Soham Parekh secretly worked at multiple Silicon Valley startups at once

The startup founder said luck That Parev will ace early interviews, well-paid jobs and ghost employers when work begins.

They say that Parev came up with creative excuses for late or low quality work before discovering he worked at multiple high-tech companies at the same time. He was offered a salary of up to $200,000 a year with base pay from the founder.

The Saga began on Wednesday when Mix Panel co-founder and former CEO Suhail Doshi issued a warning about him. x.

“PSA: A man named Soham Parekh (India) works at a 3-4 startup at the same time. He has won YC companies and more. Be careful. I fired this guy in his first week and told him to lie/stop scams. I wrote it in a post by x.

The post was quickly flooded with replies from fellow founders with similar stories, including a few who claim to still have Parev on their pay.

Doshi shared the engineer’s resume in a follow-up postcited multiple companies, practical experience and master’s degrees in computer science at Georgia Tech. But the lab said luck In a statement that They “we couldn’t find a record of registration at Georgia Tech for someone by that name.”

In an interview with Daily Tech Show TBPNParev confirmed the claim that he had held back multiple jobs at the same time, saying, “I’m not proud of what I did. That’s not something I support either. But I really don’t like working 140 hours a week.

He added that he chose because he was “in a very bad financial situation.”

When contacted for comment, Parekh referenced luck “We’ve been working hard to make this statement,” he told Sanjit Juneja, founder and CEO of Darwin. “At Darwin, we focus on building the most innovative software products for both brands and content creators. Soham is a highly talented engineer and believes in the ability to bring products to the market.”

“He really crushed my interview.”

Arkadiy Telegin, co-founder of an AI startup, was not surprised to see the now-growing engineers trending on X as AI jumps.

Telegin said luck He made Parekh a job opening in April after being blown away by an engineer during the interview process.

“He really crushed my interview. I interviewed about 50 people two weeks before I spoke to him and he passed all the people I interviewed,” he said. “He was also a very likeable person.”

“I offered him a base fee of $160,000 to $200,000 a year, plus a shares ranging from about 0.7% to 1.1%. He chose the cash center and the stock center.” “I told him to come to San Francisco, but we can sign the paperwork.”

Telegin said Parekh was in the process of getting an O-1 visa. This is reserved for individuals with extraordinary abilities in science, arts, education, business or athletics, but he wanted to contribute remotely while he was still in India. However, shortly after the company had loaded him, Parev began behaving strangely.

“He wrote and wrote the code, and he was insanely late, and there was always these excuses like flooding and electricity, and then (Indo-Pakistan conflict) and he was far from the conflict,” Telegin said.

Parev tells Telegin that he is based in Mumbai, more than 1,000 miles from the battle near Jammu and Kashmir, but later on The drone claimed to have been damaged The building where he lived.

Telegin said he officially decided to pay him, assuming Parev is picking up some jobs on the side, and that the engineers officially decided to lock him up on a full-time employment agreement.

“If I pay him, it officially… I thought he was going to contribute and commit, but he never sent the bill. In the end, I didn’t transfer a single dollar to him.

Founders realize they are “dating the same guy”

A month later, when Telegin was visiting fellow founders of the Y-combinator cohort, the pair chatted about AI employment issues.

The war for AI talent is particularly tough for today’s startups as tech companies compete for a smaller pool of talent. Large tech companies are firing Eye-catching salarymaking it difficult for startups with less funds to compete.

“Employment is the biggest problem for YC companies, including us,” he said. “We’ve been chatting about the pain of employment, explaining who we’ve been talking to, and we started to explain to each other about Soham. And the next moment, “Wait, are we dating the same guy?”

Telegin then realizes that his friend is just the tip of the iceberg. Within his YC batch, Soham interviewed or collaborated with three other companies.

“It was just surreal… at a dinner event, someone would start saying, ‘Oh, I interviewed this cool guy and he crushed my interview.’ And those who tell the story are surprised.

“I don’t think anyone hired him with my batch,” he added. “But he was definitely paid to work trial.”

“Then the excuse began.”

Create co-founder Marcus Lowe has been taking part in payroll for around two weeks this year, as Parev is a full-time independent contractor. During that time, the engineer appeared in the office once and barely sent out the code.

“He’s a really strong engineer and he crushed the interview,” Lowe said. luck. “But a week before he was due to start, he texted us saying he had to go to New York to visit his sister and he needed to push the start date.”

“Then the day before he was supposed to start, he texted us saying he was feeling bad and couldn’t get in, so we pushed back the start date again,” he said.

“By this point, he had come to the office for a day and he had actually been two weeks late for doing a good job… and the excuse started again.”

Lowe had registered Parev as an independent contractor for a transaction that included five days of office work and a base fee of $150,000. Lowe saw him in the flesh for a day only.

Suspiciously, he went to Parev’s github profile for an investigation and saw that he committed the code to another San Francisco-based startup. He went to the office to ask if Parev worked there. He was told that the engineer did it, but he got sick.

“For a long time, we kept pushing him to come to the office, but he never again. In the end, we just gave him a performance conversation and told him you haven’t shipped enough code and you really need to deliver,” he said. Parekh never did and ended later.

Another Silicon Valley-based founder said luck He hired Parev for a job trial in 2024, but decided not to move forward with him after it became clear that he could not move to the US.

He also said there was a problem with his performance and one problem that led him to believe he was a habitual lie. He paid Parev $2,400 that week.

All Founders luck The engineer said he had heard of several other incidents where he had worked multiple jobs at once three years ago.

He too It looks like you have There was a short stint Meta 2021. Company representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment from luck.

In the post of x, Gergely Orosz, software engineer and author of the “The Pragmatic Engineer” newsletter, has confirmed (but lied) 10 companies that “Parev) have been hired and fired for nothing (but lying) interviewing him, many rejected.