The two big questions for Silicon Valley startups at the moment: Did Mumbai-born Soham Parekh ever apply, and is he still working for any of them?
The charge against the software engineer is that he worked full-time for multiple startups simultaneously. Several startups came to know about his strategy only after Suhail Doshi, founder of the AI design tool Playground AI, posted a “public service announcement” on X on July 2.
He posted on X: “There’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He’s preying on YC companies and more. Beware.”
Doshi claims to have “fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying/ scamming people”. It appears that Parekh didn’t take his advice.
The post on the social media platform quickly attracted similar stories. Ben South, founder of Variant (a code generation tool), posted: “We interviewed this guy too, but caught this during references checks. Turns out he had 5-6 profiles each with 5+ places he actually worked at.”
Nicolai Ouporov, founder of Fleet AI, said: “He has been doing this for years and works at more than 4 startups at any given time.”
Flo Crivello, CEO of Lindy in San Francisco, a startup that helps people automate their workflows, said he hired Parekh in recent weeks, but fired him after Doshi’s post. “We hired this guy a week ago. Fired this morning. He did so incredibly well in interviews, must have a lot of training. Careful out there,” said Crivello.
Impressing all the startups has been Parekh’s CV, which Doshi has made public on X.
Parekh claims — in the CV posted by Doshi — he holds a BE in computer engineering from the University of Mumbai (August 2016 to May 2020) and an MS in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology (September 2020 to May 2022), and has knowledge of “deep learning, natural language processing, advanced operating systems, distributed computing, computer networks”.
He appears to have held a number of senior roles, mostly remote. It also means he wasn’t required to be in office. The CV says he was a senior software engineer (contract) at DynamoAI, starting January 2024, senior full stack engineer at Union.ai (remote) from January 2023 to January 2024, and a senior full stack engineer at Synthesia (remote) from December 2021 to December 2022. Apparently, he even participated in GitHub’s Open Source Fellowship during the summer of 2020.
Silicon Valley startup founders have accused Parekh of betraying the trust of employers who thought they were paying a dedicated, full-time employee.
A day after the drama unfolded on X, Parekh came forward with an interview with the daily tech show, TBPN. “I’m not proud of what I’ve done. That’s not something I endorse, either,” he said. “But no one really likes to work 140 hours a week, I had to do it out of necessity…. I was in extremely dire financial circumstances.”
Asked about his visits to the US, Parekh said: “I have family in the East Coast. The first time I ever visited the US was in 2018, and I was supposed to do grad school there. Different financial circumstances… couldn’t do that. I have visited America mostly for offsites to catch up with team members and things like that.”
He finally made his way to the US to study in 2020. Parekh has not revealed where he was based while working for multiple companies remotely.
He said he would “love to add colour” to Doshi’s allegation on X, but “that is true”.
Most of the startups have not questioned his skills. “People around me would probably say that I am notoriously known for not sleeping,” said Parekh.
He “plans to apologise to everyone”, and he doesn’t have to “resign” from any company at the moment.
During the pandemic, moonlighting became increasingly common, with many people working remotely.
In September-October 2022, Wipro fired 300 employees who were found to be moonlighting. The company’s chairman, Rishad Premji, posted on X in August 2022: “There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating — plain and simple.”