A new reality TV series about America’s technology jewel Silicon Valley, Start-Ups: Silicon Valley, premiered Monday, November 5 at 10 pm ET/PT on Bravo TV, a program service of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment.
Start-ups: Silicon Valley whose executive producer is Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg’s sister, explores the intertwining lives of a group of young entrepreneurs on the path to becoming Silicon Valley’s next great success stories.
The show casts Sarah Austin (Creator and Host of Pop17.com,) Dwight Crow (Programmer and Entrepreneur), Kim Taylor (Founder of Shonova.com), David Murray (Entrepreneur and CEO, Goalsponsors, Inc.), and brother and sister duo, Ben Way (Inventor, Serial Entrepreneur) and Hermione Way (Media Entrepreneur and Journalist).
Hermoine Way who is also the Silicon Valley Video Director for The Next Web (TNW), was recently on a tour of Africa with TNW’s Startup world to promote startups, entrepreneurship and technology through a global challenge that seeks to identify the globe’s most innovative startups.
According to Wired.com, Start-Ups goes the other way, by highlighting lifestyles of its want-to-be-rich and not-yet-famous personalities, rather than delving into the presumed substance of their endeavors.
Reception to show is not all positive with some Silicon Valley techies expressing their outrage at the shows complacency to the reality of life in California’s tech city.
“The entire thing is just horrendous,” tech blogger Francisco Dao told New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose.
The real people in tech are out building companies, doing real work, and along comes this show that is just a terrible misrepresentation of their lives, and it hijacks their work, he added.
Randi Zuckerberg however feels that Silicon Valley need to learn how to take a joke, “People need to realize that this is a reality show, not a documentary—if we were filming a documentary of Silicon Valley, the footage and the casting would be significantly different. But we’re not.” Zuckerberg told Vanity Fair in an interview.
As Africa prepares to build its own Silicon Valley dubbed as the Silicon Savannah, it is expected that TV producers will care to borrow a leaf. Briefcase inc, a Kenyan series on Kenyan TV network KTN about two young men (Charles and Ben) trying to start a business offers a sneak peek of how this could happen.
