strategy of promoting Big Head to a position of influence as a legal tactic backfires because Big Head doesn't have the knowledge or the inspiration to come up with a viable product that could be rolled out to cover up the failure of Nucleus.
  • He included a non-compete clause in Hooli employment agreements and used it to support his argument that Richard and Jared knowingly broke a contract agreement. But because non-compete clauses are illegal in California, the judge in the binding arbitration declares that this null and voids thousands of employees' contracts, including Richard's. Because this means that Richard wasn't working for Hooli with a valid contract, the company has no legal right to claim ownership of any intellectual property that may have been created on Hooli property. The Hooli board, needless to say, is not pleased.
  • After some former Hooli employees crack Richard's algorithm and take it to another company, Gavin buys the company to get his own platform on the market while Pied Piper is stuck on another project thanks to their tyrannical boss Jack Barker. But his buying the company also serves to put a concrete price point on a platform based on the algorithm, the lack of which was Barker's entire leverage against doing it.
  • He illegally orders Hooli's software to eliminate results that speak badly of the company, which Richard gets wind of just in time to feed it to a reporter in place of an article that would have wrecked his own career.
  • He illegally monitors his employees' personal e-mails and uses the information gained from this surveillance to get a look at Pied Piper's beta. When Richard finds out about this, he has Gilfoyle send a zipbomb that floods Gavin's personal computer and phone with the smiling poop emoji, effectively bricking both devices. Gavin's over-the-top response and subsequent angry outburst towards the EndFrame team causes several to simply walk out.
  • The Hooli board finally has enough of Gavin and votes to relieve him of his duties and "transition" him into a less oversight of the company. He immediately realizes that he's being exiled to the roof (his personal preference when punishing employees), where all of Hooli's "unassigned" employees congregate.
  • His habit of using animals as props in his presentations bites him in the ass when he uses an elephant that subsequently dies from stress. After he subsequently fires the employee who protests his decision to illegally dump the elephant, she goes to an online tech blog and tells them the story.
  • When the reporter talks of it, Gavin decides to buy the blog ...which just so happens to be owned by Erlich, meaning Gavin just paid Pied Piper $2 million.
  • He acquires Piper Chat from Dinesh because Gavin wanted access to chat logs in order to spy on Jack Barker. In his haste, Gavin doesn't realize that he also inherited the under-age users and pedophiles that made Dinesh want to part with Piper Chat in the first place.
  • His vindictiveness in throwing Jack Barker to sub-basement D comes back to haunt him after that act pushed Barker into becoming The Starscream.
  • He tries to get the Seppen smart refrigerator company to sue Pied Piper after he learns Gilfoyle was responsible for the hacking. This leads to Gilfoyle finding out Seppen records their customers' dialogue and gives Jared leverage for Seppen to not only drop the lawsuit but to partner with Pied Piper instead of Hooli.
  • He rejects a buyout offer from Amazon because they plan to rebrand the company which causes them to start heavily downsizing. This causes him to consider moving Denpok and Hoover overseas. This upsets the normally blindly loyal Hoover into undermining the sale by informing the feds of Hooli having assets that would prevent them from moving parts of the company overseas due to security issues.
  • When Richard offers to take such assets off his hands as he needs it to prevent a takeover from a foreign entity, he rejects it because he doesn't want to do anything that benefits Richard even if it benefits him as well. Because of the earlier downsizing and because earlier Gavin had bought out Gwart from Jared, he inadvertently reveals Hooli stock is worth a lot less than it used to, making it feasible for Pied Piper to buy them out
  • Because Gavin can object to the sale, Pied Piper decides to do the sale while Gavin is busy running a vanity charity race that he cheats at.
• It's All About Me: His desire to beat the Pied Piper team has nothing to do with making money, or 'making the world a better place' like his advertising claims. Rather, it's simply because he can't stomach someone else getting credit for a revolutionary tech product.
  Gavin : I don't know about you people, but I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.
• Ivy League for Everyone: Went to Harvard.
• Jerkass: Gavin is an egotistical and insensitive bully with no redeeming qualities. He is a bad boss who manipulates people and fires them for his own mistakes. Even his attempts at philanthropy are clear PR stunts.
• Karma Houdini: By the end of the series, despite having been exiled from Hooli and the tech industry, Gavin still manages to bounce back as a successful trashy romance author and despite his "tethics" manifesto having been exposed as copying different company slogans or brochures, he still managed to get the Technology Ethics department at Stanford named after him.
• Kick the Dog: Literally. Jared once saw him throw a sloth down a flight of stairs... possibly on purpose.
• Manipulative Bastard: Constantly pulls the emotional heartstrings of both the public and his own employees in order to maintain his self-image and screw over Pied Piper in any way he can.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He looks like, acts like, and while in a very different field, has similar publicity practices to Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco and present Governor of California.
• Percussive Therapy: Gavin will smash and throw around an inanimate object when things don't go his way.
• Properly Paranoid: In regards to Barker having designs on betraying him, even as his assistants play along, believing these fears unfounded.
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: His wealth and success often blinds him to how much of an idiot he can come off as. At a conference, he shocks the crowd but openly stating that millionaires are persecuted even worse than the Jews in Nazi Germany.
• The Sociopath: In one scene, a handwriting expert analyzes Gavin's signature and finds that it suggests "troubling traits" indicative of sociopathy: lack of empathy, a need to dominate, willingness to hurt others to achieve one's goals, inability to accept bad news, etc. It's never outright stated that Gavin is a sociopath, but all of these traits fit him to a T.
• Stupid Evil: In season 6, he and Richard both find themselves in dire straits: Richard is about to get his company bought out by an evil Chilean mining baron, and Gavin is about to be ousted from what remains of Hooli after the Amazon merger. When they drink together to their misfortunes, they discover that Richard could buy an app that was a millstone to Gavin and solve both their problems in one fell swoop. Gavin blocks it, since he can't allow himself to aid Richard, no matter how much it would also benefit him.
• Villainous Breakdown: When things outright fail, Gavin responds by screaming, throwing tantrums, and even taking his rage out on inanimate objects.
• Yes-Man. He's surrounded by them, largely because they're too scared of his outbursts to be anything else. At one point, he tries to stream a live UFC fight in HD using Nucleus. It's a disaster since the Nucleus team is afraid to tell him how far behind they are on getting it to work fine to the point of lying to him.

