Startups

2014 · 6 Seasons · HBO · Comedy

Silicon Valley spent six seasons proving that the tech industry is beyond parody by parodying it with terrifying accuracy, from hot dog identifying apps to founders promising to make the world a better place through middle-out compression. Mike Judge's startup odyssey follows Richard Hendricks and the Pied Piper crew through funding rounds, patent suits, and self-inflicted catastrophes, with Thomas Middleditch's panic spirals and the immortal Erlich Bachman providing the engine. Industry insiders vouch for its accuracy like veterans vouch for war films. The failure-reset formula wears by the middle seasons, and a key cast exit stings, but the finale sticks a landing few comedies attempt.

2009 · ABC · Reality / Business

Shark Tank made venture capital a spectator sport, entrepreneurs walking a carpeted gauntlet to pitch five self-made investors who negotiate with their own money and their whole personalities. The format's genius is playable math, valuations and royalty deals legible enough that the couch negotiates along, and its best pitches, disasters and million-dollar lightning alike, became a business education America actually completed. The drama edits inflate, the deals often dissolve after the cameras, and the sharks' theater can drown the finance. As a machine for making commerce watchable, though, it has no real rival, and everyone knows their favorite shark.

2011 · Eric Ries · 336 pages · Non-Fiction

The Lean Startup introduced the build-measure-learn loop and the minimum viable product to a generation of entrepreneurs, and those frameworks have become so embedded in startup culture that it's easy to forget how fresh they felt in 2011. Eric Ries draws on his own experience founding IMVU and on Toyota's lean manufacturing principles to argue that startups should treat their ideas as hypotheses and test them as quickly and cheaply as possible. The core concepts are powerful and practical. The book's execution is less consistent, with repetitive examples and a writing style that circles back to the same ideas more than a 336-page book warrants. It remains essential reading for anyone starting a company, but it's a book whose ideas are better than its prose.