3. Intellectual Property

Complete story — includes the ending

Gavin Belson is fired following the disastrous acquisition of PiperChat. He is replaced by Jack Barker, who has found a way to avoid the COPPA fines. During Jian-Yang's pitch, Erlich convinces venture capitalists that Jian-Yang's app is actually a " Shazam for food". He hires Dinesh to help write a demo. Monica tricks Raviga's new rising star, Ed Chen, into making a sight-unseen offer for the app, but Chen quickly finds out that there is no product after speaking to Jian-Yang. As revenge, Chen has Monica put in charge of the investment. Big Head applies to Stanford University; he is rejected for enrollment, but the admissions officer invites him to be a guest lecturer based on his name recognition and executive experience. Meanwhile, Richard learns from Monica that Peter Gregory thought of a decentralized Internet in the 1990s, and gains access to his archives. He finds Gregory came to the same conclusions, but the compression wasn't good enough back then. Richard then realizes that this is the best manifestation for his compression algorithm. However, Richard discovers that the new Internet idea was patented by Gavin Belson when he was founding Hooli with Gregory and others.