Boom.

Dear 20 or so religious recap followers,

You probably noticed that I took last week’s episode off. I could give you a list of reasons: it was really busy at work, I was trying to wind down for Thanksgiving, and catching the West Coast feed starting at 10 p.m. Pacific is a bitch. But ultimately, I just didn’t feel like watching it. The first two episodes left me narcoleptic and an unopened Xbox game seemed like more fun.

But Nitasha, Betabeat’s editor, convinced me to give it one last try. Well, I’m glad I did. I managed to stay awake for the entire episode! And it was definitely the most authentic of the season. It may have helped that I was getting texts from Gabe Rivera, founder of the famous tech news aggregator Techmeme, that my startup and I made an appearance in this week’s show. (Gabe was in NYC at the time and claims that he was just “flipping” through the channels). My favorite subject was going to be on . . . me!

Recap: This week opened up with Hermione kickboxing with her trainer pretending the punching bag was Sarah’s face. Ben does some crunches. Kim goes to hottie Dwight for advice on quitting her job (Sorry, but Jay is still cuter). Sarah brags. Kim quits. Kim cries. Kim drinks some wine. Ben and Hermione get rejected by another VC. Kim parties. David, Ben, and Hermione head to a tech party. Hermione freaks. Hermione cries. Hermione drinks. Hermione throws a drink. Wrap!

How Real? Once again, I'll generously start them off at 100% real Silicon Valley. Last time I tried this, the show scored a miserable 10% (blame Sarah Austin.)

“Minimum Viable Product” +20%

Kim, the former NBA cheerleader, mentions to Dwight that she wants to quit her cushy job at Ampush and launch her own startup to initially build a “minimum viable product”. Mind blown. This is real techy, product management shit! Product managers refer to it as “MVP,” which loosely translates to building products with a limited features set in order to get traction and meaningful feedback from early adopters. So either Kim (1) has actually spent some time on product launches or (2) she reads way too much TechCrunch. Either way, respect.

Sarah Austin -50%

Ladies and gentleman, we have our Snooki. Sarah is still very tanned and still kind of a dumdum, but it’s pretty innocuous. She does these video interviews--sorry, lifecasts--with somewhat famous startup CEOs in a real folksy-how-do-I-turn-my-iPhone-on kinda way. It worked! I’m convinced she knows nothing about startups and tech! Then she goes and says, “I’m one of the original bloggers of Silicon Valley.” I think what Sarah meant was that she had a Blogger account and owned a Flip camera in 2007? I mean, c’mon, the Valley gave birth to tech blogging greats like Michael Arrington, MG “Fucking!” Siegler, Rip Emerson, and many others. She caps it off by proclaiming that she’s the White Oprah of the Valley. I better just move on before I bang my head into my brand new iPad mini. #humblebrag

Dwight’s Apartment +20%

This brogrammer lives in a pigsty. There’s like dirty sandals, unwashed dishes, probably a used condom all just laying about his one bedroom apartment. Later it comes out that Dwight lives in Sunnyvale, which is effectively BFE to the San Francisco tech set. But it is about half the price to rent there and it’s easier to tap older engineering talent that are likely to stick around. For a first time entrepreneur? Legit.

Kim’s $1M in Equity -15%

Someone’s been told a lie here. There’s no way in hell she’s walking away from $1 million in shares. I have no insights into their cap table or funding line, but unless she owns like 30% of the company, it doesn’t add, especially given the space that Ampush Media is in. At last count there’s like 4,000,000 of these Facebook ad optimization companies running amok in the Valley with little liquidation options on the horizon for these guys. Sorry, Kim. You’re still cute though!

Quoting Steve Jobs (Kim) -5%

Kim finally quits her job and gathers some friends to celebrate at popular SF club Harlot. Looking pretty inebriated, she mutters to Dwight how happy she’s leaving do her own thing because, “She’s been wasting her time living someone else’s life.” Shaking my head…it’s a Steve Jobs quote from a commencement address that he delivered at Stanford in 2005. Girl, that's just tacky.

My Debut +40%

You’ve had to endure three episodes to finally (finally!) see yours truly in a scene. I was working the door at a huge networking party that I threw during Apple’s WWDC. I don’t want to brag, but I fucking killed it. Totally legitimized the show over night. However, I instructed them not to shoot me from my right side. I will be talking to Randi Zuckerberg about that.

