Erlich Bachman

How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents
by Jimmy O. Yang
Published 13 Mar 2018

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.

…

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
Published 31 Mar 2017

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
Published 19 Oct 2020

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 and John Koblin
Published 1 Nov 2022

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
Published 14 Feb 2023

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.