Recently, numerous stories have surfaced on social media about encounters with Soham Parekh, a software engineer who appears to have been working simultaneously at multiple Silicon Valley startups without the companies’ knowledge over the past few years.
The question remains: who is Parekh, how did he manage to have a career as a serial moonlighter, and what is it about him that has captivated Silicon Valley?
Origins of Virality
The story began when Suhail Doshi, CEO of the image generation startup Playground AI, shared a post on X warning about Soham Parekh, stating that he works at 3-4 startups simultaneously and has been targeting YC companies.
Doshi claimed that he had fired Parekh from Playground AI about a year ago after discovering that he was working at other companies. Despite being told to stop lying and scamming people, Parekh allegedly continued his behavior.
Doshi’s post received nearly 20 million views and prompted several other founders to share their own experiences with Parekh.
Flo Crivello, CEO of Lindy, a startup that automates workflows with AI, said he had recently hired Parekh but fired him after seeing Doshi’s tweet.
Matt Parkhurst, CEO of Antimetal, a startup using AI to reduce cloud spending, confirmed that Parekh was their first engineering hire in 2022. However, they quickly let him go after discovering he was working at multiple companies.
Parekh also seems to have worked at Sync Labs, a startup making an AI lip-synching tool, where he even appeared in a promotional video before being let go.
Additionally, Parekh applied to several Y Combinator-backed startups, including Pally AI and Mosaic, with one of the founders noting that Parekh was very pro-equity versus salary during the hiring process.
It appears that Parekh performed exceptionally well in many interviews, receiving offers due to his exceptional software engineering skills.
Rohan Pandey, a founding research engineer at YC-backed Reworkd, shared that Parekh was a strong candidate during the interview process but raised suspicions when he claimed to be in the U.S. while his IP address showed he was in India.
Other companies, including Agency and Cluely, also interviewed Parekh and were impressed by his technical abilities, but ultimately did not hire him
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