On Friday night and early Saturday morning, PayPal’s Director of Strategy Rakesh Agrawal quit his job and then made several tweets expressing his opinions about his former colleagues at the company. They were not positive, nor were they coherently expressed, even by 140-character standards.
(Photo Credit: petesimon/Flickr)
The Wire offers a good chronology of events, here. (Cussword-averse people, beware: in some of Agrawal’s tweets, the only clear words are the ones you can’t say on TV — although it appears that his autocorrect also likes to clean up his language, just like everyone else’s.)
The short version appears to be this:
- At about 9:30 p.m. on Friday night, while at New Orleans’ Jazz Fest, Agrawal emailed his two-week notice for his position as director of strategy at PayPal, asking, if possible, to be released immediately in order to start on a new project.
- At around 1 a.m., Agrawal started tweeting about his (now former) colleagues, calling out one in particular, whom he characterized as a “useless middle manager.”
- He then started tweeting at Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, offering to make the company into a $50 billion operation.
- A few hours later, he deleted the tweets and blamed them variously on “sleep deprivation,” tweets that were meant to be DMs, and a new phone.
Shortly afterward, PayPal tweeted the following:
(Via The Wire)
Agrawal then tweeted his resignation email, which he says he sent prior to his Twitter tirade, and announced that he’s started a new company, which he says already has at least one investor.
What’s the lesson for the rest of us? Well, nothing new. But it’s worth stating again: do not tweet anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face, or print and post above your desk. And don’t DM anything you wouldn’t tweet to thousands of followers.
Also, if you’re sleep-deprived, angry, jetlagged, or otherwise not at your best, back slowly away from the keyboard or mobile device, and return when you’re rested.
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