You bought into Y Combinator, raised $20 million from a16z, after which exited to Meta? That’s cool, I assume. However did Soham Parekh apply to work at your startup?
There may be now a brand new badge of honor for startup founders: your proximity to 1 beforehand unknown Indian software program 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 man named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups on the identical time. He’s been preying on YC firms and extra. Beware,” Doshi wrote. “I fired this man in his first week and informed him to cease mendacity/scamming folks. He hasn’t stopped a 12 months later.”
Now, the publish has over twenty million views, with founders and buyers from throughout the tech trade weighing in. And earlier than Andy Jassy asks — might this have all been averted if extra firms returned to the workplace? No, some individuals are simply unhealthy managers.
In accordance with Doshi, not less than three founders have reached out to say that they’d fired or had been at the moment using Parekh.
Within the age of subreddit communities like r/overemployed, the place members discuss the way to get away with working a number of distant jobs without delay, this revelation isn’t all that stunning. What’s extra attention-grabbing is how extensively the responses to his actions fluctuate (to be truthful, nobody ever mentioned that the tech trade was recognized for its ethical fiber).
To some within the tech neighborhood, Parekh has the makings of a people hero, deceiving well-funded startups and sticking it to the person. To others, he’s an immoral liar who screwed over startups and took jobs away from individuals who truly would have given their all. Many are impressed by how he managed to get by so many notoriously aggressive interview processes, whereas others suppose he ought to parlay his fifteen minutes of fame into founding his personal startup.
“If Soham instantly comes clear and says he was working to coach an AI agent for information work, he raises at $100M pre by the weekend,” Field CEO Aaron Levie wrote on X.
Chris Bakke — the founding father of Laskie, a job-matching platform acquired by X — thinks that Soham ought to embrace his repute.
“Soham Parekh wants to begin an interview prep firm. He’s clearly one of many best interviewers of all time,” Bakke wrote. “He ought to publicly acknowledge that he did one thing unhealthy and course appropriate to the factor he’s high 1% at.”
In the meantime, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan took the chance to pat himself on the again.
“With out the YC neighborhood this man would nonetheless be working and would have possibly by no means been caught,” Tan wrote. “The startup guild of YC is a obligatory invention to assist founders be extra profitable than they’d be alone.”
Why did he do it? Parekh says that this wasn’t a part of some grand plan — he claims he had no plan in any respect, and he was making an attempt to make some huge cash in a short time to get himself out of a nasty monetary scenario.
“I actually didn’t suppose this by,” Parekh mentioned in a reside interview with TBPN. “It was an motion that was accomplished extra out of desperation.”
Parekh didn’t deal with Doshi’s allegation that the majority of his resume was faux.
“What’s additionally humorous is, you realize, among the memes,” he mentioned. “I’m very new to Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday, so this was a lesson for me in social media basically.” (Twitter has lengthy been referred to as X, after all.)
You don’t have at hand it to him, however he’s a fairly good poster for somebody who’s been on the platform for a day. Considered one of his few posts was a response to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who requested what folks suppose Parekh’s LinkedIn header can be.
“I don’t have a LinkedIn,” Parekh replied.
For what it’s price, his X header is on the cash, even when he gained’t trouble with LinkedIn. It’s the meme of Flynn Rider from the Disney film “Tangled” — a smug-looking man about to state a controversial opinion, surrounded by knives on all sides.