Bravo's Silicon Valley vs. A Real Silicon Valley Founder

Bravo's Start-Ups: Silicon Valley is all play and no work, says the co-founder of Scribd.
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.Image via Bravo

It's easy to mock a show like Bravo's new reality series Start-Ups: Silicon Valley, to sit back and take snarky potshots at a bunch of Los Angeles producers willfully misreading the tech world. But that’s no fun, considering that no one actually expects reality television to reflect reality.

Far more entertaining, we decided, would be to walk our DVD screener of the show half a block through SOMA, over to the offices of Scribd, and watch CEO Trip Adler take snarky potshots at the show. Adler, you see, actually knows what he’s mocking; he’s an actual, bona fide successful startup entrepreneur, one who graciously agreed to not only sit through 20 minutes or so of Bravo's program but to let us film him as he laughed at the many bizarre moments on screen (see highlights reel above). Better still, it turned out he’d been approached about appearing on the program.

Adler's reactions varied as the show progressed, but his bottom line was this: At a time when Silicon Valley is already swarming with entrepreneurs who vastly underestimate the difficulty of getting a startup off the ground, Silicon Valley threatens to make the problem worse. The show takes the actual work of launching a startup -- a long grinding process of writing code, designing applications, talking to customers, and listening to users -- and makes it seem much easier, basically a posh world where a founder asks his connections to pull strings while he goes go to glistening parties and networks.

'They get the culture wrong. There wasn’t much time for fun. It's just work.'Networking might be a huge deal in Hollywood, but in the Valley, not so much. Yes, a startup founder will typically need to meet a series of investors to fund her company, but she succeeds or fails, even in networking, on the strength of what she’s built, not who she knows. Adler estimates about three quarters of the work in building a startup is programming and design.

“I didn’t have time to go to a lot of toga parties,” Adler joked, referencing one particularly bizarre scene. “In the early days, it’s just work… It’s about building your product, it’s not about your tan. Connections are important but they’re pretty secondary… If you build a good product, the connections come.”

"Mark Zuckerberg didn’t get successful because he was connected to anyone in the Valley -- he succeeded because he built a website and everyone was using it."

There were some parts Adler found to be accurate reflections of startup life, like a scene showing programmers grinding out code in a cramped Mountain View apartment (“Control-Shift-E is SO nice,” says “Dwight”). That took Adler back to his days in the “YScraper,” a North Beach highrise apartment complex famous for packing in low-budget startups funded by the incubator YCombinator.

Mostly, though, Adler was laughing.

“Yeah, like architecture is a really important part of your startup's office space, that’s a really important point,” Adler jokes after Ben Way says he loves the architecture of the offices where he and sister Hermione Way are working to launch a fitness app.

"'Ignite?' Is that a real thing?" he asks of Way's startup as its name flashes on screen.

“Oh that looks fake there,” Adler says as lifecaster Sarah Austin, standing in a bathrobe, orders room service for her dog at the Palo Alto Four Seasons, which Adler describes as the hotel “you drive past on the highway” on your way to somewhere else. (Real startup founder budgets run so low that investors frequently use the term “ramen money,” which is approximately how much it costs to pay rent on a shared apartment and sustain yourself on cheap instant ramen noodles.)

“This girl is great, she’s like the opposite of Silicon Valley culture,” he adds later, as Austin gets her hair done and notes that it takes her two hours to get made up to go to work, three or four hours to go to a toga party. She tells the camera she’s prepping for a party where she hopes there will be “cute guys” but predicts there will merely be “a bunch of geeks.” “This girl has got to be from L.A.,” Adler cracks. (She actually grew up in Arkansas and the San Francisco Bay Area.)

“I ask my co-founder all the time, ‘How do I look?’” Adler jokes as app-maker David Murray parades before his business partner in thong underwear and a shower cap, asking for an appraisal. “You’re just so hot!” Murray says to Austin at one point. “I say that all the time to my co-workers too,” Adler says.

Bravo’s show has famously generated a strong backlash among Silicon Valley investors, entrepreneurs, and strivers, who fear that cable TV will inevitably trivialize what they do, reducing it to sex and fighting and money, i.e. everything else on reality television. But Adler took a laid back, good-natured attitude toward the show, never getting too worked up. His biggest fear is actually that the program will make the tech world seem too big, glamorous, and most of all, easy. A warning to prospective entrepreneurs: There’s nothing easy or glamorous about it.

“They get the culture wrong,” Adler says of Bravo. “We would stay up until 3 or 4 in the morning. There wasn’t much time for fun in those days, in 2006, 2007… The vast majority of people don’t make it very far. They stay a year or two and say, 'oh, this is really hard.' Especially right now, a lot of people come here for the dream, it’s a little like the gold rush all over again… There’s a little bit too much focus on getting started, and not enough on building the product.”