This YC Engineer Might Have Just Killed Remote Work
Soham Parekh, the Indian engineer accused of holding multiple jobs at once, shot to infamy, becoming an internet sensation in no time. The man, who has been under fire for serial moonlighting, has finally responded to the controversy. In an interview with TBPN, he admitted, “It is true.” Parekh said he was not proud of his actions. “That’s not something I endorse either,” he added, explaining that working 140 hours a week wasn’t a choice he enjoyed .“I had to do it out of necessity.” He said that he had been in “extremely dire financial circumstances,” which pushed him to juggle between three to five startups simultaneously. Parekh revealed that he will now be working exclusively with Darwin Studios, an AI startup working on an AI-driven video platform. “This is the only thing I’m going to focus on,” he said. “I have a lot to prove.” He explained that he handled all the work on his own and never hired junior developers, noting, “I wish I had the money [to do that].” He also rejected claims of using AI tools, saying he began taking on multiple jobs in 2022, “before the CoPilot boom”. Interestingly, he also clarified that he’s not using the viral AI startup tool Cluely. “I would love for the founder to go on record and say if I’m a paying customer, but I’m not,” he said. Meanwhile, Cluely released a video suggesting that Parekh used their tool to crack multiple interviews, a claim that Parekh refuted.  It turned out to be a marketing gimmick. The CEO also confirmed that Parekh had applied to their company, but they ultimately did not hire him. soham parekh gets away with it thanks to tools like @cluely pic.twitter.com/e67xxpVy3H— Roy (@im_roy_lee) July 3, 2025 Unlike the popular perception that it was AI behind all this, it turned out that a real person was making real mistakes and trying to own up to them. The Soham Saga The saga unfolded when Suhail Doshi, founder of Mixpanel and Play, publicly accused Parekh of working simultaneously at multiple startups by misrepresenting his identity and location. Doshi issued the warning on X, advising startup founders to exercise caution when hiring. “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,” Doshi wrote. “Beware.” Based on his CV shared by Doshi, Parekh has worked at multiple AI startups, including Dynamo AI, Union.ai, Synthesia, Alan AI and Fleet AI. Many of these are backed by Y Combinator. He claims full-stack expertise across UI with Next.js, backend with Python, Node.js and Go, and cloud infrastructure using AWS, GCP and Kubernetes. According to Doshi, Parekh misled companies into believing that he was based in the US. “We thought we were hiring someone in the US. Even sent a laptop to a US address. Got it back! Allegedly, it was sent to his ‘sister’,” he said. Doshi claims he fired Parekh within his first week at Play. “I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying/scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later,” he posted, adding, “No more excuses.” Despite confronting Parekh directly, Doshi said the situation did not improve. “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.” Doshi’s allegations sparked concern within the startup community, particularly among early-stage companies vulnerable to remote hiring fraud. How Did the Industry React? Menlo Ventures’ Deedy Das believes Parekh is just the tip of the iceberg. Citing a Redditor who claims to earn $800,000 a year across five jobs, he pointed to the 500,000-strong r/overemployed community, where such tactics are openly discussed. “There are thousands of Soham Parekhs we don’t know about,” he said. Saurabh, a leadership coach at Bizsquad, told AIM that remote workers are more likely to engage in moonlighting when compared to those who come to the office. According to him, the rise in remote work during the pandemic fuelled this trend. “The word [moonlighting] came into existence only after the pandemic… when people were working in the US, so while it was day there, it was night here.” He also raised certain red flags to help determine if an employee is moonlighting. “You should be watching for sudden drops in productivity, missed deadlines, repeated errors, or a general decline in output,” he said. “It’s rarely about someone being brilliant in two jobs. It’s about someone performing poorly in one while hiding the second.” He pointed out that one of the most powerful tools to check for such malpractices is the Universal Account Number or UAN, which most Indian companies already have access to for employee provident fund contributions. “Use UAN verification to check how many PF contributions are being made. If someone is receiving two full-time salaries, both with PF deductions, it’ll show up.” He further added that the employment contract must spell out that outside employment during full-time hours is strictly prohibited. There should be clauses for IP protection, confidentiality, non-solicitation, and non-compete, and the consequences of violating these clauses should be explicit, including termination. “But policies alone won’t save you. You also need discreet social media screening,” he said. “Candidates sometimes post pictures from company events. If someone’s showing up at two company parties, that’s a sign.” Regular reference checks are crucial. He urged startups to go beyond the HR department and speak directly with the candidate’s former reporting managers. “Handle it professionally. Don’t start with accusations. Gather evidence, have a conversation, and involve legal counsel if needed.” The Dominoes Start Falling After Doshi’s post, startup founders began to connect the dots. Cluely CEO Chungin Lee joined the chorus and said he too had interviewed Soham in the past. Meanwhile, Timothy Wang from Ponder admitted Parekh was let go after just three days, despite strong references. Michelle Lim, founder of a stealth startup, cancelled a scheduled trial after learning the news. YC CEO Garry Tan also weighed in on the issue. “Without the YC community, this guy would still be operating and would have maybe never been caught. The startup guild of YC is a necessary invention to help founders be more successful than they would be alone,” Tan wrote in a post on X. Soham Parekh held five jobs simultaneously for five years straight.Even during the worst tech layoff waves, he breezed through interviews.Cold-emailed founders → aced interviews → delegated the work to junior devs.Quietly operated a $1M “Soham-as-a-Service” SaaS business.— Rayan Dabbagh (@rayandabbagh) July 3, 2025 Remote Work Faces Fallout Following the Parekh incident, concerns around remote work, especially involving hires from India, have sharply intensified. Varunram Ganesh, head of growth at Warp, wrote, “Pretty sure very few YC startups will hire remote Indians now,” calling it a “classic case of one guy exploiting a high-trust society,” which risks damaging opportunities for everyone else. Alex Cohen, co-founder of Hellopatient, echoed similar views, arguing that Parekh’s actions prove “why you should build an in-person culture and not a remote-first company”. He further added that it is kind of crazy that Parekh was making more annually than the amount of revenue each of the startups he worked for actually generated. “This is wild and a wake-up call for every startup hiring remotely. Here’s how one dev allegedly scammed multiple YC-backed companies, crushed interviews, faked locations, and still got fired again and again,” said Vikas Sharma, software engineer at Siterax. But not everyone is on the same page with the outrage surrounding Parekh. Ash Arora, partner at LocalGlobe VC, asked why moonlighting was even considered wrong. “If he aced the interviews and was the best, you hired him,” she said, “so, what’s the problem? As long as he meets all deliverables on time with the right attitude…” The divide highlights an ongoing debate in startup culture on whether trust and availability should matter more than output and performance, especially in a remote-first world. Who’s to Blame? The controversy has also prompted calls for more structured safeguards in the hiring process of startups. Immad Akhund, founder of Mercury, suggested that startups need a system to weed out repeat offenders. “We (startups) need to create a system that tries to find people who do this,” he wrote, proposing that companies should KYC all hires, automate reference checks using AI, and maintain private records of individuals attempting to hold multiple jobs under false pretences. He added that Mercury might consider building such a tool and giving it away for free.Meanwhile, another techie questioned YC’s background screening process, asking, “Wouldn’t background checks happen for YC startups before a new employee joins?” “These are not common,” replied Tan.
Following the ‘moonlighting incident, concerns around remote work, especially involving hires from India, have sharply intensified.
Soham Parekh, the Indian engineer accused of holding multiple jobs at once, shot to infamy, becoming an internet sensation in no time. The man, who has been under fire for serial moonlighting, has finally responded to the controversy. In an interview with TBPN, he admitted, “It is true.”
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Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.