S01E08 - Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency
No: 8 | Season: 1 Episode: 8 | Air Date: 1-Jun-14 | Ratings: 1.74
Summary
The TechCrunch organizers accept some responsibility for the brawl and decide to send Pied Piper straight through to the final Battlefield stage. However, the Pied Piper team is disappointed after seeing that the Nucleus team has developed an app with a "Weissman" compression score of 2.89, which is a similar score than their own. Dejected, the team heads back to their hotel room, where they randomly begin to mock up a mathematical model for Erlich to give handjobs to every male in the audience. After Richard takes in the beginning of the discussion, he seems to reach an epiphany and retreats into his room to begin coding. By the next morning Richard has completely rewritten parts of the Pied Piper app, however the rest of the team is completely unaware of what he has done. Richard does the presentation, slowly revealing that he has developed a new method of compression, named "middle-out", and demonstrates that he has achieved an astronomical Weissman score of 5.2. Pied Piper wins the Battlefield, and an embarrassed Gavin Belson walks away quietly.
Director and Writers
Director: Mike Judge
Written by: Alec Berg
Quotes
Gavin: Anyone who tells you their platform is faster than ours better have good lawyers.
Music
"Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira and Wyclef Jean (Opening title music.)
"Minority" by Green Day (End-credits music.)
Notes and Trivia
This episode was dedicated to the memory of Christopher Evan Welch.
Shakira doesn't actually appear in the episode, just her song.
At TechCrunch, Gavin Belson demonstrated the Nucleus compression with the same photo of "Playboy" model Lena Soderberg that was on Richard's wall.
When Gilfoyle and Dinesh are saying they're "not dickheads", Martin Starr improvved the line "my dick and my head are totally separate".
The Weissman Score is a fictional performance score for lossless data compression. It was invented by Tsachy Weissman and Vinith Misra at Stanford University specifically for use in the Silicon Valley series.
The concept of "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency" was actually written up as a 12-page paper that became the foundation for the dialogue the guys deliver during the hotel room scene. Following the episode, the paper was put online to prove its plausibility.
There was a scene written for the very end of this episode where Peter Gregory and Gavin Belson have a conversation, but it couldn't be filmed because of Christopher Evan Welch's untimely death.
In the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards (2014), Silicon Valley was nominated for "Outstanding Comedy Series", "Outstanding Art Direction for a Contemporary Program (Half-Hour or Less)" and "Outstanding Main Title Design". It did not win any of the awards.
In the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards (2014) Alec Berg was nominated for "Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series" for the episode "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency".
In the 72rd Golden Globe Awards (2015), SIlicon Valley was nomimated for "Best Television Series
Goofs
None
Locations
None
Cast
Starring | Thomas Middleditch | Richard Hendricks |
Starring | T.J. Miller | Erlich Bachman |
Starring | Josh Brener | Nelson 'Big Head' Bighetti |
Starring | Martin Starr | Bertram Gilfoyle |
Starring | Kumail Nanjiani | Dinesh Chugtai |
Starring | Christopher Evan Welch | Peter Gregory (credit only) |
Starring | Amanda Crew | Monica Hall |
Starring | Zach Woods | Donald 'Jared' Dunn |
Co-Starring | Asif Ali | Kwerpy Guy |
Co-Starring | Jessica Chaffin | Zenella Presenter |
Co-Starring | David Fabrizio | Police Officer |
Co-Starring | David Goldman | Andy Stafford |
Co-Starring | Chase Kim | VC Guy |
Co-Starring | Jason Kincaid | Himself |
Co-Starring | Ben Zelevansky | Stage Manager |
Guest Starring | Michael Arrington | Himself |
Guest Starring | Andy Buckley | Carl Fleming |
Guest Starring | Andrew Burlinson | Nathan Gallagher |
Guest Starring | Aly Mawji | Aly Dutta |
Guest Starring | Howard Morgan | |
Guest Starring | Kara Swisher | Herself |
Guest Starring | Brian Tichnell | Jason |
With | Matt Ross | Gavin Belson |