By Ettech Last Updated
Indian techie Soham Parekh has admitted to secretly working for four to five Silicon Valley startups at the same time, claiming that financial struggles pushed him into the controversial decision.Appearing on technology show TBPN in his first public interview since the revelations, Parekh said, 鈥淚t is true. I am not proud of what I have done. I do not endorse this either, but I had to do it due to financial circumstances.鈥滺e confessed to working up to 140 hours a week, describing the period as exhausting but necessary to overcome monetary hardships.Parekh鈥檚 story went viral on Wednesday after entrepreneur Suhail Doshi warned startup founders on X (formerly Twitter) about him, alleging that Parekh was 鈥減reying鈥 on multiple Y Combinator-backed startups simultaneously. Following Doshi鈥檚 post, several startup founders shared similar experiences of working with Parekh and later firing him for moonlighting. Some employers reportedly terminated him immediately after seeing the viral warnings.In a separate post on X, Parekh defended his passion for engineering: 鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot being said about me right now, and most of you don鈥檛 know the full story. If there鈥檚 one thing to know about me, it鈥檚 that I love to build. That鈥檚 it. I鈥檝e been isolated, written off, and shut out by nearly everyone I鈥檝e known and every company I鈥檝e worked at. But building is the only thing I鈥檝e ever truly known, and it鈥檚 what I鈥檒l keep doing.鈥漃arekh said he has now joined “one company and one company only” as a founding engineer. “They were the only ones willing to bet on me at this time. The team is cracked, they back misfits, and they鈥檙e building something absolutely insane in the video AI space,” he said.