Soham Parekh breaks silence: the engineer who worked 5 startups simultaneously explains why he did it

meet you. How are you doing? There he is. Welcome himself. Thanks so much for joining. Uh, why don't you uh why don't you introduce yourself and uh just take a few minutes to just uh give us what's going on in your world? What's the last 24 hours been like? Um, how would you describe yourself?

what what what do you have to say to people and then I'm sure let's go back to the very beginning who are you where do you come from I mean um I am you know I'm originally from Mumbai I kind of grew up you know here all my life obviously drove into computer science like you know coding and everything kind of without a choice kind of process of elimination fell in love with it you know as you're aware at this point I'm like everyone's like favorite founding engineer pretty much or worker 17 or whatever you might call it like AI bot or so as a service I don't know Um but yeah um don't have much to my story essentially.

Uh you know I've just been always passionate about you know building. What was your first job? Uh my first job was actually at a company called Allen. It was like a voice assisted like conversational startup. Uh you know this is back in like 2020 2021 2020. And when did you come to the states?

Because I know uh I was talking to Matt and he said you you would go to the anti-metal off sites and and you're very much a part of the team. So to be honest and my my uh you know uh I have family in the east coast. The first time I ever visited US was in 2018 and then I was supposed to do grad school there.

Uh you know different financial circumstances couldn't do that. Had to kind of like you know not go with that plan. Um but obviously you know uh I have visited uh you know America mostly for like offsites and stuff just to catch up with team members and things like that. Um, okay.

So, the main claim uh that was levied against you on X yesterday uh kind of started with Su Hail over at Playground. He accused you of working at multiple jobs simultaneously. Is that true? It is true. Um and yeah u I I would you know love to add color to it but you know that is true. Yeah.

Um, I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?

I mean, honestly, uh, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were would probably have, you know, obviously I I would want to like preface with saying like I'm not proud of what I've done. um you know that's not something that I endorse either.

Um but you know financial circumstances essentially like no one really likes to work 140 hours a week right but I had to do this kind of out of necessity like I was in extremely like dire financial circumstances and somehow like you know I don't I'm not a very people person uh uh I I don't share much in terms of like what's going on with my life and kind of in my internal thought process you know was kind of like getting more stressed with like hey you know I want to like come out of the situation what should I do so it's more not it was not more so kind of out greed but essentially like necessity and just like thought that if I work like multiple places, you know, like I can basically like help myself like elevate the situation I was in much faster.

No, it's very economically rational. Uh what about the uh conjecture that that you had uh a a team of junior developers underneath you helping you actually accomplish the tasks? Is there any truth to that? I wish I had the money and I wish that was true, but that is not true.

um any of the founders that uh you know uh I've worked with can watch with that. I have multiple occasions like pair program with people. You know I've written every single inch of the code. Uh you know antimemetal is one of the companies I worked at. You know they have pretty high bar for design as you might know.

Uh they did a launch recently. Um you know there were two occasions where you know just before the launch like you know the the contractor who was going to do the front end for us essentially had bailed out and you know we as a team had to figure out and do everything which was a team of only three engineers right.

So so how did it originally happen though? started with one job in 2020, then you realized, hey, I could add another, and then you realized you could just continuously add them.

Did you create any type of financial models to kind of model out potential churn as you would get, you know, uh I'm curious if you were operating this looking at as basically a SAS business, the SAS of SOHAM, this was this was not a business to me.

um every company that I have worked with I have deeply cared about like you know um and again people who spend you know a lot of time with me can like back that um on multiple occasions the uh and again I did not have any financial model the uh like I said the only motivation for me was hey you know I'm in a financial jeopardy uh you know and so I didn't do this until 2022 2022 is actually when I was you know running into issues I had deferred my you know grad school uh admit and uh you did like an online degree but basically you know did not have like enough uh uh uh you know like uh essentially like you know just to get out of the situation I was in don't want to talk like too much deeply about it but no no that's fine.

So yeah, so that's talk about talk about your own talk about your own uh abilities. Every it seemed universal that the that the teams that you worked on said that you were extremely talented, that you interviewed incredibly well.

