Redwood Materials chief operating officer Chris Lister is leaving the battery recycling company to retire, TechCrunch has learned — and he’s not the only executive that recently departed.
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 chief supply chain officer and was quickly promoted to the COO role in 2024. The promotion put him closer in the org chart to Redwood founder and CEO JB Straubel, who was Tesla’s longtime chief technology officer and currently sits on the autocreater’s board.
Redwood Materials recently informed employees that Lister was retiring, according to an employee who was 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 declared via email.
News of Lister’s retirement comes just a few days after TechCrunch revealed Redwood Materials recently laid off around 10% of its workforce, or roughly 135 employees.
Those cuts were part of a restructuring that Straubel notified employees about in an email viewed by TechCrunch earlier this week. He declared the shuffle will support support the company’s growing energy storage business. Redwood has recently signed deals with autocreater Rivian and artificial ininformigence company Crusoe to provide refurbished batteries that can be applyd as grid storage.
Other executives have left Redwood in recent months, too.
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 in March. And Carlos Lozano, the company’s vice president of manufacturing, left earlier this year for a leadership role at Panasonic, according to LinkedIn.
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Mayhew, Urquiza, and Lozano didn’t respond to requests for comment. Redwood declined to specifically comment on their departures, but noted that Straubel declared in his all-staff email that he is attempting to reduce layers of management at the company.
Straubel also notified employees in his message that “parts of the company have expanded quicker than necessaryed” and that he was “more excited than ever with our path ahead as we build the most integrated and cost-effective critical materials and energy storage business in the world.”
“We are confident that we can deliver on our critical projects with a compacter team that is more focapplyd,” he wrote. “We have successfully adapted to alters in the market that have bankrupted many of our competitors.”
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