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’s 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 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 wrote. “I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying/scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later.”
Now, the put up has over 20 million views, with founders and traders 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 dangerous managers.
Based on Doshi, no less than three founders have reached out to say that they’d fired or have been presently using Parekh.
Within the age of subreddit communities like r/overemployed, the place members speak about how one can get away with working a number of distant jobs directly, this revelation isn’t all that stunning. What’s extra fascinating is how extensively the responses to his actions differ (to be truthful, nobody ever mentioned that the tech trade was identified for its ethical fiber).
To some within the tech group, 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 means of so many notoriously aggressive interview processes, whereas others assume he ought to parlay his quarter-hour of fame into founding his personal startup.
“If Soham immediately comes clean and says he was working to train an AI agent for knowledge 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 fame.
“Soham Parekh needs to start an interview prep company. He’s clearly one of the greatest interviewers of all time,” Bakke wrote. “He should publicly acknowledge that he did something bad and course correct to the thing he’s top 1% at.”
In the meantime, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan took the chance to pat himself on the again.
“Without the YC community this guy would still be operating and would have maybe never been caught,” Tan wrote. “The startup guild of YC is a necessary invention to help founders be more successful than they would 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 attempting to make some huge cash in a short time to get himself out of a nasty monetary state of affairs.
“I really did not think this through,” Parekh mentioned in a reside interview with TBPN. “It was an action that was done more out of desperation.”
Parekh didn’t tackle Doshi’s allegation that the majority of his resume was pretend.
“What’s also funny is, you know, some of the memes,” he mentioned. “I’m very new to Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday, so this was a lesson for me in social media in general.” (Twitter has lengthy been referred to as X, after all.)
You don’t have at hand it to him, however he’s a reasonably good poster for somebody who’s been on the platform for a day. One in every of his few posts was a response to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who requested what folks assume Parekh’s LinkedIn header can be.
“I don’t have a LinkedIn,” Parekh replied.
For what it’s value, 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.
#tech #opinion #Soham #Parekh