Um it's, you know, easy for, you know, new CS grads to be frustrated because you were probably running laps around them in the interview process. But um but yeah, uh it's very impressive if you actually didn't have a junior team and you were just, you know, juggling.

You know, it seems uh estimates seem to put it at maybe five five companies at once. Are you are you just like hyper productive? Are you leveraging AI tools and coding assistance?

Are you just able to move really quickly in a startup environment or are you also like talented at like systems engineering and algorithms and like solving really really hard computational program uh problems. So I'll preface with this. Um you know some of these companies I worked at was before the co-pilot boom, right?

There were no AI assisted programming. At least three startups have went on the record like saying this. People who have pro pair programmed with we can also watch with this. But the real truth is you there's this funny line in some of my interviews like TLDDR. I don't do anything outside coding. That is very true.

And if you're like spending hours like you know sitting in front of the computer, you will eventually like at least I hope so like get good at it. Um I I would there's obviously a lot for me to learn in general.

uh you know I wouldn't say like I'm you know like a like a I don't know what they call like uh you know like a platform manage or something like you know top principle or whatever but I I would like to believe that I was a decent enough a good enough engineer to essentially be able to work at three places because that's the only thing I did the entire day so an average day for you an average week for you it feels like basically maybe you sleep for six to eight hours and then you're basically programming for 12 to 14 hours every single day for 7 days a week.

But as as some of these, you know, new coding uh codegen tools came out, claude code, cursor, Devon, etc. Were did you feel like you could add maybe a few more jobs? Were you getting, you know, more efficient or did you still handcrafted code, farmtotable, organic, you know, handmade?

I mean obviously like you know having more like uh you know AI assisted tooling like definitely helped but it did not amount to like me working on more jobs. Um because like I would still love to spend you know a justifiable hour like working on something and it doesn't have like a measure.

It's not like hey you know I'm going to split time like four hours for this company for that company. Like I was essentially like working until I got something done for that day. And um I think people around me will probably say this that I am notoriously known for not sleeping.

Um I am uh you know I'm a serial like non-sleeper at this point is what I would say.

But yeah and as far as the interviews go right like so one there there's also been a lot of things around like hey you know I probably used uh you know some sort of like tool like cluly which you know I would love for the founder to essentially go on record and say if I'm a paying customer I'm not.

um but uh or or some sort of like you know had to game the system. The truth is a lot of these companies did not have lead code style problems and if they did I would have bombed the interviews you know because I don't practice lead code as much.

I'm I know my data structures well I know what to use when but you know like typically a gun. Well you're also great at cold email. I saw some of these cold emails. You got a great format. It pulls people in. It it shows your personality.

It shows that you care about you know coding and I think that helped a lot as well. Totally. Yeah, I mean I do care about coding a lot, but again like you know most of these companies essentially had a take-home assessment or a work trial, right?

So it's very difficult to like game a work trial or game a take-home assessment like you have to do it and then deliver it. Um and I I did everything you know on my own like I was also doing the work trials on my own and um yeah like I guess I'll I'll leave it at there.

If if they did have lead code I would have bombed the interviews but luckily they didn't. like startups usually just like care more about like working talk about uh talk a little bit about the companies that you chose to work for you applied to.

Do you think you could have pulled this off with Microsoft, Google, Amazon and split three times? Or do they have defenses in place that would make this difficult? There's a variety of memes around maybe big tech companies it's easier work, maybe startups are harder.

I'm just kind of curious about it seems like you went for a lot of startups. What was the reasoning behind that? Yeah. So, it feels counterintuitive like if I was in dire need of money like why would I work for you know startups as opposed to big tech because they clearly pay well.

They have a 9 to5 schedule for the most part like I would say you know people don't really care about like what you are essentially like doing.

Um the thing with me is like if you're spending you know multiple hours a week like working on something you would have to at least decently be passionate about it because otherwise you'll just like burn out.

Um like I said you know each of these companies that I work for and again uh you know founders some of the founders who spent meaningful time with me can vouch um you know would would say that I actually cared about these companies.

So it wasn't like cold email without context like I deeply read into what a company was doing, what the business model was, you know, who who their customers were. I had great ideas about like you know what to build for them, what not to build for them, you know, what the platform is like.

um you know I did deliver like beyond engineering for a lot of these companies and um yeah like it was more kind of like hey if I'm spending like 140 hours like I want to do something that I actually care about like I don't want to like you know do 9 to5 and kind of like send out a div in like six hours or something.

