Introduction: The Man Who Juggled Four Startup Jobs
Imagine this: you wake up, check your email, and realize you’ve got code reviews pending for Playground AI, feature requests for Antimetal, design tweaks for Sync Labs, and debugging tickets for Lindy—all due by 9 AM. For most of us, that’s a nightmare. For Soham Parekh, it was just Tuesday. Since 2022, Parekh has quietly moonlighted as a software engineer at multiple Silicon Valley startups—often without any of them knowing. That revelation exploded on social media last week, sparking a swirl of stories, red-flag revelations in interviews, and, inevitably, a debate: genius or grifter?
The Viral Tweet That Started It All: Suhail Doshi’s Warning
The saga kicked off when Suhail Doshi, CEO of image-generation startup Playground AI, posted on X (formerly Twitter) on July 1, 2025:
“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 says he first hired Parekh about a year ago, only to discover Parekh was also submitting code at Lindy, Antimetal, and Sync Labs. “I told him to stop lying/scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later,” Doshi wrote. The post garnered over 20 million views in 24 hours, igniting a chain reaction of founder confessions.
Founder Encounters: From Flo Crivello to Roy Lee
After Doshi’s warning, dozens of Silicon Valley CEOs weighed in:
- Flo Crivello, CEO of Lindy, an AI workflow-automation startup, hired Parekh in late June 2025 but let him go immediately when Doshi’s tweet went viral. Crivello told me, “His code was solid, but the trust was broken the moment we saw Suhail’s post.”
- Matt Parkhurst, CEO of Antimetal, which uses AI to slash enterprise cloud spending, named Parekh as Antimetal’s first engineering hire in early 2022. “We realized he was moonlighting at other companies and had to part ways,” Parkhurst said.
- At Sync Labs, makers of an AI lip-synching tool, Parekh even starred in a promotional video—only to be quietly let go once internal resources flagged his concurrent gigs.
- Haz Hubble, co-founder of Y Combinator-backed Pally AI, recounts offering Parekh a founding-engineer role before learning of his side hustles.
- Adish Jain, co-founder of YC-backed Mosaic, the AI video-editing startup, remembers interviewing Parekh but ultimately deciding against extending an offer.
- Adam Silverman, co-founder of AI agent observability startup Agency, got a cold DM from Parekh and scheduled an interview—until Parekh rescheduled five times and insisted on fully remote work. Silverman noted, “His React skills were strong, but the constant delays and remote-only demands raised red flags.”
- Roy Lee, CEO of the “cheat on everything” AI marketing startup Cluely, interviewed Parekh twice. “He’s articulate, brilliant in React—but something about his story felt off. We passed.”
Interview Red Flags: Top Talent or Too Good to Be True?
Multiple founders described remarkably consistent patterns in Parekh’s application and interview process:
- Discrepant Location Claims
- Reworkd founding engineer Rohan Pandey pegged Parekh’s performance in coding interviews as top-three quality—yet an IP logger on a Zoom call proved Parekh dialed in from India, despite claiming U.S. residency.
- Résumé Inconsistencies
- Doshi uncovered that Parekh’s resume—which boasted a master’s from Georgia Tech—didn’t always align with his GitHub contributions or employment dates.
- Remote-Only Demands
- Agency’s Silverman and Cluely’s Lee both flagged Parekh’s insistence on entirely remote work as unusual, especially for senior or founding-engineer roles.
- Rescheduled Interviews & Vanishing Acts
- Silverman logged at least five reschedules from Parekh before deciding the delay wasn’t worth the risk.
Despite these red flags, Parekh’s raw technical ability made it easy for founders to overlook inconsistencies—until the X post made everyone check their records.
Parekh’s Perspective: 140 Hours a Week, Zero Regrets?
On July 3, 2025, Parekh appeared on the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) podcast with hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays to share his side:
- 20 Hours a Day, 7 Days a Week
- “I work about 140 hours each week,” Parekh admitted. “That’s borderline impossible, but I love coding too much to stop.”
- Financial Jeopardy & Deferred Grad School
- Parekh deferred a Georgia Tech master’s program because he “needed the income.” Yet he also chose “low salaries for higher equity”—raising questions about the depth of his financial troubles.
- No AI Bots, No Junior Devs
- He insists he didn’t hire help or use large-language models to churn out code. “It’s all me,” he said, describing endless nights refactoring, debugging, and sprint planning across four companies.
- Boundary Between Work & Life
- When asked why he didn’t simply ask one employer for a raise, Parekh shrugged, “I like to keep my professional and personal lives separate.” Yet his multi-job hustle blurred those boundaries beyond recognition.
- Mixed Feelings
- “I’m not proud of what I’ve done,” Parekh admitted, yet defended his actions as a path to mastery. “Working on multiple products made me a better engineer.”
What’s Next? From Viral Notoriety to Potential Seed Round
In true Silicon Valley fashion, Parekh tried to parlay his newfound fame into another gig. He announced—then quickly deleted—a role at Darwin Studios, an AI video remixing startup led by founder and CEO Sanjit Juneja, who later praised Parekh as “incredibly talented.” Both Juneja and Parekh scrubbed the announcement within hours, but not before screenshots spread across LinkedIn and X.
Given the precedent—Cluely raised $15 million in seed funding off its provocative marketing tactics—Parekh might secure investors intrigued by his audacity as much as his code. But would VCs bet on someone dubbed “serial moonlighter”?
Conclusion: Genius Hacker or Grifter of the Gig Economy?
Soham Parekh’s story sits at the intersection of raw technical prowess, Silicon Valley hustle culture, and the risks of remote hiring. It forces us to ask:
- Can we separate an engineer’s skill from their ethics?
- Does the promise of equity justify moonlighting at multiple firms?
- How will startups adapt hiring processes to spot the “too good to be true” candidate?
Whether Parekh emerges as a cautionary tale or a case study in relentless self-improvement, one thing’s certain: his four-job caper has exposed vulnerabilities in the high-stakes world of startup recruiting—and given every founder a reason to double-check their onboarding process.
