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A software -engineer called Soham Parekh Admittedly, he secretly held several jobs in the Startups of Silicon Valley at the same time and earned offers from a maximum of $ 200,000 before they deliver minimal work. After a viral post, the Saga started by the former CEO of Mixpanel accused him of lighting up YC-Financed companies. Startup founders say that Parekh has considered interviews, fake references and wanted to apologize – ranging from drone – attacks to visa issues – before they disappear. Allegedly at least 10 companies hired and fired him because he was lying and under performance.
A single software engineer has become the most hired person in Silicon Valley. The engineer, Soham Parekh, has admitted that he had worked on several Silicon Valley startups on several emerging Silicon Valley after he went viral on social media.
Startup -founders told Fortune That Parekh would go early interviews, jobs in landing and then ghost workers land when the work began.
They say that Parekh came up with creative apologies for work or of poor quality, before they discovered that he was working for multiple technology companies at the same time. He had offered salaries up to $ 200,000 a year in basic compensation by founders.
The Saga started on Wednesday when Suhail Doshi, co-founder and former CEO of Mixpanel, a warning about him on X.
“PSA: There is a man named Soham Parekh (in India) who at the same time works at 3-4 startups. He hunted YC companies and more. Be it. I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying / rising people.
The post was quickly flooded with answers from fellow founders with similar stories, including some who claimed to still have Perekh on their payroll.
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Doshi shared the CV of the engineer in a follow -up postThose several companies, work experience and a master’s degree mentioned from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Computer Science. However, the institute told Fortune in a statement That They were “unable to find a registration of registration with Georgia Tech for a person with that name.”
In an interview about the Daily Tech Show TBPN, Parekh confirmed the claims that he held several jobs at the same time and said: “I am not proud of what I did. That is not something that I endorse. But nobody really keeps from 140 hours a week, I had to do it out of necessity.”
He added that he made the choice because he was ‘in extremely terrible financial circumstances’.
When he was reached for comment, Parekh referred Fortune To Sanjit Juneja, founder and CEO of Darwin, who shared this explanation: “At Darwin we are only aimed at building the most innovative software products for both brands and content makers. Soham is an incredibly talented engineer and we believe in his capacities to put our products on the market.”
“He really crushed my interview”
Arkadiy Telegin, co-founder of AI Startup Spring ai, was not surprised when he saw that the now notorious engineer was trending on X.
Telegin told Fortune He had made Parekh a vacancy in April after he had been blown away by the engineer in the interview process.
“He really crushed my interview. In the past two weeks I interviewed about 50 people before I talked to him and he passed by far all the people I interviewed,” he said. “He was also a very sympathetic person.”
“I offered him a salary range of $ 160,000 to $ 200,000 a year basic compensation plus equity, ranging from around 0.7% to 1.1%, he chose the center of the money and the center of equity,” Telegin said. “I told him to come to San Francisco and we could sign the papers.”
Telegin told him that he told him that he was busy getting his O-1 visa-a kind of visa reserved for people who have extraordinary capacity in sciences, art, education, business or athletics, but wanted to contribute remotely while he was still in India. However, almost immediately after the company brought it on board, Parekh began to behave strangely.
“He produced and wrote code, but he was incredibly slow. And there were always these apologies such as a flood or the electricity went out, and then it happened (Indo-Pakistan conflict)-but he was so far away from the conflict,” Telegin said.
Parekh had told Telegin that he was located in Mumbai, more than a thousand miles away from the fighting near Jammu and Kashmir, but later claimed that a drone had damaged the building in which he lived.
Telegin said that he hired that Parekh had picked up some work on the side and decided to pay him formally for his time, with the aim of exclusively locking the engineer with a formally full -time employment contract that he would sign when he arrived in San Francisco, where the role was full -time, in the office.
“I thought if I pay him, it is official … he will contribute and commit, but he never sent an invoice. In the end I did not transfer it any dollars, which is the most confusing part of all this, because other people seem to have paid him.”
Founders realize that they ‘express the same man’
A month later, when Telegin visited a colleague founder of his Y Combinator -cohort, the couple touched their AI -in -house misery.
The war for AI Talent is currently especially difficult for startups, because technology companies compete for an ever -small pool of talent. Large technology companies have eye-water salaries, making it difficult for startups with fewer funds to compete.
“Hiring is the biggest problem for every YC company, including us and in the field of them,” he said. “We talked about our recruiting pains while we describe people with whom we spoke with, and then we started to both describe Soham against each other. When the next moment was:” Wait, do we go with the same man? “”
Later Telegin realized that his friend was only the tip of the iceberg. Within his YC -Batch, Soham had interviewed or worked three other companies.
“It was just surreal … At some dinner events, someone would start to say:” Oh, I interviewed this cool guy, he crushed my interview “and then people would say at the same time,” Oh, is it Soham? ” And then the person who tells the story would be crazy, because what the hell is going on?
“I don’t think someone hired him in my batch,” he added. “But he was definitely paid for work tests.”
‘Then the apologies started’
Marcus Lowe, co-founder of Create, also had Perekh about two weeks earlier this year on the payroll as a full-time independent contractor, in which the engineer appeared one in the office and shifted almost no code.
“He is just a really strong engineer and he has crushed the interview,” said Lowe Fortune. “But about a week before he was planned to start, he texted us to go to New York to visit his sister and push the start date.”
“When the day before he had to start, he texted us that he felt sick and was unable to come in, so we pushed the start date back,” he said.
“At this point it was actually two weeks late before he came to the office for a day and he did a good job … Then the apologies started again.”
Lowe had signed Parekh as an independent contractor in a deal with five days in the office and a basic compensation of $ 150,000. Lowe only saw him in the meat for one day.
Suspicious he went to the Github profile of Parekh to investigate, saw that he had committed code for another startup in San Francisco. He went to the offices to ask if Parekh worked there. He was told that the engineer did, but was sick.
“To make a long story short, we continued to encourage him to get to the office, but he never did it again. In the end we just gave him a performance interview and said you don’t send enough code, we need you to actually deliver,” he said. Parekh never did and was terminated later.
Another founder from Silicon Valley told Fortune He hired Parekh for a work process in 2024, but decided not to continue with him after it became clear that he could not move to the US.
He also said there were problems with his performance and a series of what he was going to believe were habit lies. He paid Parekh $ 2,400 for the week.
All founders Fortune said they had heard of several other incidents where the engineer worked more than one job at the same time, some as long as three years ago.
He also seems to have had a short period at Meta in 2021. Representatives of the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
In a message about X, Gergely Orosz, a software engineer and author of the newsletter “the pragmatic engineer”, that he had “confirmed 10 companies where (purekh) was adopted and fired because he did nothing (but to lie against them.) And another 8 who interviewed him but who have displayed him a lot, much more.”
This story was originally visible on Fortune.com
