Appearing on technology show TBPN in his first public interview since the revelations, Parekh said, “It 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.”
He confessed to working up to 140 hours a week, describing the period as exhausting but necessary to overcome monetary hardships.
Parekh’s story went viral on Wednesday after entrepreneur Suhail Doshi warned startup founders on X (formerly Twitter) about him, alleging that Parekh was “preying” on multiple Y Combinator-backed startups simultaneously. Following Doshi’s 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: “There’s a lot being said about me right now, and most of you don’t know the full story. If there’s one thing to know about me, it’s that I love to build. That’s it. I’ve been isolated, written off, and shut out by nearly everyone I’ve known and every company I’ve worked at. But building is the only thing I’ve ever truly known, and it’s what I’ll keep doing.”
Parekh 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’re building something absolutely insane in the video AI space,” he said.
