The first season of the American comedy television series Silicon Valley premiered in the United States on HBO on April 6, 2014. The season consists of eight episodes, and concluded on June 1, 2014. Silicon Valley follows a group of young men working on a startup company in Silicon Valley, California. The first season introduces the characters of Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller), Nelson "Big Head" Bighetti (Josh Brener), Bertram Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), Dinesh Chugtai (Kumail Nanjiani), and Jared Dunn (Zach Woods), who work together to create an app called Pied Piper, which is the result of Hendricks' development of a data compression algorithm.