This is quite a bit different from the others. Pied Piper is a functional brand. It is the name of the tech start-up in the Silicon Valley series of HBO. There, Richard Hendrix (Thomas Middleditch) is the CEO of the company. He is of a little bit shy personality but has excellent business skills to grow any business. He is a programmer by his profession. Because of his shyness, he is not comfortable in social gatherings. And one more important thing about him is he can’t handle pressure. Behind Pied Piper there are Jared Dunn (COO), Erlich Bachman (CEO), Dinesh Chugtai (undetermined), and Bertram Gilfoyle (Chief Architect). Erlich Bachman’s house in Los Angeles is the company’s working office. So, let’s know how this team builds up to something like Pied Piper. Let’s get deeper on the topic “why is Pied Piper called Pied Piper“?
A little bit of History
Before Pied Piper, Richard was working at Hooli, a technology company – Talking about Hooli’s story; it consists of double O’s which the founders of Hooli put there willingly as good luck in the technology world because big tech companies like – Yahoo, Facebook and Google, all have double Os in their names and they are so successful.
Richard tried sharing his ideas with other programmers at Hooli but they laughed at him because they thought it was very dumb. Later, they realized that the compression algorithms that Richard was developing were far more impressive and could worth billions. Those two programmers to whom, Richard shared his idea, informed the CEO of Hooli about the idea and unsure of what to call it? Richard called it, Pied Piper.
Why Is It Called Pied Piper?
In the beginning, the original plan behind Pied Piper was a website that checks for a match for any uploaded music on it to all music in the world. Its purpose was to find if the user’s uploaded music is already existing or not to avoid copyright issues. The idea was target towards Songwriters and musicians. Their original site said –
“Pied Piper is a universal compression engine that stacks on any file, audio, data, video, or image no matter the size. It takes all your files and makes them smaller when you need a little help!”
The name is taken from the expression “Who pays the piper gets to call the tune” or as people know it, “pay the piper.”
After some time; Richard has realized that the name Pied Piper was already trademarked by a sprinkler company in Gilroy, California. This made Erlich start his search for a new name for the project. The remaining team members went into brainstorming sessions. The team started thinking about another name that can be catchy and witty and attract users towards them.
More About Pied Piper
There were a lot of replacement names like SMLLR, SMLR (even smaller), Dwarfism 2.0, and Infitra. None of the names was enough meaningful to overcome Richard’s obsession with the “Pied Piper” name. He had sentimental values linked with the “Pied Piper” name and he didn’t want to change it all. He went the extra mile and eventually negotiated the trademark for $1,000 and retained the name at the end.
Pied Piper (PP) was a compression company based in Silicon Valley, California. Richard Hendricks founded it in 2014, it was well-known for having the highest Weissman score in history. The last CEO was Richard Hendricks.
In the Silicon Valley show; it has been shown that the Pied Piper algorithm from the show Silicon Valley is a video compression software program written in C language that achieves a Weissman score. This type of video compression technology is claimed to have the capacity to shrink the internet by 10 percent with widespread adoption.
Created by the team of main characters, led by the CEO Richard Hendricks and software developers like Bertram Gilfoyle and Dinesh Chugtai; the Pied Piper algorithm was told to be very revolutionary that made the company won TechCrunch Disrupt and a $50,000 prize.
The logo
Yes, the logo is very important for any company to sell out. Every brand has a logo. Some have interesting logos like a chimp or duck and others have some logos that have some meaning and reason behind them. The pied piper logo was not quite relatable as the logo above was not looking like he is playing a fiddler. Richard Hendrix said that –
“The old Pied Piper “flute player” logo was a reference to the fairy-tale character. It wasn’t meant to suggest any sexual act involvement. Apologies to any who were offended and the logo has been changed to our current green “PP”!”
Story of the founders
Richard Hendricks – He was the CEO and founder of Pied Piper as well as PiperNet and after Pied Piper, he became a Gavin Belson Professor of Ethics in Technology at Stanford. He was an employee at Hooli before starting up Pied Piper.
Jared Dunn – Donald “Jared” Dunn was an Hooli executive and was a trustworthy man to the head of the company, Gavin Belson, but after having an interest in Richard’s algorithm, quit his job at Hooli to work for Pied Piper.
Erlich Bachman – He was the head of the company. He was at the Hooli and was assisted by many people. Erlich Bachman was informed by Jared Dunn that Richard was up to come with a compressed algorithm that can cost billions in the future.
Conclusion
Pied Piper was a company that lasted for only a few years in the industry. It has not much history or details but it was still appreciated by people that is why a serial is based on it called Silicon Valley that portrayed the story of Richard and Pied Piper. So, how did you like the story on “why is Pied Piper called Pied Piper”?