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Andreessen’s office, where photographs of hydrogen-bomb blasts hang on the walls. (“They’re a good way to make sure people are awake,” Andreessen’s spokesperson told me.) Then the writers were ushered into a conference room, where, for more than an hour, they sat around a blond-wood conference table while Andreessen pitched them jokes. “They weren’t terrible, either,” one of the writers told me. “I have eight dense pages of notes from that meeting. I have never heard a man speak as fast as Marc Andreessen.” None of his jokes appeared on the show in their original form, but a concept he explained—the downside of accepting too much free money from investors—became a scene in season two. In the TV version, the venture capitalist is a young woman, and the conversation begins with her interrupting Richard while he’s in the bathroom.

Every summer, “Silicon Valley”’s writers and producers take a research trip to Northern California. Pictured: a meeting room in a cargo container at the GoogleX research lab, in Mountain View. Photography by Brooks Kraft LLC / Corbis / Getty

During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me. GoogleX is the company’s “moonshot factory,” devoted to projects, such as self-driving cars, that are difficult to build but might have monumental impact. Hooli, a multibillion-dollar company on “Silicon Valley,” bears a singular resemblance to Google. (The Google founder Larry Page, in Fortune: “We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.” Hooli’s C.E.O., in season two: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do.”) The previous season, Hooli had launched HooliXYZ, its own “moonshot factory,” whose experiments were slapstick absurdities: monkeys who use bionic arms to masturbate; powerful cannons for launching potatoes across a room. “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.)

Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”

In a Paris Review interview in 1991, Tom Wolfe discussed his satirical novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” He wanted the book to capture a recent historical moment—“New York in an age of money fever,” as he put it—and, in his view, the only genre equal to his ambition was

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