The ‘economically rational’ scammer who duped 19 startups into hiring him

Dhruv Amin, founder of AI-tool builder Create, was immediately blown away by Soham Parekh. 

Earlier this year, Amin was looking to hire the sixth member of his team, and was finding it tough to locate top-level engineering talent who would accept a low-for-Silicon Valley salary of roughly $150,000. But then in walked the twenty-something Parekh, who aced the in-person coding challenge at Create’s San Francisco office. 

“Oh, he was great,” Amin recalled. “He was a good engineer, really knowledgeable.”

Amin hired Parekh and announced the promising addition to the company in his monthly memo to investors. But then things started going wrong. 

Parekh called in sick the very first day, so Amin offered to ship Parekh’s work laptop to his apartment. To his surprise, the engineer didn’t give him an address for a residence, but rather for a co-working space about ten minutes away on Montgomery Street, where several Y Combinator-backed startups, including the AI lip-sync company Sync, happened to operate. 

Parekh finally showed up for two days in the office and then called in sick once more. Amin and his cofounder Marcus Lowe noticed that, on Parekh’s Github account, he was completing code for other projects. Eventually, Lowe decided he had had enough. He marched to the coworking space and asked anyone who would listen: “Is Soham Parekh here?” 

“No,” someone called out in response. “He’s working from home. He’s sick.”

It turned out that Parekh was working for Sync at the same time. Now Amin had a new investor memo to send out: they had to fire Parekh for working two jobs at once. “We felt like idiots,” he said. 

It was only this week that Amin realized that he wasn’t alone. “PSA: there’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time,” wrote Suhail Doshi, the founder of AI design company Playground, on X on Tuesday. “He’s been preying on YC companies and more. Beware.”

In the comments, dozens of founders told their own version of Surviving Soham, revealing a shockingly similar playbook: the Indian coder aced technical interviews, promised companies he was close to securing an O-1 visa, and then stopped showing up to the office or producing code remotely. He’s worked at least 19 jobs since 2021, according to SohamTracker, a database that sprang up in the aftermath of Doshi’s disclosure; he started at least five of those jobs in the last two months. 

The Standard spoke to five founders who interviewed Parekh, three of whom hired him. Many of the 15 companies that employed Parekh fired him within a few months of subpar work, usually after the prolific engineer had scored a handful of paychecks and, in at least one instance, a company laptop. 

The Standard reached out multiple times to the number and email listed on Parekh’s resume; he did not respond to requests for comment. On Thursday, Parekh went on the podcast TBPN, where he copped to the accusations and attributed his actions to “dire financial circumstances” and mental health struggles. “It was not more so out of greed, but essentially necessity,” he said. “I just thought that if I worked multiple places, I can basically help myself alleviate the situation I was in much faster.” 

“It’s very economically rational,” said podcast cohost John Coogan. 

More than a cautionary tale about mental health struggles, however, Parekh is as much a sign of our hustle-culture times. The subreddit r/overemployed has swelled to nearly half a million members, and every day, redditors post stories about secretly balancing two or three remote jobs. Researcher Yegor Denisov-Blanch, who studies software engineering productivity at Stanford University, said that, out of the 100,000 engineer coding portfolios he has access to, he’s personally found at least 50 engineers who are working full-time at two different companies.  

Most self-identified overemployees target remote jobs in large companies. Parekh, however, took a more challenging route, purposefully eschewing big tech jobs for scrappy, code-all-night startup gigs. He scoured Y Combinator’s job postings for smaller companies, many of which required him to work in-person — a bizarre choice for someone trying to balance multiple jobs at once. Parekh told TBPN it was about choosing jobs he “actually cared about.” 

The spurned companies offered a different perspective on Parekh’s shenanigans. “It’s a playbook,” said one founder who hired the engineer for four months before firing him. “He knows early-stage companies are desperate for various top engineers, and the founders are extremely distracted because they’re trying to build a company.”  

On the podcast, Parekh maintained he’s not a con artist. “I don’t really care much about the money,” he said. “I was really into it for building.”

Parekh’s resume paints him as a pitch-perfect startup employee. 

According to a C.V. submitted to at least two companies, Parekh graduated from the University of Mumbai in 2020 with a degree in computer engineering; completed stints as an intern at Amazon and Google; and earned a master’s degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. (It is unclear if he actually completed the internships. The Standard reached out to both universities to confirm Parekh’s enrollment. Neither school has responded.) 

One early-stage founder, who requested to remain anonymous, said he was floored by Parekh’s application when he first saw it last year. If someone with these kinds of credentials comes across your desk, the founder said, “that’s somebody you’re going to at least try out.” 

To land jobs, Parekh had an ever-shrinking list of people willing to act as references. One person, Divyansh Chaurasia, said he worked with him at Alan.ai. “I was always nice to him, because I felt he’s a good guy going through a lot,” Chaurasia explained. Chaurasia provided over ten reference calls for Parekh, before getting frustrated in March and declining to do any more. 

For at least two of the US-based jobs Parekh landed, he came into the office for a few days to a week before disappearing. For one of the companies, he said he went back to India. He gave a variety of excuses to explain why he could no longer be in-person or why he wasn’t delivering on deadlines. He told one founder his grandmother had died — then later that his fiancée had left him. In May, he told another founder that he was stuck in the crossfire between India and Pakistan that was triggered by a terrorist attack in Kashmir. 

“Also fyi they shot a drone in the air near my house 10 mins away,” Parekh wrote on Slack to Leaping AI cofounder Arkadiy Telegin, insinuating that he lived near the conflict. Meanwhile, Mumbai, where Parekh appears to be based, is over 1200 miles from Kashmir and was unaffected by the attacks.

Now that Parekh’s identity is widely known in the Valley, some are calling for formal punishment. “Please report him to US immigration as he abused his visa status to work under b1/b2 and for scamming the US startups,” Chaurasia wrote in an email to The Standard. 

On the TBPN podcast, Parekh assured the hosts that he had already landed on his feet and was working with an AI video company called Darwin. “This is the only thing I’m going to focus on,” he said. “They’ve put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove.” 

Sanjit Juneja, the founder of Darwin, confirmed Parekh’s employment: “Soham is an incredibly talented engineer and we believe in his abilities to help bring our products to market,” he said in a written statement. 

Like so many talented, if controversial, figures in Silicon Valley, Parekh is getting his second chance. But the damage to the overall startup ecosystem might already be done. “After the Soham saga, pretty sure very few YC startups will hire remote Indians,” wrote Varunram Ganesh, head of growth at payroll platform Warp, on X.  “Classic case of one guy exploiting a high-trust society, which leads to downfall of all the others around him.” 

Create’s Amin, who is American-Indian himself, said that Parekh “did unfortunately color our opinion a little bit” of candidates based in India who might need a visa sponsorship. Within a few months of firing Parekh, Amin decided to hire an Indian engineer who was waiting on his H1-B visa. The candidate ended up being legitimate, and the visa process went smoothly. 

But, as they waited for the visa confirmation, a Parekh-induced paranoia set in. “We were just like, we really hope this is real and goes through and it isn’t a fake again,” he said. “Because if this is fake, we’re going to get crushed.”