Soham Parekh, an India-based software engineer, has made headlines after admitting to moonlighting or secretly working at dozens of US startups simultaneously.
The controversy surfaced after entrepreneur Suhail Doshi, in a series of posts on X, called Parekh a “scammer” who had tricked several startups, including those backed by the Y Combinator accelerator.
"PSA: there’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He’s been preying on YC companies and more. Beware," San Francisco-based Suhail Doshi posted on X.
He added that Parekh worked briefly at one of his companies and was fired within his first week. It was later revealed that Parekh juggled roles at around 34 different companies, including Alan AI, Synthesia, DynamoAI and Union.ai, often with overlapping job periods.
Ever since the post on X went viral, more companies shared their story showing how Parekh turned up for a job interview and how he managed to fool them.
How Soham Parekh operated?
{{/usCountry}}Ever since the post on X went viral, more companies shared their story showing how Parekh turned up for a job interview and how he managed to fool them.
How Soham Parekh operated?
{{/usCountry}}Dhruv Amin, co-founder of AI startup Create, took to X to share the story of how his firm hired Soham Parekh as engineer number five and that he was recommended by a recruiter.
Parekh called in sick on the very first day of the job and said he would onboard from home, and gave his address to ship his laptop.
"Yes, we hired him. we're building an AI agent in SF. he was eng #5.- recommended by a recruiter, which lent legitimacy. He was eager and crushed our in person pair programming onsite. I believe he's actually a good engineer...I gave offer while waiting for responses for the first (and last) time...He accepted same evening. said he had an nyc trip planned, then would start...His first day at 9:30 am he calls in sick (strange). said he'd onboard from home. gave an address to ship laptop," Dhruv said in a post on X.
The first red flag, Dhruv said, was the shipping address. Instead of home, Parekh asked for his laptop to be shipped to a San Francisco office building.
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Dhruv, who happened to be on a visit to a doctor, checked the place, which housed industrial spaces and Sync Labs, a YC-backed startup. Meanwhile, Parekh called in sick in the first week, while his GitHub account showed late-night activity on private repositories.
Over the days, things got even weirder with Parekh missing meetings, delayed deliverables and made excuses.
"He then spent 2 days saying he was working on something from home we knew should have taken him 1/2 a day max. always almost ready, just testing something. Finally it started blocking the main thread. So my co-founder asked to take over his branch to get it done. Almost nothing had been done," Dhruv added.
When the firm found out that Soham was working for Sync Labs, they confronted him, only to get a denial. Eventually, when the co-founder called Sync Labs and asked if Soham was working there, the response from the YC company was that he was working from home that day.
Dhruv added that Parekh was a good engineer, but the "biggest mistake was lying repeatedly."
Soham Parekh responds
Soham Parekh, who is at the center of the online storm, has publicly admitted to working for multiple startups full-time.
Parekh said that the allegations against him were true and he did it due to his financial circumstances.
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“It is true. I’m not proud of what I’ve done. But, you know, financial circumstances, essentially. No one really likes to work 140 hours a week, right? But I had to do this out of necessity. I was in extremely dire financial circumstances," he said during an interview to tech show TBPN.
The controversy has raised concerns on the growing trend of 'overemployment' where people take multiple remote jobs without disclosing them. It has also raised concerns over the hiring culture, especially among the tech startups, that hire people without adequate background checks.