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HBO’s Silicon Valley is over. I won’t spoil what happened for those who aren’t caught up, other than to say this fan was disappointed as hell by a boring, not-particularly-funny final episode that indulged its creators more than its viewers.
I’m more than happy to cut the writers some slack, though. This satire was so consistently spot on in its portrayal of both the pompous and ordinary characters in real-life Silicon Valley. To make a show year after year that connects not only with people like me who get most of the inside jokes, but also people who just think it’s funny, is a tremendous feat. For whatever reason, it’s not uncommon for the devoted to hate finales. Seinfeld and The Sopranos come to mind. (Co-creator Mike Judge and executive producer Alec Berg discuss their approach to the Silicon Valley finale and reminisce about making the show in this Fortune interview published last night.)
Silicon Valley, including even its last installment, got so much so right. It poked fun at the phony “change the world” ethos of Silicon Valley, and, increasingly, of the rest of the business world. It used comedy to lay bare the greed and arrogance and imposter-syndrome-ism that is daily life at the biggest and smallest tech companies. It will be remembered as a perfect time capsule of one of the tech world’s darkest periods—when the productivity-exploding eras of semiconductors, computers, and the Internet gave way to the epoch of icky surveillance, online hate, tech-enabled incivility, and cheap temporary lodging.
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TV shows come to an end when it’s time. But companies just get new CEOs. The New York Times weighed in on why Larry Page and Sergey Brin resigned their Alphabet (Google) operating roles with an astute observation: They never much liked running a company in the first place.
That got me thinking about what’s next for Alphabet/Google’s newly all-powerful leader, Sundar Pichai. CEO of most of the company for four years already, he now probably needs a No. 2, or at the very least an obvious successor. Every company needs a backup to the CEO. And a CEO that doesn’t have a successor hasn’t prepared the company well for her or his departure. Pichai has a powerful chief financial officer in Ruth Porat and a top business leader in Phillipp Schindler. But neither is a technical executive at what remains an engineer-led company. Cloud chief Thomas Kurian has the right technical skills, but is too newly arrived (from Oracle) and has yet to prove himself.
Adam Lashinsky
Twitter: @adamlashinsky
Email: adam_lashinsky@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
