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demoralizing? “I would tell them a detail about something I’d observed or someone I’d met, and they would get this sparkle in their eye and go, ‘That really happens?’” Costolo said.

Over time, Costolo grew comfortable enough to pitch jokes of his own. “They were generous about letting me down gently,” he told me. “It was interesting to go from the C.E.O. to the least experienced guy in the room.” Among the tech-journalism books that everyone on staff had read was “Hatching Twitter,” Nick Bilton’s history of the company. “Once, they were debating what should happen next in a story arc,” Costolo told me. “Mike asked the room, ‘Didn’t they face a problem like this in the Twitter book? What did they decide?’ Someone had to point out, ‘Mike, one of the people from that book is in the room. Let’s just ask him what happened.’”

“Silicon Valley,” now in its third season, is one of the funniest shows on television; it is also the first ambitious satire of any form to shed much light on the current socio-cultural moment in Northern California. The show derives its energy from two semi-contradictory attitudes: contempt for grandiose tech oligarchs and sympathy for the entrepreneurs struggling to unseat them. In the pilot episode, Richard Hendricks, a shy but brilliant engineer, designs a compression algorithm—an ingenious way to make big files smaller. He later turns this innovation into a company, which he insists on calling Pied Piper. (Richard: “It’s a classic fairy tale.” Employee: “It’s about a predatory flautist who murders children in a cave.”) As his company grows, Richard becomes a nerd David beset by Goliaths: duplicitous board members, corporations trying to steal his intellectual property. Can he succeed without compromising his values? The deep irony of Richard’s situation—that his ultimate goal, presumably, is to become a Goliath himself—either has not yet come up in the writer’s room or is being tabled for later.

Richard Hendricks, played by Thomas Middleditch, is a genius coder who struggles to make an algorithm into a business. Photograph by John P. Fleenor / HBO

“Real startups go through all the shit you see on the show, as well as even crazier shit,” Roger McNamee, a venerable venture capitalist and a consultant to the show, told me. “If anything, the writers might have to leave out true things in order to seem more realistic.” Both Judge and Berg have an eye for authenticity. In Judge’s movie “Office Space,” from 1999, he enlivened his subject—white-collar drudgery—with details he had experienced or observed: a boss’s onerous attention to the formatting of T.P.S. reports, a chain restaurant that forces its servers to wear at least fifteen pieces of “flair.” Similarly, many of the shows that Berg has written for, notably “Seinfeld,” harvested story lines from real life. “On ‘Seinfeld,’ the same thing happened again and again,” Berg told me. “Someone would pitch ten ideas. The first nine would be wacky, silly things, and the tenth would be genuinely funny and interesting. You’d go, ‘That tenth thing—where’d that one come from?’ and the person would say, ‘That one actually happened to a friend of mine.’”

When you’re writing a show about nothing, or a movie about cubicle

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