Indian techie Soham Parekh, who has been accused of frauding US companies by working in several companies at the same time, owned up to what he did and said he did that out of dire fiancial circumstances. In TBPN’s show, Parekh, who worked in multiple US companies lying to them about his location, admitted that the allegations against him are true but he is not proud of what he has done. “I’m not proud of what I’ve done. That’s not something I endorse either. But no one really likes to work 140 hours a week. I had to do it out of necessity. I was in extremely dire financial circumstances,” Parekh said in the interview. “I’m not a very people person. I don’t share much about what’s going on in my life. So I just thought: if I work multiple places, maybe I can elevate myself out of the situation faster,” he said.
‘I was decent enough, a good enough engineer’
In his first interview amid the major moonlighting controversy, he said he likes to believe that he was decent enough, a good enough engineer, to essentially be able to work at three places because that’s the only thing he did the entire day. “Some of these companies I worked at were before the Co-Pilot boom. There was no AI-assisted programming,” he said. Soham Parekh’s scam came into light after Suhail Doshi, co-founder of Mixpanel and Playground AI outed him in an X post, warning everyone that Parekh scams startups by faking his resume and working multiple jobs at the same time. “PSA: there’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He’s been preying on YC companies and more. Beware,” Doshi had said. “He hasn’t stopped a year later. No more excuses.”Several CEOs claimed that they interviewed Parekh and got to learn about his scam the hard way.
