I’ve been on Twitter since 2007. According to the stats, I have 39.8k tweets in that time.

In those seven years, the feed has changed a lot. It’s gone from a largely personal feed with friends and a few colleagues to a feed that is followed by CEOs, journalists, industry experts and venture capitalists, among others. The content has changed from random events — my first ever tweet was “Breathing” (thanks, Jason Del Rey for looking it up) — to a period where it was mostly about Groupon. Now it’s a mix of things that I’m passionate about.

I’ve always been a call-it-like-it-is person. I try to be thoughtful, critical and (at times) funny.

People have the usual disclaimers on their feeds: these aren’t my company’s views; retweets aren’t endorsements; etc. When I was independent, running my own company, the “these aren’t my company’s views” disclaimer was unnecessary. Although I’ve never explicitly said it, retweets haven’t been endorsements. I try to retweet things that are interesting and thought provoking. Sometimes I agree with them; sometimes I don’t. I tweet out things that are in direct conflict to my views, if I think the author has made a cogent argument.

Now that I work for a large public company, I try to be cognizant of how people might misattribute any given tweet. Here’s my thinking so far; it will likely change as I tweet and get feedback on it.

PayPal-related tweets

I joined PayPal because I believe in the company and what we’re trying to do. I will tweet about things that I find interesting. No one at PayPal gives me a list of things to tweet about. It’s stuff that I’m genuinely interested in. In many cases, I find the stories through reading my Twitter feed or because a journalist sent it to me or a friend sent it. Sometimes, it was on an internal distribution list and I thought it was something I think my audience might find interesting.

PayPal has a culture of being honest and direct. (Great fit for me!) I’m a big believer that the best products come from very smart people passionately debating products, rather than people blindly sucking up to a “visionary”. But those debates belong inside the company, among colleagues. You do a big disservice to the process if you air those differences in public.

You’ll see more PayPal tweets than you did before. This feed has always been about what interests and excited me — and my job really excites me! But this isn’t a PayPal PR feed. If you want that, follow @paypal. For the record, PayPal PR does not edit the content of this feed. They have no pre-approval of what I tweet. (Given how much I tweet, that would be a big job!)

Payments industry-related tweets

Because a lot of people have followed me for how closely I track the payments industry, I plan to continue to tweet about the industry. But a lot of these tweets will just be links to interesting content about the payments industry, without comments. (Especially in the case of direct competitors.)

All other tweets

As you might have noticed, I have strong opinions on things like net neutrality, equality, finance, venture capital and the state of journalism. These are all outside the scope of my job. I don’t even know the company’s position on this stuff (or if there even is a position). I’ve got a big role as it is without tracking down all of this stuff.

But I think have important ideas and commentary to contribute to those debates. I plan to continue those tweets as long as there is engagement and interest.

I recognize that it can be confusing because in some cases, I will actually be speaking on behalf of PayPal. But that’ll be in media outlets, on the official PayPal blogs or when I’m speaking at conferences for PayPal.

If you’re a journalist and are ever wondering whether I’m speaking on behalf of the company, please email me at rocky@paypal.

We’re all living in a grand experiment where the lines between work and personal; public and private are blurring. Fun times.