I always knew I was missing something, and then when someone explained the concept of ‘game’ I remember very distinctly thinking ‘That’s what I don’t have.
Richard Hendricks (played by Thomas Middleditch) was the CEO and founder of Pied Piper as well as PiperNet, and is currently a Gavin Belson Professor of Ethics in Technology at Stanford. Before founding Pied Piper, Richard was an employee of Hooli. At work he was often an antagonist to the brogrammers. While at Hooli, Richard worked on the Pied Piper algorithm. However, even though Richard created one line of code on the algorithm on a Hooli laptop which would mean that Pied Piper would be property of Hooli, Richard's contract with Hooli was void due to a clause preventing him from leaving. Richard continued to work on Pied Piper until its demise, but still was involved with Pied Piper projects such as PiperChat and PiperNet until the company would be shut down in 2019.
Personality[]
Though timid and nervous, Richard is an intelligent coder and very passionate about what he does. He can be a perfectionist and spends a lot of time making sure everything is fitting his vision, and has even refused to hire coders and date someone because of the way they wrote their code. His anxiety causes him to struggle with being a respectable figure to his friends, coworkers, and others he's in business with, and often becomes the target for bullying. However, as time goes on, he gains more confidence and becomes more abrasive and demanding.
I'd like for this company to be different than Hooli and Goolybib and all the rest, you know? Like, let's not turn this into a corporate cult with bike meetings and voluntary retreats that are actually mandatory and claiming for the world to be a better place all the time.
After founding Pied Piper, Richard left Hooli to develop the company and its algorithm. At TechCrunch Disrupt, he quickly realizes that Hooli's Nucleus project is going as planned, and will be better than Pied Piper. In a bathroom, Richard comes up with middle-out compression and wins TechCrunch Disrupt.
"Third Party Insourcing": Richard hires a prodigy programmer known as The Carver, but discovers that he destroyed Bank of America's systems on accident.
"I always knew I was missing something, and then when someone explained the concept of ‘game’ I remember very distinctly thinking ‘That’s what I don’t have."
