Redwood Materials COO Chris Lister is leaving the battery recycling company to retire, TechCrunch has learned – and he’s not the only executive to recently depart.
Lister, a former vice president who led operations at Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, has been with Redwood since late 2023. He started as the company’s supply chain director and was quickly promoted to COO in 2024. The promotion moved him closer on the organizational chart to Redwood founder and CEO JB Straubel, who has long served as Tesla’s chief technology officer and currently serves on the automaker’s board of directors.
Redwood Materials recently informed its employees that Lister was retiring, according to an employee granted anonymity to speak about the announcement. The company confirmed Lister’s departure to TechCrunch on Thursday. “We wish him the best in his retirement,” a spokesperson said via email.
News of Lister’s retirement comes just days after the TechCrunch revelation Redwood Materials recently laid off about 10% of its workforce, or about 135 employees.
The cuts were part of a restructuring that Straubel told employees about in an email seen by TechCrunch earlier this week. He said the shakeup would help support the company’s growing energy storage business. Redwood recently signed deals with automaker Rivian and artificial intelligence company Crusoe to supply refurbished batteries that can be used as on-grid storage.
Other executives have also left Redwood in recent months.
Bradley Mayhew, Redwood’s vice president of integrated supply chain and a former Tesla employee, left the company earlier this month, according to LinkedIn. Guillermo Urquiza, Redwood’s vice president of mechanical engineering — and another former Tesla employee — left the company in March. And Carlos Lozano, the company’s vice president of manufacturing, left earlier this year to take a leadership role at Panasonic, according to LinkedIn.
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Mayhew, Urquiza and Lozano did not respond to requests for comment. Redwood declined to comment specifically on their departures, but noted that Straubel said in his email to the entire staff that he was trying to reduce management levels at the company.
Straubel also told employees in his message that “parts of the business have grown faster than necessary” and that he was “more excited than ever about the path ahead as we build the most integrated and profitable critical materials and energy storage business in the world.”
“We are confident that we can deliver our critical projects with a smaller, more focused team,” he wrote. “We have successfully adapted to market changes that have led to the bankruptcy of many of our competitors. »
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Sean O’Kane is a journalist who has spent a decade covering the rapidly evolving business and technology of the transportation sector, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News, where he helped break stories on some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted numerous short and long-form videos, did product and editorial photography, and nearly passed out on a plane in the Red Bull Air Race.
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