love.

Swisher said that she still introduces Judge and Berg to Silicon Valley insiders such as Dick Costolo, who might prove useful to the show, “and who won’t be too full of themselves to take a joke.” One such person was Mark Pincus, who founded the gaming company Zynga. “When they said they wanted to meet at our office, I briefly went, ‘Are they just trying to collect the ammunition they need to make us into caricatures?’ And I cringed a bit when they saw our—we have this programmable tunnel thing that you walk through. It’s sort of hard to explain. Later, I did see something similar to the tunnel on their show. But, look, a lot of what happens out here is ridiculous. That’s fair game.” The relationship is symbiotic: the consultants get a small jolt of non-local fame—both Costolo and Pincus have cameos in an upcoming episode—and a chance to seem self-deprecating; the show’s creators can gather material, even when they don’t have their notebooks out. “Mike seems quiet and unassuming, but his brain is always clicking away, recording everything,” Swisher told me. “Which is a skill I covet, as a reporter.” Why, I asked, would it be in the interest of anyone in the tech industry to talk to Judge? Swisher responded with a rhetorical question: “Why do any of them talk to me?”

The entrepreneur twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are among the many celebrities to have made a cameo appearance. Courtesy HBO

Every summer, when the previous season has just ended and the next season is about to be written, “Silicon Valley”’s writers and producers take a research trip to Northern California. They spend a few nights in a San Francisco hotel and fill their days with meetings: a morning tour of GitHub’s office, where the foyer is a full-size replica of the Oval Office; lunch with Barry Schuler, a former C.E.O. of AOL; an afternoon on Sand Hill Road, in Menlo Park, visiting the world’s most valuable venture-capital funds; dinner with Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus at LB Steak. “We’ve had a few meals where it was me, Alec, and three or four billionaires,” Judge told me. “We sit back and observe the dynamic. One of them might be the alpha billionaire. Or one of them will go to the bathroom, and the others will lean in and start talking shit about him while he’s gone.” In an episode from the first season, two tech titans—former colleagues, now rivals—encounter each other at an LB Steak-like restaurant. A specific kind of awkwardness ensues: these are men who make million-dollar decisions without hesitation, but who struggle mightily with pleasantries. It’s the kind of interaction that is difficult to get right unless you’ve seen a version of it in real life.

“They’ve asked me questions about Richard’s fictional company, like whether it would actually be fundable,” Marc Andreessen, a Web pioneer and a prominent venture capitalist, told me. “The technology, as described on the show, would certainly have a major impact if it existed. Could you turn it into a viable business? Unknown. But, in fairness, you could say that about half of the companies we fund.”

Between the show’s first and second seasons, the wri

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