Dan O’Keefe on the founding of Festivus and secrets of HBO’s Silicon Valley - a podcast by Gregory Galant

It’s a special holiday edition of Venture Voice, and the holiday we’re celebrating is Festivus. You may know it from the hit TV series Seinfeld, where the holiday “for the rest of us” is featured in the episode “The Strike” as an invention of George’s dad, Frank. Festivus was, in fact, invented by someone’s dad, but as you’ll hear in this episode, it wasn’t George Costanza’s; it was Seinfeld writer Dan O’Keefe’s. Dan shares how he reluctantly turned a family holiday memory he’d long tried to repress into one of Seinfeld’s most iconic episodes. At the time, he wasn’t convinced it would be well received. “It was embarrassing to me and seemed insane and not in a good, quirky TV way but in, like, a sad creepy dysfunctional way,” he shares. And yet, not only was that episode a hit with audiences, decades later, the holiday lives on. In preparing for the interview, I looked up media mentions for Festivus in our Muck Rack software and found over 3,000 articles have mentioned it in the past 12 months alone.

Also in this episode, Dan shares some insider details from his time writing for HBO’s Silicon Valley, where he interviewed start-up founders and entrepreneurs as part of his research. The year the show premiered, HBO sponsored The Shorty Awards, which I co-founded and run, and they invited us to watch the pilot. I remember watching it and thinking, this is so good — it’s so accurate and incisive. After talking with Dan about their research process, I now understand just why it was so realistic. To nail down the Silicon Valley culture, the writers piled into vans and visited various tech companies, where they hit up founders, executives, engineers and VCs for stories. Coincidentally, among those Dan talked with were a couple of past Venture Voice guests, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and my first guest on the podcast, the very funny Dick Costolo, then CEO of FeedBurner.

According to Dan, a large percentage of the original Festivus was spent on airing grievances. I’m sure that’s something we can all get into as 2020 comes to a close. But you could probably also use a break about now, so tune in — I think you’re going to have a lot of fun with this one. Happy Festivus!

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Learn more about Muck Rack at muckrack.com and The Shorty Awards at shortyawards.com

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