Anika Begay
Last spring, Sweet Capital partner Pippa Lamb accidentally auditioned for one of the hottest TV shows of the moment.
Her Instagram regularly features snippets of her life as an investor: travel, another event, another dinner, another panel. One day, her old Oxford classmate Mickey Down, co-creator of the HBO show “Industry,” jokingly called her out for always appearing on investor panels. She responded that she should do another one, this time on her show. She didn’t think the comment through, but the next thing she knew, she was recording a self-tape for the casting department. “I formally auditioned for the cameo,” Lamb told TechCrunch, laughing.
Season 3 of “Industry” focuses on the fictional bank Pierpoint as it prepares energy company Lumi for an IPO. It dives into the ESG investment conversion, blending the worlds (and drama) of tech, media, government and finance. Down said that while writing this season, he and co-creator Konrad Kay came up with a character who was described only as a “young VC investor.”
They created the company Lumi, founded by Kit Harrington’s character Henry Muck, who comes from a blue-blooded British family. Down and Kay wondered what kind of investors would back a company that was somehow involved with the British establishment. “Probably a lot of older white men,” Down told TechCrunch. But then, “we thought, ‘There’s probably a young person in the room who might be a woman, who might not be white,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds like Pippa!’”
Lamb is now making a quick two-episode cameo in Industry, which you might want to miss, in which she plays herself as an investor in Lumi. Her cameos feature her at a podium during an IPO and in a boardroom when things go south for the company. “Walking on set, I was struck by the incredible attention to detail the showrunners had,” she said, adding that the tech company’s production sets “felt eerily like a normal work day.”
He’s not the only real person on the show: Amol Rajan, a BBC journalist, also appears on the show during an interview. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction has always been a way to keep audiences engaged: “Entourage” did it with the entertainment industry, “Billions” did it with the New York food scene, and the “Gossip Girl” reboot did it with members of the New York media. It keeps audiences enthralled and helps ground shows in the realities they’re trying to portray. Lamb, for example, had no acting experience, but said he offered the wardrobe department advice on how to dress tech people.
Actors asked her for context and additional insights on how to mimic the founder-board member relationship. The style department asked questions like whether founders actually wore Oura rings and whether pre-IPO board members dressed differently than post-IPO board members. “I was struck by their attention to detail,” she said. “No matter how small.”
The details were interesting for this show, especially in trying to capture how nuanced tech founders are. Kay pointed out one small detail from the show: Henry Muck’s shirt collar is a little messed up in the first episode, and she said people noticed. “Those are deliberate costume choices about how, even though he was CEO, he was kind of all over the place,” Kay told TechCrunch.
There were also some details that didn’t make it into the show. “When we meet people in finance and technology, they’re very open with us,” Kay said. “But you wouldn’t believe some of the things they tell us about their little peccadilloes or personality traits. You’d think it sounded like something you could make up and put on TV.”
“Industry” also follows another trend, which now casts tech moguls as the villains of the modern financial age. Decades ago, the men in suits on Wall Street were the mysterious evildoers, causing havoc and breaking hearts wherever they went. Now, it’s all about tech moguls, mostly because tech moguls are the frontier of change and exist in a dark bubble that the general population doesn’t quite understand or are a little nervous about, Down and Kay said. Seasons 1 and 2 of “Industry” focused heavily on the public markets, but Season 3 is kind of the beginning of the show’s deep dive into tech.
“We thought it was a little strange, after three seasons we had never done an IPO,” Down said, adding that most people, regardless of what they know about business, know what an IPO is.
Down and Kay then tried to create a founder. They were looking for a bit of satire mixed with a realistic corporate drama. Down said Henry Muck is more of a British tech archetype than an American one, which makes sense since the show is set in London rather than the Bay Area.
“He’s very unique to England,” Down said. “He’s incredibly educated, incredibly intelligent, privileged, with a sort of poise and a huge safety net underneath him that allows him to behave in a way where he can basically get away with anything, but he also has this sort of huge insecurity based on the fact that he doesn’t think he can live up to the expectations of his background.”
They considered focusing the story on an app or software, but thought something adjacent to technology, like the energy sector, would be much better. It also helped add to Henry Muck’s backstory, examining the kind of person who runs an ESG company and the dilemma a founder might find themselves in as they balance purpose and shareholder profit. It’s the fine line between delusion and ambition, Kay said.
They also chose ESG because it’s become a very hot topic these days, but the show leaves it up to the audience to decide what they think about ESG investing. The show touched on the tension between profits and altruism, versus care and corruption. “He says things like, ‘I want to reform the industry for the better, but I also want to make money,'” Down added. “There are all these things he has to say to investors and he [that he also] has to say to the people who use the service.”
There were other comments about the current tech landscape: employees sleeping in what appear to be nap pods (with Harrington’s character commenting that he sleeps better under his desk), CEO tantrums, a former wunderkind founder in prison, tweet-tipping windmills, and special requests for keto bread.
In a particularly apt moment, Yasmin, one of the bank’s analysts, tries to calm an investor during a dispute over the valuation before the company’s hoped-for IPO with a classic phrase: “Lumi is at the forefront of the democratization of the energy sector and…”
“Yes, I keep hearing that and I still have no idea what it means,” replies the long-term investor.
There’s no word yet on a Season 4 for “Industry.” Down and Kay said that if there is a Season 4, it’s inevitable that they’ll continue to go down the tech rabbit hole because technology has disrupted every industry. There’s also no word on whether Lamb will reprise his role. For now, he said he has real companies to cover through his work with Sweet Capital, so stay tuned.
