Richard Hendricks

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

Miller from the stand-up world. They were the guys who I’d looked up to, both having been series regulars on other TV shows and had their Comedy Central spots. I’d seen Zach Woods and Martin Starr in The Office and The 40-Year-Old Virgin and it was the first time I’d seen Thomas Middleditch, who played the lead role of Richard Hendricks. Nobody had heard of Silicon Valley yet, but each of them painted such a vivid picture of their distinct characters. 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.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang
Published 6 Feb 2018

It is not an exaggeration to say that, for a solid week in Silicon Valley, this memo was the main topic of conversation. I interviewed Damore just two days after his firing. He Skyped into our Bloomberg studio from his Mountain View apartment. He seemed a little shell-shocked by the dramatic turns his life had taken, looking a bit like Richard Hendricks, the perpetually bewildered main character on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Damore told me the reaction to his memo both internally and externally was deeply unfair. The public reaction, he said, required that he be the scapegoat. He claimed his own boss threw him under the bus. “It’s really a shame that no one in upper management could protect me,” he said.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age
by Robert Wachter
Published 7 Apr 2015

It will likely take two or three years. Chapter 25 Silicon Valley Meets Healthcare For thousands of years, guys like us have gotten the shit kicked out of us. But now, for the first time, we’re living in an era when we can be in charge. And build empires! We can be the Vikings of our day. —Richard Hendricks, lead character on HBO’s Silicon Valley, 2014 As you’ve seen, the people who complain that the HITECH incentive payments and the Meaningful Use regulations have locked in the incumbents also worry that they have locked out the young innovators. You know the entrepreneurial types I’m referring to—the ones who have transformed the way we buy our houses, hail our cabs, and book our travel; the ones who don’t ask for permission before they enter a market, and make no apologies when they turn it upside down.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

A big reason the business geek community laughed so much at the show was that it got a lot right about the kinds of companies they were familiar with. In particular, it conveyed the great geek norm of openness. Pied Piper was one incessant argument, punctuated by periods of writing code. Its employees showed little deference to Richard Hendricks, the company’s beleaguered CEO. The software developers Bertram Guilfoyle and Dinesh Chugtai respected Hendricks’s technical abilities and realized he was the final decision maker about company strategy, but they felt gloriously free to disagree with him visibly, at great length, and with frequent vulgarity.

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World
by Anupreeta Das
Published 12 Aug 2024

In an interview about the show, Gates said: “It’s fun to have a show where people are allowed to be a little nerdy, and a little bit smart, so I can relate to it, and I was thrilled when I got the chance.” In the HBO show Silicon Valley, a tech satire that ran from 2014 to 2019 and both parodied and idealized modern nerd culture, the protagonist, Richard Hendricks—portrayed as a skinny, neurotic, socially inept entrepreneur prone to vomiting when nervous—explains the historic opportunity for nerds: “For thousands of years, guys like us have gotten the shit kicked out of us,” he says. “But for the first time we’re living in an era where we can be in charge and build empires.

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO
by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Published 1 Nov 2022

“When somebody is controlling two of those three things, you can control the tone really well.” 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?”