Appcelerator +10%

This is the amazing mobile startup that I work at. Total legit! Buy some of their software? #GratuitousPlug #AlwaysBeHustlin’

Tally

For episode 4, we get a record-setting final score of 120% real Silicon Valley! Granted it was mostly buoyed by the appearance of my awesome startup, my CEO (Jeff Haynie), and myself. But I think it's a sign of good things to come. In all seriousness, I think the folks in the Valley should be rooting for the show to be a hit. If it isn’t, this will likely be the last startup show for a mainstream audience that you will see greenlit for a while. And that’s a loss for all of us that call this wonderful place our home. [Ed note: Sorry, Best Coasters, it looks like New York is already on the hook for sloppy seconds.]

Season 1 . . . Episode 2 . . . no end in sight . . . I’m not sure how much more I can take.

Now that the dust has settled from the PR, subsequent Valley backlash, promos, more backlash, and last week’s premiere, we actually get to see what we have here with Bravo’s "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley." Basically, it's formulaic reality show.

The genre's hooks and tricks are well established, they just happen to be filmed in Silicon Valley with cast members that are, well, made for TV. I think for many here, there was still some hope that the show would offer a national audience an insider's look into the motion and the madness in which the Valley operates. Not so much.

Back in 2001, there was a great startup documentary called "Startup.com." It would have been such a worthwhile endeavor if the producers aspired to create something like that. Instead we’re left with what venture capitalist Ron Palmeri of MkII Ventures calls, “The Housewives of Silicon Valley.”

However, I will say these characters are kind of lovable. (Emphasis on “kind of.”) I even tried to make fun of Sarah Austin on Twitter, but I don’t think she got the joke:

@spencerchen @p_kassie hahahaha no she's the one who meets me in the morning and brings hot coffee lol#siliconvalley

— Sarah Austin (@sarahaustin) November 13, 2012

(Noteworthy here is that whatever was written about the Valley’s disdain towards the cast members was misguided. It’s the idea of a startup reality show that Valley folks disliked, not the people involved.)

Anyways, enough about what could have been and more about that Sony Vaio.

Recap: Ben Way and Hermione Way return to The Villa dejected after being turned down by VC Dave McClure. They start screaming. Um, okay. Kim Taylor is pissing and moaning about work because she’s been there for two years and the cofounder is thinking about bringing in someone more senior to handle sales. This is her first startup job after being a NBA cheerleader, so you know, why wouldn’t she be considered for the Chief Revenue Officer role? Sarah is talking about “Lifecasting” again. I don’t even… oh hey, pool party! David Murray made an “Oedipus” reference to siblings Ben and Hermione during the pool party. Awk!

Friends of the cast finally get some airtime here. I guess all that hard work lingering around the cast members finally paid off! Sarah hosts some VC pitch event. She’s wearing a cute, burgundy dress . . . her tan looks awesome? Totes. Hermione vists Sarah at the Four Seasons to extend an olive branch in the shape of a homemade tiara. Sarah dismisses the hope that she and Hermione will be friends anytime soon. Whatevs. David and new hottie Jay Holanda go play in the park together. Ben and Hermione pitch Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC. Denied! Hermione elects not to sleep underneath the VC’s conference table this time. Smart girl, she’s learning! David and new hottie Jay play Magic and do some brogrammer bonding. Sarah and Jay go on a date, but Sarah ruins it by ‘lifecasting’ it. The end.

How Real? Once again, giving the show the benefit of the doubt we’ll start them off at 100% real Silicon Valley. Last week the show scored a respectable 60% real Valley. Let’s see how they do this week . . .

Getting Rejected By VCs - 10%

After VC Dave McClure shot down their first pitch, Hermione slumps back to The Villa physically tired and emotionally exhausted. There’s quite a bit of drama’ing it up here. Getting rejected, especially at the seed rounds, is quite common for first-time founders. While the constant rejection can take a horrible toll on your ego and self-confidence, founders in the Valley tend to have thicker skin. Being better prepared helps. They certainly don’t scream from the Villatop every time a VC says no. I know one founder that pitched 50 Valley VCs before getting funded. I didn’t even know there were 50 VCs in the Valley.

Lifecasting -30%

Kassandra, Sarah’s assistant, asks Sarah if she’s going to Lifecast her date with Jay. Sarah responds that she’s going to because it’s the way for her audience to get to know the ‘real’ Sarah Austin. At this point, I feel it’s my moral obligation to educate the world that we in the Valley have no idea what the hell she is talking about. I’m pretty sure that Sarah means she tweets and Instagrams. If so, yeah, we do do that.