Um you know that's that's just not me because I do like what I do and and and that's kind of cold email hack. Send the cold emails from the heart. Put some real thought into them. Um, talk to me about um other alternatives that you maybe considered or maybe didn't.

Um, did you ever think about going to a startup and saying like, "Hey, I'm doing a great job. I'm working 40 hours a week. I need to make more money. I'd like to take on a second job. Would would would that be amendable to you? Do you think that founders might be actually open to that?

" Or say, "I'm working 18 hours a day. Can you pay me three times as much? Can you pay me?

I'm doing the work of three devs because there is a world where you could have allocated all that time and one startup would have gotten three times as much value but they probably should have paid you three times as much maybe to make that balance out and so did you ever have those types of decisions like we're seeing this with the AI talent wars the the 10x you can think of yourself as like a three to fivex engineer I guess no offense but you know the 100x engineers are getting you can maybe be 10x if you just if you really focus Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And so and so it's almost a question of like why couldn't you get the money that you wanted from a single job? What was what was the what was the stumbling block there? Yeah, I think the part where you know I should have basically done is like come clean with my situation.

Uh you know to be very frank with you like I mentioned like I'm not a good uh you know person with sharing what my internal conflicts are.

I do like to keep boundaries between my personal and private you know like whatever is like going with me mentally and that's true with any person I'm with as well like you know that's outside of work.

Um so one there was an embarrassment to essentially like admitting that hey you know I have this struggles mentally uh you know like and talk in open about it and then the second thing is you know I uh really did not like think through this because like I said it was an action that was done more out of like desperation to get out of the situation I was in rather than like I mean the flip side here is that you you don't necessarily need to have something going on in your family to justify a $10 million salary or a $1 million salary.

Like LeBron James doesn't need to say, oh, like, you know, I have a Saab story and that's why I need $50 million. He's like, I'm delivering this value to you and you should pay me the value that I'm creating.

And so I'm wondering if you ever considered just coming to a founder and saying like, I can do the job of three engineers, but you got to pay me three times as much. Honestly, I it again feels counterintuitive like I don't really care much about the money. I was really into it for building.

So like greed was not like an incentive for me. Um again regardless of my financial circumstances in most of these companies I always took the lower uh you know pay higher equity offer.

Um again like equity for me was not even like vested until I would make the move to US which like I said you know I was based out of India so I had to go through a whole visa process in order to make that happen. So I wouldn't even be getting equity as long as my immigration was uncertain which it was. Yeah.

So the decisions seem counterintuitive. Basically for me it's like hey you know I have to do something to kind of get out of situation I'm in. I also want to do spend time like building something meaningful you know as long as I like the startup and as long as it's not like handtomouth. Yeah.

It did not matter too much like you know. So what are you going to do now? you have the intention of the entire tech ecosystem the and I appreciate how candid you've been uh with us and and I want to talk about dev shop specifically. Yeah. I mean there's a few angles here. You could do the the dev shop of Periq.

I think you would be able to get a handful of clients immediately. Uh I think you could sign a max out maxed out contract with Cluey. they would probably pay you uh a pretty penny to to join the team over there. And I also it sounds like you're interested in joining uh uh as a founding engineer uh of a new AI startup.

So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now and and um how can you turn this into a win?

Yeah, look like I've you know regardless of the situation like I've been privileged to like work with some of these companies like you know antimatter you know sh m the founders like sink labs you know pratty uh you know rudaba they're one of the most uh you know crack faces I've been at in general partly because they had me maybe not I don't know uh I guess with that but um I think the main thing is like I am really excited about what I'm going to be a part of next so you know working with a company called Darwin they are essentially like building a new like AIdriven like data plat like you know video platform essentially for more kind of like you know uh UGC style media and we're going to release to the market very shortly.

Um this is the only thing I'm going to focus on. Um I think you know they've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove. Um and there's there's not a lot for me to say. So yeah. H how do you rebuild trust?

How do you how do you give them the confidence that this isn't just you're focused on it for a couple weeks and then the second job creeps in and then the third job creeps in?

