Ahhh.. sweet revenge. First there was "House of Lies"-- that supposedly showed the consulting world in all of its ugly, fattening, debaucherous glory. I haven't watched the show myself, but the clips I've seen insinuate that all consultants are hip, young, attractive professionals making an ungodly amount of money to say things like "let's leverage learnings" and making approximately one powerpoint slide a day. If this is true, I would like to say that I'm available and very much open to change, but alas, consulting is not an exception to the age-old adage that nothing is free. I would just like to note that, in reality, consulting (particularly at the levels where you actually matter and are having all of those shmoozy client dinners) are dominated by older, typically white, men. And for every "team dinner" you get, you pay for it with about 120 hours of sitting in a conference room, eating greasy Chinese food, madly tapping away at your computers in a rush to do something ridiculous, like manually clean data from over 12000 lines of Excel or something. If you're lucky and nothing goes wrong, you can assume 60-80 hours a week on average, no social life on the weekends due to exhaustion and days upon days of modelling, powerpointing, client meetings and scope creep (which is a fun term we use that basically means "being made to do things outside of our contract because our client says so").
Anywho. Bravo apparently is starting a new reality show that focuses on Silicon Valley. Frankly, I'm just surprised that they didn't do this earlier-- a bunch of young, smart kids making it big and potentially coming into a lot of money very fast? Sounds like a sexier version of "The O.C." to me. Realistically though, Silicon Valley was never really in mainstream media (from an entertainment perspective) until "The Social Network", which apparently made quite a lot of people mad in the valley because they felt it focused on Zuckerberg's desire to woo a girl more than it did the fact that he wanted to change the world. (Let's be honest though, in all reality, it was probably a little bit of both. Like a "Hey I bet I can show her!...Wait, I can make money off this?" type of moment). Funnily enough though, one of the executive producers is actually Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's sister. Bravo has even admitted to portraying this false sense of reality by saying "In the editing process, we try to get rid of everything that is going to be a snooze"-- and that was said by Bravo's president. I suppose that there are a lot of really boring, unimportant things like raising capital, actually coming up with an idea, recruiting resources, figuring out a business plan, figuring out your investment model... you know, things that will probably be cut out in editing.
Among others, Bravo's cameras will focus on the Way siblings, Ben and Hermione, who are developing a fitness app. Already, they had a chip company and a coconut water company sponsor Hermione's birthday party and have thrown a lot of their filming time to focus on their pad in San Francisco, which oh, by the way is $17,000 a month. "If you divide by the five roommates, it is not so much money" Mr. Way has been quoted saying (as he works out with his personal trainer --see above). But the best quote has come from Ms. Zuckerberg herself:
“Silicon Valley is high school, but it’s only the smart kids and everyone has a lot of money.” (Later, she qualified her remarks on Twitter. “Apologies that I said Silicon Valley was like high school. I meant middle school.”)
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