Sliceline - Silicon Valley S05E01
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2025
- One of the candidates Richard rejected is also at the reception. It’s Duncan, the pizza-app guy. Unfortunately, Duncan tells Richard that his Sliceline app is about to take off, so he doesn’t want to be considered for Pied Piper anymore. Sliceline’s entire premise is absurd: Like Priceline does with travel arrangements, it finds you the best price for a pizza and the quickest means of delivery.
Sliceline manages to get $8 million in funding, which Duncan casually reveals while Richard is trying to convince the CEO of Optimoji to let him acquire her failing company. She has 30 programmers, and Richard only needs 12, but she’s a stickler for keeping her crew intact. The deal is almost set before Duncan and his big mouth shows up. Optimoji decides to go with Duncan, leaving Richard high and dry.
This entire show is basically Gavin's back story, told through Richard's evolution.
AJ Waters I never thought of it that way but it really is. The tech world is a hostile monster and Richard wants to innovate it for the greater good, by any means necessary apparently.
I’d like the series finale to be Richard in a giant office after “Revolutionizing the World” with fake Yes men all around him, getting ready to buy out the next world changing idea. This showing the cycle of silicone valley.
Richard started out as the most boring of the main team but he's slowly become a compelling character.
History tends to repeal itself
@@Kagemusha08 By the end of the show, he will be the bad guy...with too much money and power that you can't stop him.
As long as innovation is prioritised over money,he can be Elon musk of web!
Wow, the irony...bankrupting a company by actually buying their products...that's a new one loll
thats an actuall DDOS most food apps have to deal with, since they only grow by getting users by handing out free food coupons.
The amazon approach
This is exactly MoviePass's model.
That's exactly Indian start up model....
It worked.
01:55 02:23 This is such a Gavin Belsen move. Using money to crush a guy he hates.
It was actually necessary, they needed staff urgently
it's what every single company do
he learned from the best :)
Tbf he totally deserved it. Slice Line was just making profit from another companies product. It was a parasite of a company
For the whole series I think Richard is very likely to become like Gavin. But of course he did not.
Revenge is a dish best served algorithmically optimised!!
😂😂😂
Revenge is like serving cold cuts.
😂😂
Revenge is like serving a deep dish pizza
@@mrartdeco jon stewart would be so proud of you
The funniest part of this is that when he says they are stallions. Kira who has coding experience turns around and looks at them with aw like she looking at the holy Grail 😂
This is the moment Richard becomes "an asshole" like Erlich taught him. It's also when he starts to mirror Gavin Belson.
Richard's evolution into Gavin Belson.
How?
wow, Richard has 13 million in his Bank account? Remember when the series began when Richard was just a college drop out living at a hostel?
Aer NicaGar he’s STILL a college dropout, and he’s STILL living in the hacker hostel. The 13 million in the bank is likely just 100% the remaining runway funds from the percentage of Pied that was sold off to the VCs.
@@HylerMusic It was from their Series A funding
With a six figure job at Hooli
I mean....in the first episode of S1 gavin belson offered him a check for $10 million if he sells all of pied piper to hooli. So he already could have had 10 million (as his actual money, not as part of VC funding for his startup) before the first episode ended
Incubator*
I love how the show is about how stupid low level ideas are getting promoted and overvalued, while true game changing technology that is hard to grasp struggles
No. The show is how (social) incompetent people and giant ego's prevent good ideas from spreading out in the first place. Dude had chance after chance to dominate. They could have done multiple licensing deals by creating a B2B service.
The reason why ideas like the one in this video have been funded over the past decade is due to the loose monetary policy. The benefits of which we've been experiencing over the past few years in the form of inflation.
@@GBXS 1) It's a show. If he makes smart choices, it would have ended. 2) Monetary regulation in the last decade and this inflation have nothing to do with poor idea funding. Again, you do understand this is a show, which means dramatization. What an incompetent chump you are.
@@GBXSI think that a lot of these are money laundering startups too.
@ketankulkarni7938 makes little sense as the start ups themselves are typically money losers as there is a focus on growth and growth alone. The start ups going public are typically late stage companies.