The Pool Scene at the Four Seasons - 20%

I don’t know where to start. There’s a poodle, spray tans, pretty flowers, and a lengthy conversation about feelings and being BFFs. No. No. No! Whatever free time startup people have (and it’s very little) are spent grabbing a quick meal, a few Fernets, and being generally exhausted. We don’t have enough time to have feelings here in the Valley. 

Sony VAIO -10%

Ben is seen pitching Jeff Clavier with a Sony VAIO. I’ve heard of these things and I’ve seen them on BestBuy’s site before. I’ve just never seen one in the wild here in the Valley. The Valley is MacBook Air country or if you’re a designer or developer, you’re on a MacBook Pro. Maybe it’s a product placement deal?

Tweeting About Your Date -20%

Sarah meets Jay at his place for their long-awaited date and she starts secretly live tweeting the big event. Here’s another thing that Valley types just don’t do. Between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Socialcam, Tumblr, etc…there’s already an abundance of sharing for the tech set throughout the working day. If there’s one last bastion of privacy that we all hold dear, it’s with our love lives. At the most, we make those posts #PathOnly (yes, that’s actually a thing).

Zzzzz

For episode 2, we get a final score of 10% real Silicon Valley. Worse is that the Valley’s interest in this show is sliding like Groupon stock. It just has not been that entertaining. It neither gives you enough of real startup life, nor is it an entertaining reality show. For anecdotal evidence, take a look at the photo I snapped of my girlfriend Amy White during the show. She heads up marketing for Highland Capital Partners and loves Jersey Shore. If Bravo’s Silicon Valley can’t capture her interest, I’m not holding out hope for the rest of the season.

Spencer Chen is head of partnerships at @appcelerator (and Betabeat’s 86th most entertaining Tech Twitterer!) Follow him@SpencerChen.

We'll use this as an artist's rendering. (Photo: flickr.com/lac-bac)

Silicon Alley Smackdown One of the many tech events on rain delay because of Hurricane Sandy was the Big Apple Smackdown ping pong tournament, whose guest list included an impressive number of familiar names from the New York tech scene. (Betabeat is one of the media sponsors, so we may be a little biased.) Among the techno-athletes scheduled to play was Gilt Groupe CEO--and soon-to-be Gilt Groupe chairman--Kevin Ryan. Apparently, we missed quite a show.

The tournament was scheduled for Sunday, "and I played on Friday and on Sunday just to get ready for it!" Mr. Ryan told Betabeat. Really? "Oh yeah, because I won a tournament about a month ago." That was an invitation-only affair for ping pong ringers at the Hamptons manse of ABC Carpet & Home's Ken Pilot. "You had to put $100 into the pot and the winner got two-thirds of the pot, so I was pretty excited about that," Mr. Ryan enthused.

Mad that Sandy ruined your chance to see him action? You can drown your sorrows at Appular's F#@K SANDY event this coming Thursday and throw one back for a good cause.

Make It or Break It Start-Ups: Silicon Valley glamazon Kim Taylor finally has a name for her soon-to-launch startup, and being the gymnast that she is, she's named it after a move from Yelena Shushunova’s floor routine. The former NBA dancer will launch Shonova this winter, targeting the "millennial luxury fashion market," because you can never have too many websites dedicated to selling expensive clothes to young professional women.

LOLfamous Speaking of Bravo, it appears that I Can Has Cheezburger founder Ben Huh is starstruck by himself. Following the premiere of his new Bravo show, LOLwork, Mr. Huh tweeted a link to his freshly-minted IMDB profile with the caption "So...this happened." Don't let the fame get to your head!

And the techno's so loud USV ringleader and hometown hero Fred Wilson is wheels up and L.A.-bound today. However, his wife--Gotham Gal and investor-in-her-own-right Joanne Wilson--booked the tickets, and so he's not flying his preferred airline. Instead, he's flying Virgin, which is not his preferred airline and for a very specific reason: "I find flying on Virgin like going to a nightclub because of the lighting and I avoid it as a result." We always suspected Mr. Wilson was more of an indie music club kinda guy, and this cinches it.

"Executive scent" It seems that, after several years of "sifting through the crap," Team Thrillist has finally found the platonic ideal of brochandising. Behold:

Via Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer's Instagram.

