You got into Y Combinator, raised $20 million from a16z, and then exited to Meta? That’s cool, I guess. But did Soham Parekh apply to work at your startup?
There is now a new badge of honor for startup founders: your proximity to one previously unknown Indian software engineer named Soham Parekh.
The Anna Delvey of Silicon Valley was outed on Wednesday when former Mixpanel CEO Suhail Doshi posted on X to warn fellow founders about Parekh.
“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 wrote. “I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying/scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later.”
Now, the post has over 20 million views, with founders and investors from across the tech industry weighing in. And before Andy Jassy asks — could this have all been avoided if more companies returned to the office? No, some people are just bad managers.
According to Doshi, at least three founders have reached out to say that they had fired or were currently employing Parekh.
In the age of subreddit communities like r/overemployed, where members talk about how to get away with working multiple remote jobs at once, this revelation isn’t all that surprising. What’s more interesting is how widely the responses to his actions vary (to be fair, no one ever said that the tech industry was known for its moral fiber).
To some in the tech community, Parekh has the makings of a folk hero, deceiving well-funded startups and sticking it to the man. To others, he’s an immoral liar who screwed over startups and took jobs away from people who actually would have given their all. Many are impressed by how he managed to get through so many notoriously competitive interview processes, while others think he should parlay his 15 minutes of fame into founding his own startup.
“If Soham immediately comes clean and says he was working to train an AI agent for knowledge work, he raises at $100M pre by the weekend,” Box CEO Aaron Levie wrote on X.
Chris Bakke — the founder of Laskie, a job-matching platform acquired by X — thinks that Soham should embrace his reputation.
