Technology

The Complete Saga (So Far) of PayPal vs. Former Executive Rakesh Agrawal

On Friday night, PayPal's recently hired director of strategy sent out some questionable (and that's being generous) tweets. 

By Polly Mosendz
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This article is from the archive of our partner .

On Friday night, PayPal's recently hired director of strategy sent out some questionable (and that's being generous) tweets. Since then, its been a long, winding road: PayPal has sort of fired him, Agrawal has started a new company, and tweets have become fighting words.

Executive Rakesh "Rocky" Agrawal started tweeting around 1 a.m., and his tweets (which have since been deleted) were the equivalent of slurred words and included the following:

  • "Christina Smedley is a useless. Piece of shit"
  • "Duck you Smedley you useless middle. manager."
  • "People who should be fire from paypal Don Christmas a pool a kick."
  • "Oh. I quit pay a tonight because of self at son and aortic and ah our and hill e a s th." 

Agrawal blamed the late night tweets on a new keyboard and said the messages were intended to be DMs. Sure, new keyboard. Let's go with that. 

The day after the tweets were sent and began circulating the web, PayPal announced Agrawal was no longer with the company:

But apparently, they couldn't fire him, because Agrawal said he quit on Friday night via email. Agrawal later tweeted the following email:

While Agrawal clearly has some issues with Christina Smedley, PayPal's vice president of global communications, he has shown no ill will towards vice president of growth and global strategy Stan Chudnovsky and PayPal's president David Marcus:

As for where he's headed, Agrawal mentions "redesign mobile" in his resignation email. Before the tweets and resignation, Agrawal did take issue with the internet connection at his hotel that was getting in the way of his future:

The "coolest project" is now up to three employees: Agrawal and his assistant, with an honorable mention to his assistant's adorable young daughter. According to reDesign's website, his new company "is a product strategy consulting practice focused on Internet and mobile technologies." It is taking to Twitter to raise funding:

As of 12:13 a.m. on May 5th, Agrawal confirmed that he has at least one investor.

Agrawal has also been actively tweeting about new hires ("Two of the top designers ever about to close. Three of the top biz dev people in discussions") and business plans ("I will set aside equity for the favorite charity of each of the first five employees. Plus a smaller piece for their favorite local business.")

For someone who so actively and publicly wants to document quitting their job, starting a company, raising funds, and forming business plans on Twitter, he should really deal with that pesky keyboard issue:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.