Erlich Bachman

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How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents by Jimmy O. Yang

call centre, do what you love, Erlich Bachman, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Jian Yang, Peter Gregory, Richard Hendricks, Silicon Valley, Uber for X, Vanguard fund

That was my second day on the set of Silicon Valley, an HBO show created by one of my comedy heroes, Mike Judge. It was my big break in Hollywood. My character, Jian Yang, is a fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrant whose struggle with the English language often leads to comical misunderstandings with his buffoonish roommate, Erlich Bachman, played by the impeccable T. J. Miller. It felt natural for me to play this character. I was once a fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrant myself. I was Jian Yang. When my family immigrated to America from Hong Kong, I was a thirteen-year-old boy who looked like an eight-year-old girl. I didn’t even speak enough English to understand the simplest American slang.

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It turned out the scene Zach was referring to was the “I Eat the Fish” scene in the following episode. I was stoked that I would work another day at scale for another nine hundred bucks, but more importantly, I got to be Jian Yang again. I was over the moon. The “I Eat the Fish” scene would be the first time I worked with T. J. Miller and his character, Erlich Bachman. Something about our difference in size and mannerisms just instantly clicked. There was something naturally funny about the juxtaposition of a small deadpan Jian Yang and a large loudmouthed Erlich. Mike Judge came up to me between takes and gave me one simple note: “Before you say your first line, can you stand still and don’t say anything for a few seconds?”

…

For the first time in my career, I actually had a wardrobe for my character, instead of just one outfit for the one day of work. This foster child had finally found a home. Jian Yang was here to stay. My first scene as a series regular on Silicon Valley was the mansion party scene in season two, where Jian Yang and Erlich Bachman tried to get into the fancy Muir Woods charity party. Christina and I made sure Jian Yang had an ill-fitting tuxedo with a crooked clip-on bowtie. In between takes, a background actor came up and politely tried to fix my bowtie. “It’s supposed to be like that,” I said as I put it back to a forty-five-degree angle.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

If it isn’t enough that he or she has to worry about carbon emissions, social inequality, non-taxpaying coffee chains and any number of other ethical concerns, there is now the added guilt of using Uber, the smartphone app for hailing cabs.” At an industry awards ceremony in San Francisco a couple months later the comedian T. J. Miller, popular for his portrayal of the perennially stoned company founder Erlich Bachman on the hit HBO show Silicon Valley, quipped that Kalanick deserved an award for “constantly stepping in shit.” It was a precarious moment for Uber: even as its business was picking up speed its image was cratering. “They completely lost the narrative,” bemoaned Chris Sacca, the early Uber investor and adviser, who by this time had had a falling-out with Kalanick over Sacca’s attempt to buy the shares of other investors.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

His mother had recently been diagnosed with the same pancreatic cancer that killed Steve Jobs, and Adam started talking more about immortality, and his interest in the emerging science aimed at staving off death. At Summer Camp 2015, the cost of which had ballooned into the seven figures, WeWork hired T. J. Miller, a comedian who played the cartoonishly boastful venture capitalist Erlich Bachman on HBO’s Silicon Valley, as well as the Chainsmokers, the popular DJ duo, whom they paid in WeWork stock. On Saturday night, Adam was in the front row, dancing with Michael Gross, when the Weeknd arrived by helicopter to play a surprise set. (Miguel performed in a talent show wearing a Sia wig and lip-synching to “Chandelier.”)

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

Set in contemporary Palo Alto, Silicon Valley revolves around a residential tech “incubator,” a dormitory-like house full of young, male, socially inept software engineers, banging out code, mocking each other, and striving for tech stardom. At the start, Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), a high-strung computer programmer, is developing Pied Piper, a new app that will allow people to search the universe of recorded music to check for any copyright infringements. The head of the incubator, a blustery buffoon named Erlich Bachman (T. J. Miller), is not impressed and reminds Richard that “nobody gives a shit about stealing other people’s music, okay?” He implores Richard to be more like his housemate, a chipper dimwit named Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti (Josh Brener). Bachman points out that Bighetti is working on a promising start-up called NipAlert, a geolocation app that provides users with “the location of a woman with erect nipples.”

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the internet was worth investing in.”3 In 2005, he and some colleagues from the Yahoo! deal opened Y Combinator, an accelerator that traded advice, connections, and a little cash to start-ups in return for shares. Theirs was the best-organized institution—angel investing as a for-profit university—but there were more casual setups, too. The fictional prototype is Erlich Bachman, the extroverted bullshit artist at the center of Mike Judge’s HBO clown-era Palo Alto satire, Silicon Valley. Bachman sold his web start-up of unclear utility—an air-travel data scraper named Aviato—to Frontier Airlines and spun his winnings into his own accelerator: a moderately sized Palo Alto house in which he rents rooms in exchange for equity in early-stage start-ups.