If you've worked at a Y Combinator (YC) startup and haven't received a cold email from a man named Soham Parekh, are you even a startup? That's the question some have been asking online recently.

For the past 24 hours, Silicon Valley founders have been sharing screenshots of Parekh's emails the way girls swap receipts on a two-timing Tinder date.

It all started when entrepreneur Suhail Doshi posted a warning that an Indian software engineer named Soham Parekh had allegedly been juggling jobs at three to four startups at once. Not in an admirable "hustle culture" way, but more in the "he wasn't doing the work and may have faked parts of his resume" way.

Within hours, tech bros were lighting up X / Twitter with memes, exposés and their stories about interacting with the prolific hire. A debate then broke out, posing the question, "Was Parekh a scammer or a misunderstood talent who simply min-maxed the hiring system too hard?"

Here's a recap of all that went down.

Who Is Soham Parekh, and What Was Suhail Doshi's Tweet About Him?

On July 2nd, 2025, Suhail Doshi, the co-founder and former CEO of analytics firm Mixpanel, dropped a PSA accusing a man named Soham Parekh of deceiving startups by working at "3-4 startups at the same time," adding that Parekh had been "preying on YC companies" and continued doing so even after being fired a year earlier.

The post racked up over 17,000 likes in a day. While side gigs aren't unheard of in tech, Doshi's issue was that Parekh allegedly never stopped juggling more jobs than he could handle, purportedly lied about it, and may have padded his resume.

How Did Startup Founders React to the News About Soham Parekh?

By July 2nd, X looked like a Y Combinator group chat had exploded. Antimetal CEO and X user @mprkhrst chimed in, revealing that Parekh had been their first engineering hire back in 2022: "Really smart and likable… we realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and let him go."

Meanwhile, the X account @Altimor added, "We hired this guy a week ago. Fired this morning. He did so incredibly well in interviews, must have a lot of training."

X user @mhadifilms posted a video allegedly showing Parekh in a promotional reel for Synq.hq, saying that Soham regularly appeared in multiple videos posted to the startup's YouTube channel.

PSA: soham parekh needs your help(this was 3mo ago) pic.twitter.com/g6zLnB1BtJ

— M Hadi (@mhadifilms) July 2, 2025

Meanwhile, Happenstance.AI's @var_epsilon joked, "If your CEO doesn't have a Soham Parekh email in their inbox, it's time to start polishing your resume."

How Did Soham Parekh Respond to the People Trying to 'Expose' Him?

According to Suhail Doshi, Soham Parekh reached out shortly after Silicon Valley exploded on him and begged for advice. Suhail posted a message from Parekh that read: "Asking this as genuine advice since I do really love what I do, have I completely sabotaged my career? What can I do to improve my situation? I am also happy to come clean."

It's the kind of thing you can expect to hear from a man who realizes too late that playing recruiter roulette probably isn't a sustainable career plan.

On July 3rd, 2025, Soham Parekh gave an interview with @TBPN, owning up to working at multiple companies at a time, saying, "I'm not proud of what I've done. That’s not something I endorse either. But no one really likes to work 140 hours a week, I had to do it out of necessity."

We asked @realsohamparekh if he had been working multiple full-time jobs at once."It is true."“I’m not proud of what I’ve done. That’s not something I endorse either. But no one really likes to work 140 hours a week, I had to do it out of necessity.""I was in extremely dire… pic.twitter.com/IC3qXOPdSt

— TBPN (@tbpn) July 3, 2025

What Are the Memes People Posted About Soham Parekh?

The tech side of Twitter had found the horse to beat for the week, and the jokes came flooding in immediately. On July 2nd, X user @growing_daniel posted a Greedy Pipe Man meme showing Parekh guzzling up all the dev jobs while "New CS Grads" were left parched.

Also on July 2nd, X user @TurnerNovak posted a Peter Thiel reaction meme about the controversy, captioning it, "VCs realizing 12 of their portfolio companies have founders named Soham Parekh."

X user @var_epsilon then threw his hat back in the ring and cracked a topical joke, writing, "BREAKING: Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have signed Soham Parekh as fractional Chief AI Officer."

What Are Some More Memes About Soham Parekh's YC Controversy?

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For the full history of Soham Parekh's YC Controversy, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.