Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups can't stop hiring?
But who is Parekh, how did he pull off his career as a serial moonlighter, and why can't Silicon Valley get enough of him?
The saga all started when Suhail Doshi — CEO of image generation startup Playground AI — shared a post Tuesday on X that began: '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.'
Doshi claims that, roughly a year ago, he fired Parekh from Playground AI after he found out he was working at other companies. '[I] told him to stop lying/scamming people. He hasn't stopped a year later,' Doshi wrote.
That post from Doshi received roughly 20 million views and prompted several other founders to share their run-ins with Parekh as well.
Flo Crivello, the CEO of Lindy, a startup that helps people automate their workflows with AI, said he hired Parekh in recent weeks, but fired him in light of Doshi's tweet.
Matt Parkhurst, the CEO of Antimetal, a startup that does automated cloud management, confirmed that Parekh was the company's first engineering hire in 2022. Parkhurst tells TechCrunch that Antimetal let Parekh go in early 2023 after they realized he was moonlighting at other companies.
Parekh also seems to have worked at Sync Labs, a startup that makes an AI lip-synching tool, where he even starred in a promotional video. He was ultimately let go.
At some point, Parekh applied to several Y Combinator-backed startups. Haz Hubble, the co-founder of Pally AI, a Y Combinator-backed startup building an 'AI relationship management platform,' says he offered Parekh a founding engineer role. Adish Jain, the co-founder of YC-backed Mosaic — an AI video editing startup — said he interviewed Parekh for a role, too.
TechCrunch has reached out to these companies for comment, but they did not immediately respond.
It turns out that Parekh did quite well in many of these interviews and received offers, largely because he's a gifted software engineer.
For instance, Rohan Pandey, a founding research engineer of the YC-backed startup Reworkd, told TechCrunch that he interviewed Parekh for a role and he was a strong candidate. Pandey, who is no longer with the startup, says Parekh was one of the top three performers on an algorithms-focused interview they gave candidates.
Pandey said the Reworkd team suspected something was off with Parekh. At the time, Parekh told Reworkd he was in the U.S. — a requirement for the job — but the company didn't believe him. They ran an IP logger on a Zoom link from Parekh and located him in India.
Pandey recalled other things Parekh said often didn't add up, and some of his GitHub contributions and previous roles didn't quite make sense either. That seems to be a common experience when dealing with Parekh.
Adam Silverman, co-founder of the AI agent observability startup, Agency, told TechCrunch his company also interviewed Parekh. Silverman said Parekh sent him a cold DM about a job opening at Agency, and they set up a meeting. Parekh had to reschedule that meeting five times, according to Silverman and emails from Parekh viewed by TechCrunch.
Silverman says he was also impressed by Parekh's technical ability, but in the interview, he insisted on working remotely. Much like with Reworkd, that was a red flag for Agency.
Roy Lee, the CEO of the 'cheat on everything' AI startup, Cluely, tells TechCrunch he interviewed Parekh twice for a role. Lee said Parekh interviews quite well and 'seemed to have strong react knowledge,' referencing a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
Lee says Cluely did not end up hiring Parekh. However, several other companies clearly did.
Parekh made an appearance on the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) on Thursday to tell co-hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays his side of the story and explain why he's worked at so many companies.
He admitted that he's been working at multiple jobs simultaneously since 2022. Parekh claims he was not using AI tools or hiring junior software engineers to assist him with his workload.
All that work has made Parekh a much better programmer, he believes, but notes that it's taken a toll.
Parekh said he's notorious among his friends for not sleeping. He repeated several times throughout the interview that he works 140 hours a week, which comes out to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. That seems to be borderline impossible — or at the very least, extremely unhealthy and unsustainable.
Parekh also said he took multiple jobs because he was in 'financial jeopardy,' implying he needed all the income he could get from his various employers. He claims he deferred going to a graduate school program he had been accepted to, and instead decided to work at several startups simultaneously.
Notably, Doshi shared a copy of Parekh's resumé that claims he received a masters degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.
When TBPN's co-hosts asked why Parekh didn't just ask one company to raise his salary and help with his financial struggles, Parekh said he liked to keep a boundary between his professional and private life. (But he had also opted for low salaries and high equity at all his jobs, which doesn't quite add up with his financial crisis story. However, Parekh declined to share more about it.)
Parekh told the hosts he genuinely loved his work, and it was not solely about the money. He says he was very invested in the missions of all the companies where he worked.
He also admitted that he's not proud of what he's done, and he doesn't endorse it.
Some are calling Parekh a scam artist and a liar, but in classic Silicon Valley fashion, Parekh appears to be trying to turn his viral moment into a business.
Parekh announced his newest employer, which he claims to be exclusively working at: Darwin Studios, a startup working on AI video remixing.
However, Parekh quickly deleted the post after announcing it, as did the founder and CEO of the startup, Sanjit Juneja.
TechCrunch has reached out to Parekh requesting an interview regarding this article, however, he has not yet accepted. Instead, a spokesperson representing him sent TechCrunch a statement from Darwin's CEO.
'Soham is an incredibly talented engineer and we believe in his abilities to help bring our products to market,' said Juneja.
We've seen countless startups turn their viral, often controversial, moments into businesses in the last year. One of the most famous is Cluely, which is known for creating provocative marketing campaigns. It's rage bait, but it's attention-grabbing, and it was enough to land Cluely a $15 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz.
Perhaps Parekh will land a similar fortune in the future.
Update: This story has been updated to reflect TBPN's current name and include additional comments from Antimetal.
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