This is all that happens when you're increasing the money supply. Since the economies are incredibly big, it takes a while for everything to start affecting prices. This is what happens if you listen to Keyenesians.
Richard started off slow and gradually turned into the type of person he was up against in the first season. Some may call it evolution, I call it adaptation.
Sliceline buys pizza for 10 dollars and then sells them for 9. No optimization of order routing and allocation is going to make that business cash flow positive. Pizza chains have already done tons of work to get those optimized, he is not going to figure out a way to optimize another 5 dollars a pizza off.
You loose money until you have market dominance and then you increase the price. I am not saying that pizza app is a good idea, but Its not inconceivable or even unprecedented to loose money like that.
@@atypicalambience3487 yeah at that point you just buy pizza from the original chain app themselves
i think he means the "Pizza" on the app shows a price of 9 dollars, not showing the hidden costs like driver fee and management fee and then finally tipping, so sliceline is taking a bath by paying their drivers for each delivery, essentially draining sliceline to pay drivers.
this gets fixed by having optimized driver and order routing, essentially paying the drivers less.
at least thats the way i decided to see it.
Yup. It's primarily an Uber/UberEats joke (but so many other companies, primarily rideshare and delivery, were guilty of this). They basically handwaved their untenable business models by alluding to better algorithms, optimization, market share, autonomous cars, good vibes, etc.
Once they ran out of cheap VC money, they had to increase their prices. They were never going to be as big as their investors were led to believe. Personal delivery and long-distance on-demand taxi services were always going to be luxury services for the foreseeable future.
Company make pizza for 3 dollars, sell for 10. Company want people to sell pizza to. They give discount to apps and coupons in places where people will be. So company can make price even lower with more people because its a bulk discount same as GoodRx.
Considering Duncan is played by the “new gang” Frank tries to join in always sunny I like to imagine it’s the same character. He came up with sliceline after being inspired by Frank’s crazy ideas as a desperate way to come back after losing his bar
2 stallions and a mole actually
Rat fuck I believe is the correct term
@@aidenrawlins8709 Mole is the correct term. A rat is a snitch.
P L lols it was jared’s line
Revamp Agent 😳🤣 I don’t remember that part, but haha what a coincidence.
He was no stallion
This is when Richard Hendrix become Heisenburg
I saw the thumb and assumed there was a real company named sliceline and was about to show outrage at its existence.
Kyle Noe but it’s a pun
Breaking bad nerd edition
Isn't Breaking Bad itself a story about a nerd breaking bad?
@@CanOfMinus Computer nerds are to chemistry nerds what lepidopterists are to ornithologists
"You spent 19 thousand dollars on pizza"
MrBeast: Hold my beer
Richard "Gavin Belson is bad"
Also Richard:
The cracking of Jereds voice in the end makes me feel so sad for him.
I take great pride in being the first one to own this.
That pizza algo is actually a great idea.
Is it?
@@PorkotylerClips Is basically a food delivery, but only for pizza. So yeah, great idea.
Yuri Reis I was referencing the pun it wasn’t a statement on the actual algorithm.
Push for Pizza, 2014
It's not. It wouldn't work unless pizza places shared information with you they keep secret.
They don't stop doing this once they are huge. Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook et al continue to do this right now.
Reminds me of two law students, before the internet, at an exclusive ivy league school, who went into the bookstore just before schools first year semester started and bought up every single copy of the required law books for the classes. Got so far ahead of the rest of the class nobody else could earn an A. Genius.
Don't schools usually have deals with publishers of educational books? Kinda weird to have to go through bookstores finding a specific laywer book.
@Stella Hohenheim Before the internet, it was impossible to find text books and academic literature outside of university bookstores and if you lived somewhere that only had 1 university within a 100km radius, you'd be hooped. If you were lucky, you'd find something second hand but law students wouldn't sell off their books that readily. Bookstores off campus wouldn't have the books in stock, and even if they could order it in, it would have taken weeks to have them shipped.
That's an urban legend.
"each one a stallion, more magnificent than the last"
I must say, while Richard did become like Gavin in this moment, he had every right to do so. The Sliceline guy basically f*cked him over with the whole coders issue, so Richard needed to play dirty to continue swimming. He was totally justified. If he did not do it, what other options did he have? Gavin took away his options. That is the difference between them. Richard had no other choice, in this case, while Gavin often had multiple choices on how to act but choose the bad ones.
