Redwood Supplies loses COO amid layoffs, restructuring

Redwood Supplies chief working officer Chris Lister is leaving the battery recycling firm to retire, TechCrunch has discovered — and he’s not the one government that just lately departed.

Lister, a former vp who led operations at Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, has been with Redwood since late 2023. He began as the corporate’s chief provide chain officer and was shortly promoted to the COO function in 2024. The promotion put him nearer within the org chart to Redwood founder and CEO JB Straubel, who was Tesla’s longtime chief know-how officer and at the moment sits on the automaker’s board.

Redwood Supplies just lately knowledgeable staff that Lister was retiring, in line with an worker who was granted anonymity to discuss the announcement. The corporate confirmed Lister’s departure to TechCrunch on Thursday. “We want him the very best in his retirement,” a spokesperson mentioned through e-mail.

Information of Lister’s retirement comes only a few days after TechCrunch revealed Redwood Supplies just lately laid off round 10% of its workforce, or roughly 135 staff.

These cuts had been a part of a restructuring that Straubel advised staff about in an e-mail seen by TechCrunch earlier this week. He mentioned the shuffle will assist help the corporate’s rising vitality storage enterprise. Redwood has just lately signed offers with automaker Rivian and synthetic intelligence firm Crusoe to supply refurbished batteries that can be utilized as grid storage.

Different executives have left Redwood in current months, too.

Bradley Mayhew, Redwood’s vp of built-in provide chain and a former Tesla worker, left the corporate earlier this month, in line with LinkedIn. Guillermo Urquiza, Redwood’s vp of mechanical engineering — and one other former Tesla worker — left in March. And Carlos Lozano, the corporate’s vp of producing, left earlier this 12 months for a management function at Panasonic, in line with LinkedIn.

Mayhew, Urquiza, and Lozano didn’t reply to requests for remark. Redwood declined to particularly touch upon their departures, however famous that Straubel mentioned in his all-staff e-mail that he’s attempting to scale back layers of administration on the firm.

Straubel additionally advised staff in his message that “elements of the corporate have expanded quicker than wanted” and that he was “extra excited than ever with our path forward as we construct essentially the most built-in and cost-effective essential supplies and vitality storage enterprise on the planet.”

“We’re assured that we are able to ship on our essential tasks with a smaller workforce that’s extra centered,” he wrote. “We now have efficiently tailored to adjustments out there which have bankrupted a lot of our opponents.”