Aly and Jason

Aly Dutta and Jason

Played by: Aly Mawji and Brian Tiechnell

• The Bus Came Back: They return Season 5.
• Jerkass: They bully Richard and Big Head.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: They leave Hooli after being disrespected by Gavin who has been becoming more erratic.
• Put on a Bus: In Season 3. Then they come back.
• Those Two Guys: The "brogrammers".

Patrice

Patrice

Played by: Jill E. Alexander

• Put on a Bus: She's fired by Gavin Belson in Season 3 for voicing concern over him bringing live animals in the office and is completely absent for Season 4. She returns in the first episode of Season 5 only to be fired again.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Her being fired from Hooli incentives her to leak information to Code/Rag. This is important for the finale of season 3.
• Token Good Teammate: Seems to be the only person around Gavin with morals. She gets fired for it.

Hoover

Hoover

Played by: Chris Williams

• Affably Evil: Doesn't seem to be a bad guy, just serving an asshole.
• Bald of Authority: He is the head of security at Hooli.
• Blind Obedience: He is incredibly willing to go to extremes do whatever Gavin asks, without hesitation or even blinking at the increasing weirdness of his demands, including when Gavin needs to dead elephant removed from the Hooli campus.
• The Ditz: Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
• The Dragon: Gavin's Right Hand Man as of Season 3. In Season 5, he places a mole in Pied Piper without telling Gavin to not indite him. When Denpok comes back into the picture, they become Co-Dragons.
• Evil Counterpart: In a way he's this for Jared, though he's considerably less picked-on. Both Jared and Hoover show Undying Loyalty and Blind Obedience towards Richard and Gavin respectively, to an almost questionable degree.
• Villainous Rescue: He covers for Pied Piper placing pineapple routers at Hooli-Con to spite Jack Barker.
• Undying Loyalty: Is incredibly loyal to Gavin.

Denpok

Denpok

Played by: Bernard White

Gavin's sycophantic spiritual advisor.