So saucy Betabeat hates to clutch her collective pearls, but my goodness! Who knew the crowd at AllThingsD were quite so naughty? (Okay, we had an inkling.) Earlier this week, ATD doyenne Kara Swisher tweeted out the link to a colleague's story, which had the headline, "Meet the Man Behind Those Hot Pink Mustache Rides." Catalyst Group CEO Nick Gould immediately gave that the side-eye, noting that he "Can't help wondering if @lizgannes is aware of the off-color meaning of the term "mustache ride." Ms. Swisher didn't miss a beat: "i mean I ASSUME she is. I am." Duly noted.

Digging up history The Computer History Museum, located in Mountain View, California, is kind of like mecca for tech geeks. Contained within its hallowed walls are artifacts that tell the history of computers and videogames. Among those artifacts, apparently, is a copy of Windows 1.0, originally owned by Digg founder Kevin Rose. "My copy of Windows 1.0 on display!" Mr. Rose wrote in a caption for the below photo. A nerd's dream come true.

(Photo: Instagram)

Poppin' bottles = just another day in the life. (Photo: screencap)

It's here! Bravo has launched a spiffy new landing page for the sure-to-be-captivating Startups: Silicon Valley. Included is a full, two-plus-minute trailer featuring bikinis, alcohol, iPhones, crying jags, overly dramatic self-aggrandizement, more alcohol, and more crying.

What we don't see is much in the way of self-awareness.

In other words, it's definitely a reality show.

The full video is certainly worth watching for anyone amused by entrepreneurial antics, but we've also pulled out a few of our favorite moments. The top five:

• "I live, breath, eat, shit, daydream my company." As long as it's in that order.
• "How do you solve negative cycles?" Context: The man being asked this question is wearing a toga, standing over a table full of liquor bottles. He replies, with drunken hand gestures, "Are we talking Bellman's algorithm or Dyson's algorithm?"
• "There is a spirit of fuck-you disruption." You kiss your mama with that mouth?
• "I would say I'm living paycheck to paycheck, but I don't have a paycheck! So I'm just living." Youth is wasted on the young.
• And the winner, for achieving both laughable grandiosity and ominousness:  "The future of the world is in our hands." God help us.

November cannot possibly come soon enough. The trailer, for your amusement:

Ms. Taylor narrating episodes (Photo: Facebook/kimtaylor10)

It's hard to come out the other end of Bravo's Real-i-Tron with anything in the way of dignity. Just ask these gilded lilies. Something about the cocktail of ambition, insecurity, and actual cocktails tends to make one's better judgment obsolete.

Thus, we can't vouch for how the world will perceive stealth startup founder and Ampush Media alum Kim Taylor when Randi Zuckerberg's creation (working title: "Silicon Valley") debuts this fall. But over coffee in Midtown last month, Ms. Taylor came across as disarmingly articulate, well-versed in the chutes and ladders of Startupland, and, dare we say, sensible.

Blame her Midwestern roots, or the trial-by-fire of helping to grow a bootstrapped company to revenue in the high eight figures in its first two years.

Inside the bubble, Ms. Zuckerberg's retelling of the entrepreneur's dilemma as shirtless melodrama has been received with the kind of pearl-clutching usually reserved for marauding barbarians or Snooki. We're pretty confident, however, that post-Empire viewers will be able to tell the difference between the real world and reality TV. Besides, Bravo's mission has always been less about inspiring copycats of what you see on screen and more about offering aspiring anthropologists safe space to judge from their couch. And as a subculture, Silicon Valley could benefit from a little perspective from a world of potential users of their world-changing products.

The early word on "Silicon Valley" seems to indicate that its getting a lot of support from the network. We hear the hour-long show, which is slated to premiere the first of week November, will follow one of Bravo's biggest hits (Ramona Singer, is that you?) and boasts the cable channel's largest promotional budget ever. So it seemed as good a time as any to get to know the cast member responsible for the most memorable phrase of the trailer: "Silicon Valley is like high school, but it's only the smart kids and everyone has a lot of money."

When the show began filming, Ms. Taylor was still working as a digital director (and one of the first five employees) at Ampush Media, an online marketing company that became one of the first Facebook ad API partners. Somewhere during filming, Ms. Taylor decided it was time to launch her own venture, a fashion startup, which she is currently operating out of WeWork Labs in San Francisco. The diminutive 30-year-old said she closed first major client, a multibillion dollar company, during a trip to New York in August and is the process of closing a seed round as well.

