Richard Hendricks

Richard Hendricks is the main protagonist of the comedy series .
He is a software developer and designer, responsible for creating the Pied Piper app and algorithm that the series revolves around.
He is portrayed by , who plays Penn Zero in , Harold Hutchins in , Sam Coleman in , and Keith in .
==Personality==
Richard is shy, socially awkward, and weak-willed, and does not have much of a temper, but when he finally reaches his limit, is prone to intimidating explosions of anger. Despite this, he is a talented coder proficient in many programming languages. He also doesn't understand sarcasm.
He is constantly struggling with the demands of the business world, preferring instead to disappear into the coding of his application, but realizes that as CEO he must do more, which is why he turns to his coworkers and allies, particularly Monica and Jared, for guidance.
==Background==
Richard Hendricks was born in Oklahoma. He went to Stanford University, but dropped out after a semester.
Richard invented and built the start-up Pied Piper, a program designed to find music matches, while working for tech giant Hooli and living at Erlich Bachman's hacker hostel alongside his best friend Nelson "Big Head" Bighetti and fellow geeks Dinesh and Gilfoyle. After overhearing the name "Pied Piper" during a Hooli board meeting, Jared Dunn comes to the house and asks Richard if he can join in and leave Hooli, despite his negative reception by the rest of the guys.
Pied Piper’s compression algorithm, while initially made by accident, triggered a bidding war between Peter Gregory and his company Raviga and Hooli, led by Gavin Belson. Due to Peter seeing himself in Richard, and making the better offer, Richard made the choice to be funded by Raviga, and Erlich promotes him to CEO.
After winning the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon at the end of the first season, and receiving more funding from investors, Richard is even more determined to make Pied Piper a company different from Hooli. After winning the competition, Richard is more determined to put Pied Piper's name on the map - constantly making new applications for his algorithm like a videochat and artificial intelligence, but his poor people skills, unpredictable-but-frequent mood swings, and lack of business training make him a poor CEO - and he constantly gets into spats with other people for small reasons as a result.
At the end of the series, after exposing Gavin Belson for creating a company based in lies and exposing his idea of "tethics"  (tech ethics) as being plagiarized, as well as Pied Piper going bankrupt, Richard is employed as a professor of Technology & Society at Stanford University, on Big Head's recommendation.
==Trivia==
*T.J. Miller, who played Erlich, initially auditioned to play Richard.
*Mike Judge, the series' creator, claims that Richard is partially based on Mark Zuckerberg. This is made evident in the press conference during the sixth season's premiere episode, a parody of Zuckerberg's "data hacking" conference. 
*It is constantly joked about in the series that Richard and Jared are gay, due to Jared's poor choice of words in describing their friendship.
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