The INSIDER Summary:
- "Silicon Valley" references real tech companies in its opening credits.
- Each season, they add new relevant companies with inside jokes.
- The season four credits include Pinterest, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Yelp.
- Plus there's a Snap Inc. "ghost" floating by the Facebook offices.
The fourth season of HBO's satirical comedy "Silicon Valley" premiered April 23, and the iconic opening sequence got some minor makeovers. The intro shows miniature recreations of real tech companies, their details giving the audience clues about what those companies have been up to in the last couple of years.
Let's take a closer look at the additions and alterations made to the opening sequence.
New companies added this year include Pinterest and Airbnb (with its controversial new logo), as well as Slack, the booming new messenger app that's popular among businesses in the tech and media world.
Theranos is another new company — and the "Silicon Valley" creators even added FBI trucks driving up to the building to reflect the company's legal troubles over the last two years. The season three finale of "Silicon Valley" directly referenced Theranos when Richard Hendricks said Theranos had been "f---ing lying," but now the company is immortalized in the opening sequence, too.
There's also an updated version of Amazon's Prime Air drone, but this time it's blue and carrying a slice of pepperoni pizza.
One logo you may have missed is the Snap Inc. ghost. Can you spot it in the GIF below?
Look closer to the left of the blue Facebook logo at the top of the image. The ghost just floats by, nearly invisible. This might be a dig at the ways Facebook (via Instagram) has been copying Snapchat's format for stories and other features — but Snap Inc. is hovering overhead like a specter of tech.
The two biggest ride-hailing services, Uber and Lyft, have had their own competing balloons in the opening sequence for the last two seasons. But now there's a third balloon:
Didi Chuxing is the biggest competitor for Uber and Lyft in China, and now you can see their orange logo floating next to the two other ride-share balloons.
Another set of additions is Dropbox, Yelp, and Twitch — these companies are all clustered in the lower right corner, right as the opening starts.
And last but not least, let's take a closer look at the vehicles driving around the streets of this miniature Silicon Valley.
Clustered together, you can see a Tesla car, an RV, and a smaller white vehicle. That little white car is actually a Waymo self-driving car used for testing (created by Google's parent company Alphabet).
The RV is likely a reference to the way people are now living out of vans and cars in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area in order to avoid paying skyrocketing rents.
Once again, "Silicon Valley" has managed to pack tons of references into their 10-second opening, and we can't wait to see how it evolves over the next season.
Here's a full list of every company included in the opening, with new additions in bold:
Intel
Google/Alphabet
Chrome
Nest
eBay
Amazon
Netscape
Tesla
Pinterest
Airbnb
Theranos
Appcelerator
23 and Me
Twitch
Dropbox
Yelp
Android
Oculus
Twitter
Blogger
Uber
Lyft
DiDi
Facebook
Soylent
YouTube
Oracle
HP
Yahoo/Alibaba Group
Samsung
Re/Code
Waymo
Did we miss one? Email krenfro@thisisinsider.com with the company name if so.
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