Soham Parekh confesses moonlighting for US start-ups: ‘I thought if I worked multiple places…’

“I’m not proud of what I’ve done. That’s not something I endorse either,” Soham Parekh said in an interview with the TBPN YouTube channel.

“But financial circumstances. 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, who is based in India, has been accused by several US startup founders of breaching employment contracts by taking up simultaneous full-time roles without disclosing them.

Suhail Doshi, co-founder and former CEO of analytics platform Mixpanel, said he fired Parekh within his first week of employment after realising he was “lying and scamming people.”

In a post on X, Doshi wrote, “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 added that he tried to reason with Parekh before firing him.

“I tried to talk sense into this guy, explain the impact, and give him a chance to turn a new leaf because sometimes that’s what a person needs. But it clearly didn’t work,” he said.

Parekh denied allegations that he had sublet work by hiring a team of engineers to handle his jobs.

“I wish I had the money, and I wish that was true, but that is not true,” he said. “Any of the founders that I worked with can vouch for that. I have multiple locations where I program with people. I’ve written every single inch of the code.”

“I’m not a very people person. I don’t share much about what’s going on with my life or my internal thought process,” Parekh said. “I was getting more stressed, thinking, hey, I want to come out of this situation. What should I do? So it wasn’t really about outreach, but necessity. I thought that if I worked multiple places, I could help myself elevate the situation I was in much faster.”

Doshi’s post prompted similar accounts from founders at Lindy, Fleet AI, Antimetal, and other startups who said Parekh appeared highly competent in interviews but later found to be juggling multiple jobs.

“I was THIS close to hiring him. The craziest part is he actually crushed the interview,” said Justin Harvey, co-founder of AIVideo. Another founder, Adish Jain, wrote, “Can confirm. This guy wasted our time for a month. Did great in interviews. But he’s a liar.”

Nicolai Ouporov, co-founder and CEO of Fleet AI, alleged that Parekh was working at “more than 4 startups at any given time.”

A user named Michelle Lim said her company cancelled Parekh’s upcoming work trial after seeing Doshi’s warning.

When asked why employers kept hiring him if he was scamming them, Doshi responded, “Obviously they do [check his work]. How else do you think he keeps getting fired?”