PayPal's Agrawal is out of a job after Twitter tirade

Agrawal blasted his colleagues on Twitter, but says he quit before it all went down

It was less than two months that PayPal hired Rakesh "Rocky" Agrawal as its new director of strategy. Now he is already out of the job.

What, you may ask, could get someone fired so quickly? How about going and blasting some of your colleagues on Twitter? Yeah, that should do it.

Agrawal may not have spent much time at PayPal, but he left in pretty in a spectacular, and very memorable, fashion.

Here is how it all played out on Twitter over the weekend:

It all started on Friday, when Agrawal took to Twitter in order to blast some of his colleagues, including PayPal VP of global communications Christina Smedley, who he called a "useless piece of shit," as well as someone named "Don Christmas," (most likely an autocorrect of PayPal retail chief Don Kingsborough), who he said should be fired.

The tweets have, of course, since been deleted, but not before they were copied and pasted by Business Insider (note to self: don't embed tweets, take screencaps of them).

Agrawal tried to explain the tweets by saying that he meant to send as direct messages (dude, didn't you learn anything from Anthony Weiner?)

And while neither Marcus, nor the company's VP of growth Stan Chudnovsky, were specifically named in those tweets, Agrawal apologized to both of them the next morning (note that the person he most pointedly insulted, Smedley, was not included, nor was Kingsborough).

Despite that apology, PayPal was having none of it. And so, on Saturday, they fired Agrawal.

Or so they would have you believe. According to Agrawal, though, he actually quit the company before any of this went down.

He even posted his letter of resignation, to Marcus and Chudnovsky, which is dated Friday, May 2nd.

So what will Agrawal do now? It seems like he is going to be starting his own company.

If you are wondering what spurred him to want to quit in the first place, so far there has been no indication of that.

So what is the lesson here? First, if you're having a bad night, or you really hate your co-workers, Twitter is bad idea. And from PayPal's perspective, perhaps they should have thought twice before they hired someone who had previously called their point of sale system a "piece of shit." (Apparently, Agrawal really likes that phrase).

Before joining PayPal, Agrawal spent the last seven years as a Principal Analyst at reDesign mobile, where his job was to "advise companies on product strategy, marketing and strategic partnerships with an emphasis on payments, mobile, social and local applications."

In the past, he also spent a year as a product manager at Microsoft and three years as the Program Director of AOL Search.

VatorNews has reached out to Agrawal to find out his motivations for leaving, as well as his future plans. We also reached out to PayPal to confirm the timeline of events. We will update if we learn more from either side.

(Image source: plus.google.com)