Um is there something that you see happening down the down the line around um you know worker monitoring or or checking when the GitHub commits are coming in or doing something to understand if someone else is uh is is working multiple places.

Somebody was saying we like um tech needs a like a some sort of service to see hey are we employing the same company. Uh how do you how do you rebuild trust and and guarantee that you won't be working multiple jobs against the will of the current employer?

So I I think like you know all all of this that has taught me is like you know just coming to Canada like probably makes people understand your situation. After all like we all are humans.

um I don't anticipate like working on multiple gigs again but you know my financial circumstances have not changed so if even if it did came to them which it won't like right now I'm very clear that this is my sole focus um you know I would probably like approach with like being very candid with the founders and just letting them know and if that's not a possibility you know that's fine um you know maybe I can uh figure a way out where you know there's like a higher pay or whatever kind of like to your point right um but in in in another spectrum of the Well, I think like what I've really realized is that I just, you know, I just want to be a part of like building something that I can like focus on a longer term.

And that's always been the goal. Uh, you know, it is always the goal with any of these companies I worked with. So, um, you know, I uh obviously, you know, like I uh I I believe in actions more than words.

Like I guess what we'll build and launch in a month would probably be a testament to, you know, what we've been able to build. Well, you're certainly going to have a lot of attention around that launch. I hope you uh now is probably not the right time to renegotiate your your uh offer letter for the new company.

You should probably uh you know, stick with it. But uh I think you're going to bring a lot of marketing uh value to to Darwin, the new company you're joining. What's the reaction been like uh at home?

you're getting a lot of messages from from from has this broken tech x and broken containment into kind of your your the world beyond just people asking you about this. Yeah, I mean obviously you know reaction is natural like a ton of people have been asking about this.

Uh what's also funny is like you know some of the memes like um I I am very new to Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday. So this was a lesson for me in social media in general like I am not a social media person. So it just like I was like you know very overwhelmed with it in general.

Um obviously you know feeling shitty about it as well like I like I said you know I'm not very proud of what I did. I think there was a way where I could have course corrected in in a much different manner. Um so there was a lot of like reflection in general but I think friends and family have been strong.

Uh you know like I said I was lucky to work at some of these places where I had really close relationships with the founders. You know a lot of them reached out you know they to essentially be like helpful or kind of give advice on what I should be doing next.

Um even like you know sometimes like staying through with with me like you know uh just to make sure that I'm like all right. Um you know like uh No, I think it says a lot that that a number of the people that that you work for that fired you because you were working multiple jobs still care about you.

It shows that when you were working for them at least it you know that it does seem like you really you really did care. Are there any uh startups that you've worked for in the past that you were uh working multiple jobs for that you haven't gotten a chance to apologize to yet that you plan to?

I mean in general like I plan to apologize to everyone. Like that's that goes without saying. Um any companies that you still need to resign from? None whatsoever. Is the only focus I have. That's great. Okay. Okay. He's on the record. You're on the right path. On the right path. Well, I'm rooting for you.

I I I hope this is a story of redemption. I believe in forgiveness. I believe in mistakes and I'm I'm I'm optimistic that this can have a good ending. Me, too. So, to be clear, your ex account is at real Periq, right? That's the real one.

There's a lot of fake ones floating out there trying to take uh trying to ride the hype wave. Mhm. Yeah. I mean, 100% that there's been so many fake accounts um and a lot of fake narratives as well. Uh but yeah, that is my real account.

Um there's there's one person who asked me to post a picture of banana on my head with a fork in my hand. And I did not have banana at my home at that point in time. But uh I was trying to do that just to show a freak. Okay.

But it's it's been it's been interestingly like uh uh you know while to like notice how people are like taking this in different ways. But um yeah, that kind of helps like just feel a little bit less less shitty about it. But yeah. Yeah. What what what are the uh the questions here?

Remote versus in office, US versus international AI. Yeah, I mean I think we we had this post from Ahmad at Mercury.

I think I think the reason this s struck such a chord uh is you know again it's this remote angle the international angle the ideas around a 10x engineer uh the potential of new AI tools but uh this has been really helpful get to know you and I think um you were getting uh you provided uh entertainment for a lot of people the last 24 hours so I'm glad to hear that you're going to apologize to everybody that that you misled and uh I I am excited to follow uh what you do next.

