Soham Parekh breaks silence on moonlighting at US startups: ‘No one likes to work 140 hours a week…’

Indian software engineer Soham Parekh has been at the centre of a major controversy after he was accused of working for multiple Silicon Valley startups in breach of his employement contract. 

The matter came to light via a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Suhail Doshi, co-founder of Playground A and Mixpanel, who alleged that Parekh has been “preying on YC companies” and most of the work showcased on his resume is fake. 

Since then several other startup founders came forward to state that Parekh had impressed him during the interview process but later did not meet the expectations. 

Soham Parekh defends himself: ‘I am not proud’

The software engineer has now done an interview to defend his stance on the whole matter. Speaking to TBPN YouTube channel, Parekh said, “I’m not proud of what I’ve done. That’s not something I endorse either. 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. ”

“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. 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.” he added.

Addresing the allegations that he had sublet the work by hiring a team of engineers, Parekh said, “I wish I had the money, and I wish that was true, but that is not true. 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. “