Rewatching *Silicon Valley* While Building a Startup in 2026

We have recently started rewatching Silicon Valley. At the same time, we are building our own product.

That combination makes the series feel very different than it did the first time around.

It is still funny, but it also feels like opening a time capsule from a very specific era of startup culture.

The era when startup offices looked like playgrounds

The offices are probably the first thing that stands out.

Bright walls, bean bags, scooters, free food, ping-pong tables and, ideally, some kind of slide to make sure nobody mistakes the company for a normal workplace.

For a while, I worked from Brain Embassy in Warsaw, so I had a chance to experience some of that aesthetic myself.

And honestly, I still have a soft spot for colorful poufs and oversized Rubik’s cubes.

But newer technology offices seem much calmer.

There is more wood, warm lighting, plants, small meeting rooms, phone booths and spaces that look more like hotels, libraries or private clubs.

The message has changed.

It used to be:

Work is play.

Now it is closer to:

Let us give people a reason to leave their homes.

The office is no longer the default place where work happens. It has to justify its existence.

The myth of the founder has changed too

Richard Hendricks had one thing above everything else: a brilliant algorithm.

The product was the center of the story.

At the time, there was something almost magical about a group of engineers sitting in a house and building technology capable of competing with a giant corporation.

Today, one person can sometimes generate an application, landing page, pitch deck, campaign and a small team of AI agents over a weekend.

That does not mean building a successful company has become easy.

It means the bottleneck is moving from execution to judgement.

“We can build it” means less every day.

The harder questions are:

• Should we build it?
• Who is it really for?
• Does the problem matter enough?
• What should the first version actually include?
• What should we deliberately leave out?
• Will anyone care once the novelty disappears?

When production becomes cheaper, restraint becomes more valuable.

Richard’s biggest problem in 2027 probably would not be writing the technology.

It would be deciding whether the technology deserves to exist as a product.

The Scrum scenes have aged surprisingly well

Of course, I also pay much more attention to the Scrum scenes now.

Jared tries to introduce a backlog, sprints and story points to give the team some structure.

Dinesh and Gilfoyle immediately turn estimation into a status game. Instead of optimizing the product, they start optimizing the points.

That joke has not aged at all.

A team can have:

• a perfectly maintained board,
• all the right ceremonies,
• increasing velocity,
• beautifully written tickets,
• a full calendar of planning, refinement and retrospectives,

and still have no idea whether it is building the right thing.

The Kanban board may be hanging on the wall, but the process can easily become a substitute for thinking.

The meta-joke is even better now: Zach Woods, who played Jared, has appeared in campaigns for Atlassian, the company behind Jira.

Jared has completed the circle.

He is still trying to help teams become organized.

How would Pied Piper work today?

Richard would announce that the company is async-first.

He would then schedule:

• a daily,
• an alignment meeting,
• a follow-up after the alignment,
• and a meeting about reducing the number of meetings.

Dinesh would send an AI agent to calls on his behalf.

Eventually, the team would discover that digital Dinesh is calmer, more confident and more useful than the real one.

Gilfoyle would never turn on his camera.

He would automate his Slack replies, and nobody would notice for six months that he had moved to a cabin in the forest.

Jared would organize mandatory virtual coffees, wellbeing check-ins and remote belonging sessions.

I should not judge him too harshly. I organize virtual coffees too.

Big Head would probably be employed by five companies at the same time, collect a full salary from each and have no idea what any of them does.

LinkedIn would call him a pioneer of portfolio employment.

And Gavin Belson?

Gavin Belson would still have no trouble finding a job.

The technology changed. The people did not.

That is probably why the series still works so well.

The tools are different.

The offices are different.

The way teams communicate is different.

The cost of building software is changing rapidly.

But many of the underlying problems remain exactly the same:

• founders falling in love with the narrative rather than the problem,
• teams optimizing metrics instead of outcomes,
• investors rewarding confidence over judgement,
• process replacing responsibility,
• companies talking about changing the world while trying to survive the next quarter,
• and ego quietly shaping every supposedly rational decision.

The funniest thing about rewatching Silicon Valley is realizing how much of it still feels current.

The props have changed.

The characters would now use agents, remote work tools and AI-generated pitch decks.

But the human operating system seems almost untouched.

What do you think would be the biggest difference if Silicon Valley were made today?