Above: Rocky Agrawal, PayPal employee.
Breakups are always hard, and sometimes kind of messy. Such is the case between PayPal and its (now former) VP of strategy Rakesh “Rocky” Agrawal, who parted ways as of this weekend.
Agrawal, a former VentureBeat columnist, told VentureBeat that he decided to leave the company prior to taking a vacation to New Orleans for Jazz Fest on Friday. But late Friday night and early Saturday morning he took to Twitter to voice some of his frustrations, in the process insulting some of his coworkers.
The tweets have since been deleted, but not before Business Insider and Valleywag publicized the outburst. Agrawal said he never intended for the messages to be made public. (He indicated that he was using a new Android phone that he wasn’t familiar with.) Among the targets of Agrawal’s Twitter outburts: PayPal head of communications Christina Smedley and PayPal retail chief Don Kingsborough.
Although Agrawal had given notice, PayPal stated yesterday that the insults were grounds for Agrawal’s immediate termination.
Rakesh Agrawal is no longer with the company. Treat everyone with respect. No excuses. PayPal has zero tolerance.—
(@PayPal) May 03, 2014
“I had submitted my resignation with two weeks notice. Clearly they chose not to use that. No one from PayPal contacted me before the tweet,” Agrawal said in an email to VentureBeat. “The last communication I had was that Stan [Chudnovsky, PayPal's VP of growth, strategy, and special ops] was trying to set up a meeting for Monday night to discuss. Clearly someone had other ideas.”
While Agrawal declined to apologize for his earlier comments, he did say he was looking forward to his next business venture, a startup called reDesign Mobile.
“Paypal was not a fit for what I want to do,” Agrawal told us. “By starting reDesign mobile I can build exactly the company I want at the pace I want.”
VentureBeat has reached out to PayPal for further comment about its relationship with Agrawal. We’ll update this post with any new information.
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PayPal parts ways with exec Rakesh ‘Rocky’ Agrawal after Twitter tirade
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