• The Dragon: Serves as one to Gavin, and later serves as Co-Dragons alongside Hoover.
• Yes-Man: To Gavin. He strokes Gavin's ego with fake advice, telling him what he wants to hear, all the while enjoying all the perks he comes across.

Jack Barker

Jack Barker

Played by: Stephen Tobolowsky

• Arc Villain: Of Season 4.
• Beware the Nice Ones: He presents himself as a genial grandfatherly type who likes to provide his employees with as many comforts as possible and will cheerfully try and get people to come around to his way of doing things. If crossed, however, he reveals that he's a ruthless businessman who won't hesitate to destroy other people's careers to further his own, as Gavin Belson found out the hard way.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Ultimately it doesn't take long for actual Big Bad Gavin Belson to give him the boot, and the threat he poses kind of pales in comparison to what Gavin and Laurie would present later on.
• Exact Words: His favored way of Kicking The Dog:
  • When Richard gets concerned about Jack's plans for the company potentially preventing them from working on the Pied Piper platform, the latter promises him that he would "never compromise the product". Once Richard learns about the Box plans, he reminds Jack of his promise. Jack then claims that Pied Piper's real "product" is it's stock price.
  • After the Skunkworks fiasco, Richard and Jack make a deal: Richard and his team will work on a bare-bones version of the Box and after its finished, they will work on the platform. The team not only finishes the Box but even majorly improve it due to their engineering pride taking over. However, once they get ready to sign the contract with the client for the Box, they find that Jack agreed to give the client exclusive rights to the algorithm for five years in exchange for more money, meaning that not even Pied Piper can use it during that period and thus can't work on the platform. When Richard calls him out for having broken the deal despite the team having gone above and beyond their agreement, Jack points out he never specified when they'd be able to work on the platform.
  • After the fallout of Gavin’s acquisition of PiperChat, Jack proposes that he could “hypothetically” delete all of its underage accounts and blame it on a malfunction in Jack’s Boxes thus ensuring that Gavin would face no repercussions from the board:
    Gavin: Jack, I’m speechless. I’m embarrassed to say it but I was starting to question your loyalty. [Tries to open the boardroom door but his card is rejected]
    Jack: Well you should’ve. I said it was hypothetical. Didn’t say I’d do it. [Opens the door with his own card]
• Face–Heel Turn: Once his vision for Pied Piper diverges from Richard's.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Raises prize horses and owns his own vineyard.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Besides the obvious physical resemblance, Ballmer's tenure at Microsoft was notorious for its focus on sales, desktop computers and products for businesses while ignoring the ongoing revolution in the mobile space. Barker rushing the stage at Hooli-Con and yelling "I love this company" is a subdued take on one of Ballmer's most infamous moments.
• Only in It for the Money: He promises Richard that he'll never compromise the product, only to reveal that, in his view, the product is the stock price. Being solely focused on the financial health of the company is not an unreasonable position for a CEO, but it grates against the team's vision to create something beautiful and world-changing.
• Red Baron: Has the nickname "Action Jack".
• Villain Has a Point: In "Daily Active Users," wherein Pied Piper under Richard's control proves to be too complex for the average user, whilst Jack has taken his box plan to Hooli and made Endframe actually profitable.
  • His determination to pursue the dull-but-profitable "box" before Richard's vision of a platform is not based purely on greed but on hard experience of working in the tech sector when the late 90's/early 2000's "dotcom bubble" burst - he argues that it could be years before Richard's platform generates any revenue, and nobody can be sure there won't be another crash before then.
• The Starscream: Subverted, then played straight:
  • After Gavin throws Jack down to Hooli's sub-basement data center, he becomes increasingly paranoid that Jack plans to be this. His paranoia leads him to hurriedly acquire Piper Chat in an attempt to remain a step ahead.
  • After this acquisition proves career ending, this trope is played perfectly straight, as Jack reveals he could cover for Gavin on the way to a board meeting, only to instead reveal that the board has installed him as Hooli's new CEO.

Hooli Associates

Keenan Feldspar

'''Keenan Feldspar

Played by: Haley Joel Osment

• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He is primarily based off of Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, though the "Keenan Vortex" is clearly a take on the "Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field"