Last spring, Sweet Capital Partner Pippa Lamb accidentally auditioned for one of the hottest shows on television.
Her Instagram routinely showcases snippets from her life as an investor — travels, 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 sitting on investor panels. She responded that he should put her another one, this time on his show. She thought nothing of her comment, 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, with a laugh.
Season 3 of “Industry” focuses on the fictional bank Pierpoint preparing the energy company Lumi for an IPO. It dives into the conversion of ESG investing, blending the worlds — and drama — of tech, media, government, and finance. Down said while writing this season, he and co-creator Konrad Kay invented a character that was only described 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 type of investors would back a company involved in some ways with the British establishment. “Probably lots of older white guys,” Down told TechCrunch. But then, “we thought, ‘There’s probably gonna be like one young person in the room who might be a woman, who might not be white,’ and I was thinking, ‘Oh, that sounds like Pippa!’”
Lamb is now making a blink-you-might-miss-it quick two-episode cameo in Industry, playing herself as an investor in Lumi. Her cameos feature her on a podium during an IPO, and in a boardroom when things for the company go awry. “Walking onto the set, I was struck at the showrunners’ incredible attention to detail,” she said, adding that the production sets of the tech company “felt eerily like a regular day at work.”
She isn’t the only real-life person in the show: Amol Rajan, a BBC journalist, also appears as himself in the show during an interview. Blurring the lines between reality and fiction has always been a way to keep audiences engaged — “Entourage” did this with the entertainment industry, “Billions” did it with the New York food scene, and the “Gossip Girl” reboot did this with members of the New York media. It keeps audiences enthralled and helps set the shows in the realities they are trying to portray. Lamb, for example, had no acting experience, but said she did offer the wardrobe department tips on how to style tech people.
Actors would ask her for context and additional cues on how to mimic the founder-board member relationship. The style department would ask questions like if founders really wore Oura rings and if pre-IPO board members dressed differently from post-IPO board members. “I was impressed at their attention to detail,” she said. “No matter how small.”
The details were interesting for this show, especially trying to capture how nuanced tech founders are. Kay pointed out a small detail from the show: in the first episode the collar on Henry Muck’s shirt is a bit messed up and he said people picked up on that. “Those are deliberate costume choices about how, even though he was CEO, he a bit all over the place,” Kay told TechCrunch.
There were also some details that didn’t make it to the show. “When we meet personalities from finance and tech, they’re very open with us,” Kay said. “But you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff they tell us about their own little peccadilloes or personality traits. You’d think that it feels like something you would make up and then put on TV.”
The show “Industry” also follows another trend, one which now sees tech barons as the villains of the modern financial age. Decades ago, suited Wall Street men were the mysterious miscreants, causing destruction and breaking hearts wherever they went. Now, it’s all about tech moguls, mostly due to the fact that tech moguls are the frontier of change and they exist in an obscure bubble that the general population doesn’t quite understand or is somewhat nervous about, Down and Kay said. Season 1 and 2 of “Industry” focused much on the public markets, but season 3 is somewhat the beginning of the show’s dive into technology.
“We thought it was a bit strange at three seasons in, we’d 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 looked to build a founder. They were looking for a bit of satire, mixed in with realistic business drama. Down said that Henry Muck is more of a British tech archetype than an American one, which makes sense as the show is set in London rather than the Bay Area.
“He’s very particular to England,” Down said. “He’s incredibly well-educated, incredibly smart, privileged, with a sort of balance and huge safety net underneath him, which allows him to behave in a way where he can basically get away with everything, but also has this kind of huge insecurity based on the fact that he doesn’t think he’s living up to the expectations of his background.”
They thought about focusing the story on an app or software — but figured that something tech-adjacent, like the energy sector, would be much better. It also helped add to Henry Muck’s backstory, looking at the type of person who runs an ESG company, and looking at the dilemma a founder might find themselves in as they seek to balance purpose and shareholder profit. It’s the hazy line between delusion and ambition, Kay said.
Furthermore, they chose ESG because it has become such a hot topic these days, but the show leaves it up to the audience to decide their thoughts on ESG investing. The show touched on the tension between bottom lines and altruism, against care and corruption. “He says stuff like ‘I want to be reforming the industry for the better, but I also want to be making money,” Down added. “There’s all these things that he has to say to investors and he [that he also] has to say to the people who use the service.”
There were other commentaries on the current tech landscape — the employees sleeping in what resembles nap pods (with Harrington’s character commenting that he sleeps better under his desk), CEO temper tantrums, a former wonder-boy founder in jail, the tweet-rumor mills, and special requests for keto bread.
In a particularly apt moment, Yasmin, one of the analysts on the bank, tries calming an investor during a valuation dispute before the company’s hopeful IPO with a classic line: “Lumi is at the forefront of the democratization of the energy sector and —”
“Yeah, I keep hearing that and I still have no idea what it means,” the long-term investor responds.
There is no news on a season 4 just yet for “Industry” though. Down and Kay said that if there is a season 4, it’s inevitable they’ll keep going down the tech rabbit hole because technology has disrupted every sector. No word on whether Lamb will reprise her role either. For now, she said she has real-life companies to attend to through her work with Sweet Capital, so stay tuned.
