The main character of HBO’s Silicon Valley, thinking he’s dying in face of interest in his product.
In the pilot episode of Mike Judge’s new HBO show Silicon Valley, the main character Richard gets a chance to pitch his big idea to big-time VC guy Peter Gregory. Peter gets bored and tries to walk away as soon as Richard gets done pitching his new startup as a being based on a proprietary algorithm that… Richard might as well not finish the sentence as he’s pitching how his product works, and no one cares.

When he senses that he’s already loosing his audience, he switches to why his product is important. Of course, that’s a double-edged sword. He ask the big-shot VC Peter guy to imagine, he’s a song writer. Peter can’t, and he gets in his tiny car and drives off. Over the next ten minutes or so, both Peter and the brogramers and execs at the company Richard works at figures out what his program actually does: it performs lossless data compression, better than any other system that currently exists.

This sets off a bidding war between Peter and Richard’s employer, leaving Richard locked in indecision between the two very different offers. It also sends Richard to the emergency clinic with what turns out to be a panic attack.

What ultimately sways Richard is when Peter’s assistant Monica, in what is apparently the only speaking role for a female in all of Silicon Valley, explains to Richard why his software is important. She doesn’t tell him about how effective his data compression algorithm is. She tells him why a more effective data compression algorithm is important, how it can make people’s live better and even save lives. She sells him his own idea in a way that he never thought to do himself–on why its important.

Starting (over) With Why

In Simon Sinek’s Start With Why he argues that when companies sell what their products do, they fail to inspire people who believe in what they do to become their loyalists. Product loyalists don’t just buy a product, they evangelize for it, they crowdfund it and do whatever it takes to make it a reality.

For Richard, finding out why his product is important inspires him. He’s transformed from another geek in Silicon Valley just trying to make something so he get out of the job he hates, and keep his free rent at the incubator he lives in. The offers of money don’t transform him into anything, but a nervous wreck. Discovering why his creation is important is what ends his series of panic attacks and turns him into a man on a mission.

Yes, Sinek’s theory on starting with why is important for marketing, and I urge you to watch the TED talk about it, but I’ve been spending the last week or so since power-reading the book working on defining why what I’m doing and getting ready to do is important. How that’s going to help my marketing is unclear, but I believe it will work.

More importantly, I’m a bigger believer in what I am trying to do than ever before. Mike Judge isn’t writing my life, though it felt like that sometimes when I was a Bevis and Butthead inspired teen. As a result I doubt that anyone who I pitch any of my big ideas to will bother to figure out why they are important for me.

In real life, Richard’s failed pitch would have been a squandered opportunity and I refuse to ever walk away from a pitch feeling like dumbass ever again. From here on out, if they don’t buy it, it’s because they don’t believe in what is important to me and I didn’t want to work them anyway.