A software engineer named Soham Parekh has gone viral after multiple tech startups discovered he was working for several of them at the same time. The situation came to light when Suhail Doshi, former CEO of Mixpanel, warned others in the industry in a post on X that Parekh had been juggling jobs at three to four startups. He said Parekh was based in India and had been "preying on" startups funded by Y Combinator, a startup accelerator. Other tech executives quickly shared similar stories, with some canceling scheduled interviews or trials after learning about Parekh's activities, NBC News reports.
Parekh admitted in a recent online interview that he was indeed working remotely at as many as four startups at once, sometimes earning between $30,000 to $40,000 a month. He attributed his actions to financial hardship, saying he endured long hours and little sleep by necessity, not by choice. He described himself as a "serial nonsleeper" who "doesn't do anything outside coding." Parekh denied rumors that he had a team secretly working for him or that he used AI tools to manage his workload. Employers described how Parekh would often miss meetings or workdays, citing illness or family visits, only to be found contributing code to other companies during those times.
Parekh said he had been juggling jobs in 2022 and had to defer graduate studies due to his financial situation. He said he now has a deal to work at "one company and one company only." Sanjit Juneja, founder of video remixing startup Darwin Studios, said Parekh is "an incredibly talented engineer and we believe in his abilities to help bring our products to market," per TechCrunch. On social media, people joked that Paresh was single-handedly holding up the world's tech infrastructure and replacing thousands of laid-off Microsoft employees, the Verge reports.
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