Halt and Catch Fire (2014 - 2017)
Halt and Catch Fire details the birth of the personal computer era, following a volatile group of builders, operators, coders, salespeople, and visionaries as they move from Texas hardware shops to Silicon Valley software, gaming and early powerhouses. It's a show about trying to invent the future while dragging unresolved ambition, insecurity, genius, ego, love, and loneliness into the work. What starts as a drama about cloning IBM's PC, becomes a cautionary tale regarding the costs required to build things before the world understands why they matter.
The show is unusually good at showing how ideas become companies, how companies become cultures, how culture becomes product, and how product becomes a vessel for people’s unmet needs. We also love that it leans into the value of tension: engineer versus storyteller, operator versus artist, ambition versus care, product vision versus market reality.
It is deeply Practica-coded because its central question is one we are constantly working through with clients: how do you turn vision into something people can actually use, love and understand? The space between invention and adoption, where narrative, systems, leadership, design, technology, and human behavior all collide, is where we're spending a majority of our time.