Yes i think the people are too polarized about Richard evolution and actions through the show, he never wanted to be a CEO but was forced to do and learning the hard way how full of backstabbing assholes Is that industry, he had to do dirty things and commit mistakes to just keep pied Piper Alive. When they had investors and good asociates It was usually due to being heavily controlled and undermined, he and pied Piper had to go through hell just to mantain some form of independency and Profit, so basically being put im a position you are not natural and being put in extreme pressure un His work and goals every day just fueled His insecurities and bitterness, thats why he acted petty in a lot of ocassions or vengeful, usually backfiring him inmediately cause he needed some vent to all that pressure and mistreat of His peers, Gavin Belson was an egomaniac that pushed everyone arround him to the límit, abused His employees and didnt give af about any form of ethic and empathy in His work
@@diegosotomiranda4107 Richard evolution lacks therapy sessions.
@@capunzel5859 Therapy teaches you how to deal with personal problems, not build a Fortune 500 tech company
Justified sure. But is it legal??
@@sarthakchandra how is it illegal?
1:54 can’t help but be reminded of that app he turned down that puts fake 3D mustaches on people. I always thought it was a great idea if they realized it could be used for more than just virtual mustaches... and well, while this isn’t the direction I would’ve gone personally, I suppose he was a “dickhead” all things considered, and it’s certainly more than just a mustache...
I suppose... good job? 🤔
petition for Snapchat and Instagram to include a "meathead" filter?:D
holy shit, He just got DDOSed with pizza xD !!!
Not really, ddos renders a site unusable, not order a product
500 Post Requests in a day couldn't DDOS a pencil
I hope he donates it to a food bank or something 🤣
Nerd Threats are hilarious.
More of a business/financial threat than anything, and a good one too, but using the buzzword “nerds” is going to give this comment traction because lots of people hate it when nerds become confident or make ruthless moves.
When Richard says “Nice Tasty Za”
If you understood what's going in this place then you are a real good brain.
One of the stallions wheezes like a horse too.
@ERA CASTE yeah, but... skills-wise he's still a stallion
you got way better at editing
I stoped my auto editing project.. and went back to manual editing :)
So Richard brought 2000+ pizza... hope he doesn't get tired of eatting pizza..
Or he could feed the thousands of homeless people in commiefornia
He probably doesn't even have that pizza: as stated, it was optimized to maximize drive time.
A lot of random people probably got free pizza. 2000 people, actually.
username it would probablly
Be illegal for him to give that pizza to homeless people
@@pteppig Are you still braindead, or did you recover?
Stallions are the highlight of this scene
I like how Dinesh calmly explains that it’s OK to draw on his forehead because he sent in a headshot
This like that old Darknet market Silk Road, at one point there was bug in the site’s code that caused them to lose money on every purchase rather than make money
In hindsight is Richard really giving other people sh*t for bad company names?
😂😂😂
1:01. Watched this high when he said fuck you to all those people and it was funny for some reason
"Her team is going to throw some artificiel intelligence magic karatee bullshit and we're going to be cash-flow positive"
Never noticed that Duncan was Andrew Leeds from _Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist_
A simple CAPTCHA addition to his check out would stop Richard. Any nerd knows that.
True
@Stella Hohenheim that's be a small number of people. Captcha would give people a chance at least.
That would only work if he was trying to by hundreds of thousands of pizzas an hour. It wouldn't be anything to hire a dozen guys at minimum wage to sit by the computer and do those. How long does one take, 5 seconds? That's 864 orders an hour. Average of two pizzas an order. That's losing over 8 grand an hour, 10 grand a day, 14 hours open, 140 grand a day they are losing.
@@alphanerd7221 Outsourcing to Jin Yang's Young girls bootcamp would have been funny as hell.
@@alphanerd7221or you could call it a coding school & get little girls to do it, like Jian Yang was doing.
By far the most i've liked richard since S1
Stallions.
