Play it last man standing: everyone stands, one hard question at a time with no options on screen, miss one and you sit down, the founder left standing wins. Pop culture that runs straight into tech, startups, business, and AI.
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Question 1 of 22
In HBO's Silicon Valley, what is the name of the fictional data compression startup the whole show is built around?
Pied Piper. Founded by Richard Hendricks around a middle-out compression algorithm.
Question 2 of 22
Two Nine Inch Nails members won an Oscar for scoring the 2010 Facebook film The Social Network. Name both.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. They won the Academy Award for Best Original Score.
Question 3 of 22
Before he settled on Amazon, Jeff Bezos almost named the company after a magic word. What was that first name he nearly used?
Cadabra, as in abracadabra. He dropped it because people heard it as cadaver.
Question 4 of 22
Slack is actually an acronym. What does S-L-A-C-K stand for?
Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.
Question 5 of 22
Before founding Amazon, Jeff Bezos worked at a quantitative Wall Street hedge fund. Name the firm.
D. E. Shaw. He was a senior vice president there before leaving to sell books online.
Question 6 of 22
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin first built their search engine as a Stanford project, what did they call it before it became Google?
BackRub. Named for how it analysed the web's back links.
Question 7 of 22
Reed Hastings usually gets the credit, but who co-founded Netflix with him and served as its first CEO?
Marc Randolph. He ran Netflix as its first CEO in the DVD-by-mail days.
Question 8 of 22
What was the very first video ever uploaded to YouTube in 2005, and where was it filmed?
Me at the zoo, filmed by co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo.
Question 9 of 22
Which was the first video to cross one billion views on YouTube?
Gangnam Style by PSY, in 2012. It briefly broke YouTube's view counter.
Question 10 of 22
In 2016 a DeepMind program beat world champion Lee Sedol at the board game Go. Name the program.
AlphaGo. Its move 37 in game two is still studied as inhumanly creative.
Question 11 of 22
Which science fiction author coined the word cyberspace, in his 1984 novel Neuromancer?
William Gibson. Neuromancer basically wrote the vocabulary of the internet before it existed.
Question 12 of 22
Everyone talks about the metaverse now, but the word was coined in a 1992 novel. Name the book and its author.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
Question 13 of 22
The 2016 film The Founder tells the origin story of which company, and which businessman does Michael Keaton play?
McDonald's, and he plays Ray Kroc, the salesman who scaled it into a franchise empire.
Question 14 of 22
In 1997 an IBM machine became the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion in a match. Name the machine and the champion.
Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov.
Question 15 of 22
Which 2014 film starring Benedict Cumberbatch dramatized Alan Turing cracking the Enigma code?
The Imitation Game.
Question 16 of 22
Steve Jobs ended his 2005 Stanford commencement speech with four words he borrowed from the final issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. What were they?
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Question 17 of 22
Elon Musk's AI chatbot is called Grok. The word grok comes from a science fiction novel and means to understand something completely. Which novel?
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.
Question 18 of 22
In Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her, Joaquin Phoenix's character falls in love with an AI operating system. What is the AI's name and who voices it?
Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
Question 19 of 22
In the TV series Mr. Robot, the giant conglomerate the hackers want to take down is nicknamed Evil Corp. What is its actual name in the show?
E Corp. The lead character literally hears and sees it as Evil Corp.
Question 20 of 22
In the 1983 film WarGames, a teenager nearly starts a nuclear war by connecting to a military AI. What is that computer system called?
The WOPR, which the game refers to as Joshua.
Question 21 of 22
When Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, roughly how much did it pay, making it one of the largest tech acquisitions ever at the time?
About 19 billion dollars.
Question 22 of 22
Which real-life billionaire founder appears as himself in a cameo in Iron Man 2, chatting with Tony Stark about an electric jet?