Peter Gregory

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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

There was an undeniable chemistry between the five of them that shone through with every written line and improvisation. They riffed off of each other even at the table read and they never missed a beat. It seemed like they had been doing this show for ten seasons. Next to me was the late, great Christopher Evan Welch. The man was a master-class actor. I learned so much about comedy just from watching him at the table read. He portrayed the eccentric billionaire investor Peter Gregory. It was the first time I learned how silence could be just as funny as any sharply constructed joke: “Have any of you…” Christopher pauses for a beat. “… ever eaten at Burger King?” “Yes, why?” his business associate responds.

…

There wouldn’t have been a Jian Yang without Erlich. This was me and TJ’s very last take together on Silicon Valley. The end of the dynamic duo: Erlich and Jian Yang, Laurel and Hardy, Karl Malone and John Stockton. If stand-up was my bachelor’s degree in comedy, Silicon Valley was my PhD. I didn’t just go to work; I went to school: Christopher Evan Welch’s masterful table read, TJ’s dazzling improvisations, the Four Amigos’ brilliance, everyone’s excellence in acting, costume design, camera work, props and everything else behind the scenes from the crew. It was the best education anyone could ever get in comedy. I would pay to be on a show like this.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

There was always a chance that he would push things too far, either by supporting something, or someone, truly odious and would be unable—or, more likely, given his impulses, unwilling—to pull back. For the most part, his reputation within the broader world had never been better. On HBO’s tech industry send-up, Silicon Valley, which premiered earlier that year, he’d been lovingly portrayed by Christopher Evan Welch as an out-of-touch but brilliant investor. In an early scene, the Thiel character—who is known in the show as Peter Gregory and who shares Thiel’s affectless demeanor, his love for seasteading, and his disdain for elite universities—is successfully manipulated by a promising engineer who threatens to go to back to college. The show’s writers had been unsparing with other tech figures, incorporating aspects of the Google founders and Oracle’s Larry Ellison into the villainous Gavin Belson—a greedy big tech executive with a persecution complex and full-time spiritual adviser—and savagely mocking the investor and NBA team owner Mark Cuban, whose fictional double is obsessed with his own net worth and a failed but financially remunerative tech product he created in the 1990s.