Ms. Taylor (Photo: Facebook)

Not that it's earned her much respect. Yet. "I get asked five times a week if I work in PR," said Ms. Taylor, sporting a silky, spaghetti-strapped maxi dress as we sipped iced coffees at Dean and Deluca.

"I wanted to do my own startup, but I knew I wasn't ready so I decided to go find smart people I knew and do a startup with them. I was the sales team and marketing team of one [at Ampush]," she said of her decision to move from Chicago to San Francisco in 2010. "We were probably in the top 100 spenders on Facebook in the world because we realized no one was doing Facebook ads that well." Ampush was cofounded by Goldman Sachs and McKinsey alums, friends of Ms. Taylor's. "It was like trading securities, so we built this platform that allowed us to not just automate our bids, but create lots of audience profiles."

She helped secure clients spending more than $100,000 a month on the social network, like Samsung, British Petroleum, and University of Phoenix. "People were applying their search methodology to Facebook and then failing and saying, 'Oh, Facebook sucks. It doesn't work for advertising."

On LinkedIn, Ms. Taylor coyly listed her startup as "Mysterious & Exciting New Venture." But in person the former gymast and NBA dancer confided that the startup's as-yet-undisclosed name is derived from "my favorite move from my floor routine."

Eschewing the Gilt Groupe route, her company isn't a commerce play and focuses on the non-discount slice of the luxury market. "There are many young affluent women who are discriminating consumers and still willing to pay full price," she explained. "I'm making a big data play on brands that haven't fully embraced online," she added, pointing to brands desperate to modernize themselves like Oscar de la Renta's attempt to woo new audiences through Oscar PR girl.

Talking to investors in New York versus the Valley has helped illuminate the differences between the tech scenes. In New York, she said, "I can have in-depth conversations with male VCs about Chanel going online," whereas across the country, "We have to spend a lot more time defining the problem for them."

Ms. Taylor was well-aware of the bad reputation the show had already picked up in the tech world. "I hear some comments made, like there's going to be this gold rush of wannabes that come out there. That's the most asinine thing I've ever heard. As someone from the Midwest, I can tell you there's nothing more terrifying than moving to one of the most expensive cities in the country. In my case, I took an 80 percent pay cut and had my cost of living double."

Besides, she shrewdly pointed out, "Most people there are transplants and immigrants. People running all those big companies didn't grow up there. We become products of that environment but we all come there wanting the same thing." With such a high bar for talent, most of those barbarians will be left at the gate.

So why sign up for a reality show if you want to be taken seriously? (Aside from the fameballing and fortune, of course.) "You always want to be riding a wave and when you look at Bravo I think Bravo is on a wave," she said. Ms. Taylor should know, before Ampush, she was a regional sales manager at Alloy Media + Marketing, the tween tastemakers behind "Gossip Girl" and "Pretty Little Liars."

Programming like Andy Cohen's "Watch Watch Happens Live" is proof of Bravo's forward momentum, she said. "If you think about the future of entertainment, it's two screens. It's watching TV while you're on a laptop, while you're tweeting about it, while you're researching things you're seeing."

That said, she whetted our appetite by admitting, "I can't control things other people have done on the show and I'm not proud of them."

When asked, Ms. Taylor also shrugged off that infamous assessment about her Best Coast cohorts. "I feel like when you say something is 'like high school,' you mean it's small and everyone knows each other," she insisted. "All of a sudden, everyone just thought of their worst memory ever and I was like, 'No!'"

Shhhhhh, you had us at "Silicon Valley is like high school."

Thankfully, Drew Olanoff at The Next Web was kind enough to single out some of the potential players so we can start doing our due diligence. According to Mr. Olanoff the show will "star" The Next Web's Silicon Valley video director Hermione Way. Her brother Ben Way, founder of The Rainmakers, Kim Taylor, digital director at Ampush Media, and Dwight Crow, founder of Carsabi.com also all appear in the preview.

A rep for Bravo told Betabeat that the cast is "not confirmed," emphasizing that, "Randi is not in the show." However, an NBC affiliate (Bravo is owned by NBCUniversal) also reported the same stars, along with Marcus Lovingood, founder of Futureleap. A Facebook post from Erin Kanaley Famularo, who used to work in consumer marketing at Facebook and now works as director of production at Ms. Zuckerberg's R to Z Media, seems to indicate that David Murray, who has worked at Google, Raptr, and Atari, will likewise be joining the cast. "Exciting! We can finally talk about this," wrote Ms. Famularo.

So let's make their acquaintance, shall we?