Is HBO’s Silicon Valley based on a true story?

You don’t have to be in the tech field to get most of the jokes and feel most of the feels in Mike Judge’s HBO Silicon Valley. In fact, the show is so relatable, it seems to be based on someone’s real experience with a tech start-up. Is there a true story behind Silicon Valley?

Although Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel told The Rolling Stone that Silicon Valley is “basically a documentary,” it’s not specifically based on any one thing.

For instance, the smug, detached, and genius venture capitalist Peter Gregory is partly based on Peter Thiel, and his sesame seed theory is similar to a Bill Gates musing on peas. Hooli CEO Gavin Belson has been linked to salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff, but the characters aren’t mimicking any one person. It’s a only slightly over-the-top satire of a a bevy of start-up stories, tech world workers, and foibles of being human. One detail that smacked of reality was when Pied Piper founder Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch,) took the big check he got from investor Peter Gregory to the bank to deposit it without knowing that that he’d have to set up his whole company and then open an account for it before he could deposit the funding. It’s an error that most start-up entrepreneurs wouldn’t make because they’ve at least Googled some things or read a book about starting a company, but because Hendricks sort of falls into this path haphazardly it makes sense that he’d have no idea about the practical implications of starting a company.

“I think it’s so spot on,” said Serge Roux, a 37-year-old industrial designer at Cambridge Consultants in Kendall Square told The Boston Globe. “It’s magnified, obviously — a little over the top — but the personalities are right on: the complete introverts who have no idea how to act socially. I can name those people in our company.”