You were given into Y Combinator, raised $20 million from a16z, after which exited to Meta? That’s cool, I assume. However did Soham Parekh observe to paintings at your startup?
There may be now a brand new badge of honor for startup founders: your proximity to 1 prior to now unknown Indian tool engineer named Soham Parekh.
The Anna Delvey of Silicon Valley was once 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 prevent mendacity/scamming other folks. He hasn’t stopped a yr later.”
Now, the submit has over 20 million perspectives, with founders and traders from around the tech business weighing in. And sooner than Andy Jassy asks — may this have all been have shyed away from if extra firms returned to the workplace? No, some persons are simply dangerous managers.
Consistent with Doshi, no less than 3 founders have reached out to mention that they’d fired or had been lately using Parekh.
Within the age of subreddit communities like r/overemployed, the place participants discuss tips on how to break out with operating more than one faraway jobs without delay, this revelation isn’t all that sudden. What’s extra fascinating is how broadly the responses to his movements range (to be honest, nobody ever stated that the tech business was once recognized for its ethical fiber).
To a few 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 clear of individuals who in fact would have given their all. Many are inspired via how he controlled to get via such a lot of notoriously aggressive interview processes, whilst others suppose he will have to parlay his quarter-hour of popularity into founding his personal startup.
“If Soham straight away comes blank and says he was once operating to coach an AI agent for wisdom paintings, he raises at $100M pre via the weekend,” Field CEO Aaron Levie wrote on X.
Chris Bakke — the founding father of Laskie, a job-matching platform got via X — thinks that Soham will have to include his popularity.
“Soham Parekh wishes to begin an interview prep corporate. He’s obviously some of the largest interviewers of all time,” Bakke wrote. “He will have to publicly recognize that he did one thing dangerous and route right kind to the item he’s most sensible 1% at.”
In the meantime, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan took the chance to pat himself at the again.
“With out the YC neighborhood this man would nonetheless be running and would have possibly by no means been stuck,” Tan wrote. “The startup guild of YC is a essential invention to assist founders be extra a hit than they’d be on my own.”
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 once seeking to make some huge cash in no time to get himself out of a nasty monetary scenario.
“I actually didn’t suppose this via,” Parekh stated in a reside interview with TBPN. “It was once an motion that was once achieved extra out of desperation.”
Parekh didn’t deal with Doshi’s allegation that the majority of his resume was once pretend.
“What’s additionally humorous is, you already know, one of the crucial memes,” he stated. “I’m very new to Twitter. I joined Twitter the day past, so this was once a lesson for me in social media usually.” (Twitter has lengthy been referred to as X, in fact.)
You don’t have at hand it to him, however he’s a horny excellent poster for anyone who’s been at the platform for an afternoon. Considered one of his few posts was once a reaction to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who requested what other folks suppose Parekh’s LinkedIn header could be.
“I don’t have a LinkedIn,” Parekh answered.
For what it’s value, his X header is at the cash, despite the fact that he received’t trouble with LinkedIn. It’s the meme of Flynn Rider from the Disney film “Tangled” — a smug-looking man about to state a arguable opinion, surrounded via knives on both sides.