Richard could be so cut throat when he needed to be lol
19000 dollars of orders means 9500 loss for Sliceline, I'm guessing. Which isn't a lot. But if Richard spent all 13 mil then Sliceline would be oit 6.5mil which would still be less than the 8mil in seedfunding. But why would Richard do that if it would also ruin him financially.
i guess you need to take other factors into it. He mentioning creating thousands of fake accounts and distributing the pizza orders for maximum travel distance (i.e. order range up to 30 min drive time -> normal orders 5-30 min but now ALL orders 30 min) which means your pizza drivers can only manage to deliver a small amount per day and thus for blocking real other customer which get pissed and never order from you again and by that ruining your business. For that you just need a small fraction of the mony.
It's a proof of concept. The coder who that other guy stole from him now knows, to a certainty, that the business model is not going to work, and that people with means are motivated to make it not work.
Yeah right. One of the stallions was a mole of hooli. LOL
What makes Richard different than Gavin in this clip?
Richard was out of options, Gavin does shit like this specifically to fuck people over regardless of how many options he has.
Domino's selling that thing they call a pizza for $10+ is the real scam here
Sadly cheap pizza keeps winning.
That's the truth.
All hail the magnificent stallions
"I saved you from kilt guy"!
I don’t understand,
at the end of the scene, Monica mentioned about 19,000 dollars spent on Sliceline’s pizza, if the retail price is 9 dollars, means Richard bought 2112 box of pizzas, and if Sliceline lost 5 dollars per box, it only accounts for 10,556 dollars of loss in a day for Sliceline with 8 million substracted by whatever they pay their 50 engineer (if average pay is 10,000 per month, means 500,000 for that 1st month of operation), they still had at least 7 million in bank account.
How is Pied Piper devaluing Sliceline with that?
They also spent a ton of their 8mil on acquiring the coders. Which could be roughly 20-30 employees, who would be all on contracts as well, likely with severance packages.
Plus all the things the other guy mentioned.
Resource crunch. They can get money but can't sell the Pizza.
How do you "optimize" your way out of selling a $10 pizza at 9 bucks a pop?
Well for one they likely had or were working on some sort of deal with Domino's to buy the pizza (I doubt they just jerry rigged an API for the domino's app) which means they may have been spending less than 10 dollars per pie. However it's also possible it just genuinely wasn't possible to optimize and they were just planning to essentially live off VC money.
@@gregorycosteas3539 Becoming the moviepass of pizzas!
@@SuperHipsterGamer was literally about to comment this today, lol, well played. God what a waste of a great idea.
@@gregorycosteas3539very hard to optimize. You're right. It's a cash cow. Get money, close the business under bankruptcy. Easiest fraud on the book.
$19,000 to get revenge isn't that bad of a deal
especially when you have millions to throw around xD
Never mess the stallions.
Stallions each one better than other 😂😂
so this is Pelant's supervillain backstory
0:04 That's Tai Lopez !
Richard really was a Gavin here
I think one of those stallions was a spy for gavin belson
Making a botnet to launch a Sybil attack against sliceline makes sense, but how would they have enough credit cards to make the accounts indistinguishable??
virtual credit cards
Debit gift cards
Or they just temporarily disallow new accounts being created by citing maintenance on your registration process, until you find a better fix
Shouldn't captcha or otp based authentication solve such problems?
19 thousand dollars on venegance
Reminds me of that scene in season 1 where Monica tells Richard that Gavin Belson and Peter Gregory are billionaires who would spend thousands just to mildly piss each other off.
I noticed how pizza guy looks like James Alifantis...
By golly they are magnificent stallions
$10 a large, we pay £20 :(
So Richard just crushed sliceline 'Gamestop' style.
Well, 2 stallions and 1 mole.
its crazy how theres a app called slice now lol
Now this actually does not make sense. $19k on pizza makes sliceline to lose around $10k. It is a lot of money, but no way enough to bleed sliceline dry.
The threat of them doing it before the company changes their pricing structure is what worked. That was 10k in one evening.
Sliceline could obviously just ramp up the price prematurely but the whole point of these companies is to build up an userbase by underpricing their product and THEN become cash-flow positive. Since Richard has more capital, he can inundate their company with fake orders that never actual build them a legitimate userbase and destroy their whole business model, basically.