Yeah. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you so much for having me. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. We'll talk soon. Bye. Fascinating. Fascinating. I think he's handling it quite well. Yeah. And I do think this is a situation where the damage is hopefully minimal to the companies.

It's not It's not like he was working multiple jobs and then there was like a you know the customer database leaked because he wrote bad code because he was working multiple jobs. too stressed out. There's no there's no one alleging that yet, at least that we've seen.

And I think the founders that hired him and then fired him in general, yeah, probably noticed it pretty quickly. This is not like somebody joining a big tech company and working there for 5 years, not doing any work and just sort of like being a cog in the machine. Yeah. And so, yeah, ultimately it's unfortunate.

Silicon Valley runs on trust. Yes. He violated that trust.

Uh but uh I was happy to see that he was you know really apologetic and and that's the thing about the startup ecosystem like we like Silicon Valley has really really leaned into the trust thing to the point where a venture capitalist can shake your hand and say I'm going to invest a million dollars and the expectation is that they actually do that and they don't back out and if they do back out it's it's a big thing it's a big deal and so um yeah even even though you know I don't know how I don't know how ironclad every work contract is e like we were going back and forth on like does is there a specific no moonlighting clause that describes exactly what you can do in your free time and can you go do dash or Uber Eats on the side or can you take a you know you know c can you earn an ex creator pay pay share uh like revshare like does that count as moonlighting you're posting you're making 200 bucks or a thousand bucks from X is that moonlighting you know maybe there's not but people know what full-time means and if I send you an offer I'm I'm offering you a full-time job I'm expecting you not to take another full-time job.

Like maybe, yeah, maybe, you know, someone throws you 50 bucks to, you know, uh, walk their dog once, you know, once on the random on the weekend, but the idea is that you're not taking a very similar job at another company. So, uh, it seems pretty clear even if there's no major like legal ramifications.

So, I don't know. He seems he seems like he's he's he's handling it well and and and going on the the correct apology tour. And, um, there could be the good ending here. Yeah. Lulu said, "Come clean. Be sorry. " He did that. Be willing to laugh at yourself. Embrace a good meme. Yep. Worker 17. He did that.

Feed the curiosity. What was it like? What did you learn? Don't sugarcoat. I thought it was interesting that that he would have been hilarious if he came out and said, "Oh, yeah. I'm running, you know, uh, 10 Codeex agents. I'm running Devon. I'm using Cloud Code. " He was just like, "No, I just worked really hard.

" Yeah. And, uh, I don't do anything other than than Yeah. It is always tough with this stuff because, you know, like somebody who would lie about working multiple jobs might just come on here and lie to us. But he seemed he seemed he seemed uh sincere.

And so I I'm I'm I'm inclined to believe that he is an insomniac and just was working three jobs, 40 hours a week each and that's 120 hours and that's, you know, Morgan Stanley investment bank associate. Yeah. You know, work.

But it it does raise this question of like like there are people out there who are willing to work 100 hours and if they go to Wall Street they get comped on that immediately and startups don't really have a mechanism not necessarily immediately.

No, but but the the the comp and the expectation is matched and and like I think Wall Street has like absorbed that that latent demand for work and capacity of young people who are down to grind basically and they can choose to opt out of it and getting a different job. Uh but they kind of know what they're going into.

Like no one no one no one shows up at Goldman Sachs and is like oh my god I had no idea I was going to have to like do a slide deck on Saturday, right? Um, but in startups like there's kind of this like, hey, we're we have this, you know, good work culture. It's kind of chill.

Let's, you know, do 40 hours a week, but then, you know, also there's no real way to make three times as much if you're willing to work three times as hard. So, yeah, it's an interesting it's an interesting story. Yeah. And to be honest, he he posted yesterday, he said, "There's a lot being said about me right now.

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, which I do believe. " He said, "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.

That doesn't feel completely true because he's in conversation with the CEOs that had hired him. But building is the only thing I've truly known and it's what I'll keep doing. Earlier today, the timing of this is amazing. Earlier today, I signed an exclusive founding deal to be founding engineer.

