Soham Parekh (or How I learned to stop worrying and love Moonlighting)

The last few days in startup twitter-verse have been dominated by one man - Soham Parekh. He’s an engineer from India who took up multiple parallel jobs at YC startups, and moonlighted. Basically, he took up jobs at each of these startups and didn’t properly contribute to anyone. All the rewards, and none of the risk.

Or so he thought. Almost every company would fire him within a week. A few that kep him kept him around for less than 10 weeks. So clearly, he wasn’t earning that much money. But that didn’t stop him from continuing, and from companies falling for his bit. So what changed?

It’s not illegal until you’re caught #

It didn’t matter to Soham that he got caught or fired, because it was just the one company that would let him go. No one really put it out in the public because they did not want to become a laughing stock. “So you’re the idiots who hired that guy without a background check?”

Until someone put it out there. Suhail, the founder of MixPanel and Playground posted about his moonlighting. That unleashed the storm. What was just some inappropriate behaviour no-one knew about became a career-ending situation. Would anyone hire Soham Parekh anymore? Probably not (Someone did though, due to Silicon Valley’s contrarian bent.)

So, would this still have been as bad if they hadn’t been caught? Would it have been OK to moonlight?

Ethics are … messy and subjective #

The crime here wasn’t the moonlighting itself. It was the pathological lying. It’s a breach of trust and of contract. That was Soham’s real crime - breaking a contract.

An employer-employee relationship is a contract. Both parties go into the relationship knowing what they want and what they get out of it. Neither is co-erced into the relationship. That means, when the company asks for loyalty and “monogamy”, the employee knows they expect it. They have the choice to not sign the contract and walk away if they’re not comfortable with it.

I remember meeting a founder who’d put on her LinkedIn that she’d been working at two different companies in parallel. It was a shock to us and we had to vet the background, but it checked out. Now, when the companies consent and know, it’s OK. It’s not unethical. But when the companies don’t know and don’t consent (like with Soham), it’s not OK.

What have we learned? #

You always have a choice as an employee or as a founder. No one forces you into signing the contract. If you are both consenting parties, you can take it up. If you don’t like a clause, walk away. Don’t work with the counterparty if it doesn’t align with your values.

You always have a choice. There’s going to be someone in the world whose way of working aligns with yours. Find your tribe. Just don’t cheat your partners - employers, employees, customers, or anyone else. There’s always a line.

I’m excited to work with founders with the right mindset. Reach out to me at startups at vatsalkanakiya dot com.

If you’re exploring how to work with AI to scale your business, reach out at consult at vatsalkanakiya dot com.