@@MrPizzapoika That is interesting, I did not think of that. It make sense though, but I think the show failed to explain it.
@@Wickerless Richard perfectly explained it, but you didn't pay attention. You focused on the $10k
19k worth of Pizza which should have been worth (19/4.9)*10k= 39k (ish). So he lost like 20k that night plus the operational cost + salaries should make it a big problem for them,
The value of a threat is that you never actually have to follow through, the $10k loss that slice-line took was just a show of proof that Richard wasn't bluffing. The again, I have to wonder if threatening the company you're trying to tear apart for their employee acquisition will ruin the work environment and productivity of the employees that you actually do hire.
good move
19k just to ruin a douchebags business?
Hell, a lot of people would pay that kinda of money even if the pizzas go to waste!
So the product is movie pass for pizza?
VC money in action: buying pizza for $9 Richard takes $9 loss per pizza vs Duncan who takes just $5 loss per Pizza. Duncan wins by 80%.
In this scene Richard is Gavin.
This actually happened in real life. I read it somewhere.
I would love to know how you could tell someone is closeted alt right from a bussiness meeting lol.
The writers mean they were a white male.
@@afbaaacfbfcc by that logic wouldn't everyone but Dinesh also be closeted alt right then...try again bud.
@@gladeskier95 No, no, and that's racist of you to assume. Everyone else except Gilfoyle is Jewish and thus non-white, and he's Canadian. Zero white American Males present.
expressing alt-right ideas but denying that you belong to the same group as "those people." same way you can kind of tell when someone is in the closet about their sexuality.
It's simple. If you criticize the authoritarian left, you're alt-right. Your actual political beliefs are irrelevant because facts don't matter in politics.
They would just pull a Robinhood and prevent users from purchasing and it would be in their terms of service that they could do that.
Slayedline
simply suspend the app, implement a rate limit...
why didn't the pizza guy just limit the number of pizzas that can be ordered for a day and limit pizza buying for 2 per person. there is multiple ways of making it work, but the first thing is shutting the app, it would lower its growth but losing all of the money will do worse
אור פאר probably because it doesn’t work out as well as you think. Movie Pass tried the same thing. Changing their business model to limit the amount of movies people could see and even which ones to stop bleeding cash. It’s still in the gutter.
@@Rushinator1 so he needs to write all of them lettera explaining that to maintain high standards and low price for the service and temporary limit must be set, and maybe reward people with a coupon or something.
אור פאר didn’t work for MoviePass
A bit net implies multiple thousands of users/accounts-limiting to 2 per account doesn't matter if you have 2 million accounts.
since the botnet can create a nearly unlimited number of user accounts, limiting orders per user makes no sense. Also, like every over-hyped food app, they desperately try to increase their user base by giving away discounts at a loss. So, even limiting the total amount of pizzas per day would only lock out the normal users, since the botnet is also quicker at ordering
I wouldn't have given in...i would said w.e im going to stop the app for cybersecurity reasons... stop any profile from being made as well as delete every user from the moment he came and called us dinks. And throw in there wait for my next turn.
when has a large dominos pizza ever been $10?
Right now.
I don't understand how they lose 5 bucks for each pizza.. I mean, the domino sells it for 10 bucks, and they sell it for 9 bucks. should they only lose 1 buck for each pizza? am I missing something here?
They have to change the box too.
Is my math wrong? For every $5 he is doing in “damage,” he has to spend $10. And he doesn’t have enough funding to last to bankrupt an $8 mill company. Certainly not by just spending $19k
$8 mil *before* they matched Richards offer to acquire Optimoji and all of her developers. That probably put a serious dent into that $8 mil
@@daniellevene7438 true. I also note that its the idea that he can do it, that makes it a threat. But the notion he has to spend millions to incur a "loss" in a lower amount is still baffling. Spend $10 to cost someone $5
You are assuming nobody else uses the app.
Why did Richard do this again?
I don’t get it, Richard ordered for 19000 dollars, that means they only lost 10,000 dollars worth of loss. How can a 10k dip is bankrupting them ?