Say exclusive at one company and one company only. They were the only ones willing to bet on me at this time. I actually think there's a lot of companies that would take a bet on him now. And it just has to be you have to promise me that you're going to work for this just for us exclusively.

And and I think the right thing to do for this next company is try to bring him out to SF or wherever they're based because he will probably spend 18 hours a day in the office. Yeah. It's so much easier to deal with a with a known unknown or like a known risk factor.

It's the devil, you know, like forever this will follow him as like, "Hey, monitor this guy. make sure he's not working a second job. If you scroll down on this post, he says, "I'm pissed and I've got something to prove.

" It's like he had a very aggressive posting style and he came on very like sweet and nice and just like kind of contrite. It seems like he got in a bad spot. He made some bad decisions. He's sorry about it and he's now got something to prove. Yeah. And he's now infamous. Yeah. Infamous. Well, that's a fun story.

Uh I'm glad we were able to get him on and cover it. That's uh that's part of the beauty of this show. live baby. Uh anyway, news maxing. Yeah. And I think that provides some good closure to this chapter of the timeline. Yeah. Um we have a million messages coming in from various sources.

Um I can go through a little bit of the stories if you want. Um we got to ring the gong though because the US economy added 147,000 new jobs. Let's go. uh manufacturers are it's a it's a it's like a a very very slight job speed. It's not actually that big of news, but we're very excited.

Uh Joe Weisenthal has a post in the stack somewhere where he says um breaking it's a beat 147,000 new jobs. Unemployment rate falls to 4. 1% last month revised higher. Analysts had expected 106k new jobs and a 4. 3% unemployment rate. So we love to see it.

Uh stark contrast with the calls uh from our president to reduce rates. If if um jobs report is good, it's hard to argue uh to to drop them very so manufacturers are pausing hiring amid tariff uncertainty while unemployment fell partly because fewer people are looking for work. So that's never a good sign.

But it does seem like uh the the American consumer seems resilient and things are uh we're we're staying in the kangaroo market. We're neither we're neither, you know, it's not so over, but we're maybe not so back just yet.

We're kind of uh right back where we started at the beginning of the year in terms of the stock market rates. Uh anyway, um the CEO of Ford had a controversial quote in the Wall Street Journal. He's agilled. He's agyp.

has been uh talking to Daario over at Anthropic and clearly uh the so the CEO of of Ford said uh AI will replace quote literally half of all white collar workers which is something that was definitely said on Dwaresh Patel first I think Shto might have mentioned that and then Adario mentioned it in the post as well and uh Anthropic's been kind of noodling on this and then uh OpenAI and Meta have kind of stayed back from that and a lot of the other labs have kind of said I don't know like you know Dar I think the quote from Sam was like Dario is a scientist like you should apply more scientific rigor here to like do this prediction like this is a very jar light cap over that's right Bradap at open AI was pushing back a little bit but look uh the when he was making these comments he was also talking about just how advanced Xiaomi and these other Chinese e EV manufacturers are.

So this was coming from a broader conversation and it's a good, you know, ultimately whether or not he actually believes this is true, he's signaling to the market that he's he's on top of this trend.

Y and uh if this does turn out to be the case, it's very possible that, you know, Ford will will be a beneficiary in some way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a it's it's tough business.

And I'm sure he's uh looking to the Chinese manufacturers and looking at their their COG structure and their their SGNA spend relative to revenue and and seeing how they can benchmark.

Um not that not that the Chinese uh EV manufacturers are necessarily adopting AI any faster than Ford, but uh it's certainly the idea of like how the shape of the business will be a little bit. They do like facial recognition tech. I think it will like you walk up to your car, it'll unlock Yeah. for you.

I think there's a story about the Ford CEO dailying a Chinese car just to get a taste of like, okay, we need to step it up a bunch of different ways. Yeah. Yeah. Um, in other news, Yeah. There's no reason that that Ford can't catch up on these type of things, right?

Uh, in other news, we have a massive story out of the United Kingdom, folks. Uh, Britain's royals gave up their luxury train, citing fiscal restraint. Uh, this was sent to us by a friend.

Uh, in an era of hard choices for economies around the world, Britain's royal family is also playing up its part, waving farewell to perhaps its most extravagant mode of transport,