Posted by Katherine Recap | Hollywood, TV

[For Silicon Valley “Daily Active Users” or any other recaps on Fetchland, assume the presence of possible spoilers.]

HBO Summary:
Daily Active Users. Richard attempts to bridge the gap between Pied Piper and its users; Jared takes drastic measures.

The episode opens with a commercial for Pied Piper, a ridiculous foray into “connections and sharing” that perfectly illustrates the crux of the company’s challenge – nobody gets it. Laurie shows the mightily expensive and equally overwrought, enigmatic ad at her home where she’s gathered Pied Piper employees for a party to celebrate the high number of installs. At the “celebration” Monica apologizes to Richard about “not getting Pied Piper and being wrong,” but then Richard replies that maybe she wasn’t. Turns out installs aren’t really a crucial measure for success. What matters more? “Daily Active Users,” in other words, people who revisit the site. It’s a wretched number and far below what Monica deemed “disappointing” at one hundred thousand. In fact, only nineteen thousand users revisit Pie Piper daily. Jared and Richard were the only employees aware of it thus far… and now Monica too.

Meanwhile Gilfoyle somehow knows Jared’s keeping a secret and makes him squirm in a hilarious deconstruction of Judeo-Christian values at their most virulent. Monica recommends a focus group to Richard to help understand this lack of interest retention in Pied Piper. In the focus group all the users are “freaked out” by the platform. They don’t understand where the downloads go or how it works. They are regular people, not engineers. Interetingly, Monica – who didn’t get it – was the only regular person to check out the PP Beta Test. A light goes on in the room but Richard has trouble accepting it and instead crashes the focus group to “explain” his precious compression platform. At first he’s too much of an engineer and the focus group seems terrified of the implications. They reference Terminator and can’t get into it until after Richard orders in pizzas and settles into an infinite explanation. Although it works, it’s more than any TV spot can cover. Richard tells his Pied Piper team the down and dirty situation then and all are appropriately bereft. It’s a hopeless fix. They’re nearly out of money from paying for the development of the platform and that heinous incomprehensible ad. So Pied Piper, successful only seconds before, is now nearly broke and terminally misunderstood.

At this moment, the luckiest loser in Silicon Valley, Gavin finds out the Pied Piper situation when a customer service rep (who left Pied Piper over this tailspin) goes to Hooli looking for a job. He brings this info to the Hooli board and pretends it was his knowledge all along and this was all part of his secret plan. Then Gavin brings Jack Barker in to introduce “The Box”. Pied Piper’s loss is Hooli’s gain. May the best product win. Thus, Gavin resets back into his old position as Hooli CEO. At that moment of victory he brings the Hooli board who betrayed him only a week before out on the roofdeck to look at an elephant, the ultimate symbol of never forgetting and assures them that “neither do I” and we know Gavin’s not exactly the forgiving kind.

Richard scrambles to get he word out about Pied Piper with media and seminars along wth conference outreach. It’s tanking quick and he ends up approaching the ad agency for another way to reach people. They dummy up a piper character who works like a pseudo Microsoft paperclip named Pipey. Instead of popping up to say, “It looks like you’re writing a letter,” Pipey teaches a platform user what Pied Piper does in the most inane way possible. As a result, we next find Richard curled up fetal position style inside Erlich’s moldy magenta bathtub. Jared tries to pep talk him out of career suicide but “it’s over” seems to be Richard’s only logical conclusion.

But in the sunny daylight of the next morning Richard awakens to find that suddenly Pied Piper had a giant burst of inexplicable new daily active users. Everybody is filled with glee. It turns out Jared bought them from a click farm in India and is going to keep filling the pipeline this way using the Indian click farm – perhaps even until they reach heir goal for the next funding cycle. Clearly, Jared slipped into survival mode. He’s lying without a blink or squirm and even fooling Gilfoyle at this point. Next week is the season finale and we can’t wait to see “The Box” battle it out with Pied Piper’s virtual version of success. Each is a mythical creature in a way. We know The Box is merely an “idea of storage” and that Pied Piper’s alleged users are merely meaningless clickers who don’t even really visit the site. Which house of cards will win the heart of Silicon Valley? Our hearts are happy in the certain knowledge that whatever happens, we’ll be laughing all the while.

–Katherine Recap

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