10k won't bankrupt the company, but its the fact that Richard has the resources to drain out the company.
they are losing 5 dollar per pizza
But he still paid for the Pizzas. So how he damaged the company? Can someone explain?
The company is losing money on orders, it _costs_ them $5 per order, they've running at loss which is very common for startups in early stages (it took years for Amazon to be profitable, they operated at loss for years just to position themselves on the market). They hoped they could turn into a profitable business by the time they spent all of their cashflow but Richard exploited that by maximizing their loss per order and ordering a ton of pizzas.
@@Zealotux wow. That's brutal
Lots of companies operate at a loss to try and gain a monopoly. You should Google Uber's losses!
The company is a fraud and can't make a profit ever.
Its a pun...is it?
This was pretty messed up from their perspective lol
It’s also messed up if one doesn’t think about it through lenses of an audience.
@@JoshityJosh No. It's pretty justified.
I am a programmer and I would work for free in a team like that.
If you happen to live in palo alto, I doubt it
@Ilovemy sachiko Why not?
@Ilovemy sachiko I highly doubt you would be able to hire anyone as people like you are prefer to be be a slave of an oil rich Arab for few darham throughout their life.
You need to make about 200k to able to afford a house in Palo Alto.
No you won't. Perhaps a 4 month unpaid internship but after that, A man's gotta eat 😅
He thinks he's morally grounded, not hiring people he thinks might be Alt Right... But then just to be petty he threatens to destroy a pizza selling app? Sounds like Silicon Valley.
This has nothing to do with being petty. This is how he gets the coders he needs.
they could've just shutdown the app, and Waited till they made it cashflow positive to reactivate it
That's what I have been thinking the whole time.
I'm no expert in development, but maybe they needed to use the app so that it can optimize itself. They were talking about algorithms and the like and to my understanding they needed to use said algorithms so that they could eventually optimize all routes without having to take a loss on every order.
Could be wrong though...
n3of1x maybe but they could even simulate the process if they cannot use the app
Their goal is to give app users an illusion by the initial crazy deals. Later on there will no longer be those crazy deals, but the app users got into a habit of thinking this app will always provide us the best deal and they will continue to use it.
SoldierOfSlaughter we are closed for business until we get better at our business?? Lol investors would have a laugh then divest!
6 minute abs :-)
I hope he gave those pizzas to the homeless and other needy people.
Oh shut up
@@jaythefirst2841 exactly😂
@@jaythefirst2841 The thing is if they did then they could write it off as a tax deduction and maybe shop the story around for some good PR. Local tech startup donates 19k in pizzas to the needy. PR person's wet dream right there.
well, since commifornia is the capital of homeless people and people getting broke on gentrification inflated rent, there are lots of mouths to feed there.
@@pteppig Do you know why California has so many homeless? It's because Homeless from all the trashy states go there because the weather is nice and they get treated better. Some gay kid runs away from Arkansas because he's being treated horribly and winds up on the street in California becuase he has no education and that's supposed to make California look bad?
Wow Richard really judging Sliceline for its name when he named his company PiepPieper. PS Both terrible names
This is basically the early days of DuPont when foreign monopolists tried to cut them out of business. Fortunately, it wasn't heavily regulated by the government, so establishing a monopoly on things was difficult in those days.
If the app singles out the "cheapest fastest pizza" wouldn't that just send everyone to the same place? Now if this guy owned a pizza chain and under cut everyone, then he'd have something.
The truth is that these apps don't take a bath and sell the pizza/burgers/whatever for less than what they buy them for. Instead they match customers and sellers. The trick is that they take a huge chunk of the menu price, squeeze the independent delivery people and charge customers for the service. The pizza place takes the losses. Often they feel that they have to be on the platforms or lose out on business. One business guru said that you don't want to be the hot dog vendors on the street engaging in price wars or competing to be the best, inexpensive hot dog vendors. You want to sell the hot dogs, buns and condiments to the vendors. Now it is the app that costs everyone more and adds little if any value at all.
Another way to lose money. He can't drive every pizza place in the valley out of business with cold dominoes.
@@alphanerd7221 Yeah, I mean have you ever even heard of hot Dominoes Pizza? If that's all it took they would have gone out of business too years ago.
Optimoji
Fkkn stallions man