Tesla vice president Sreela Venkataratnam, who has worked with the automaker for 11 years, has quit. She was one of the only two women VPs in the company. Announcing her departure in a LinkedIn post this week, Venkataratnam praised Tesla but, in comments, said working there was "not for the faint of heart."
She described her tenure at the company as "nothing short of extraordinary" and said that she was proud of the company's growth to become the $700 billion mammoth it is today.
"Leaving as a Vice President (one of only two women VPs in the company) with annual revenues soaring close to $100B, market cap to $700B (reaching $1T during the pandemic) and cars delivered in a year to more than 1.8 million, I am proud of how much we’ve achieved together," Venkataratnam wrote.
Moreover, responding to a comment from Tesla's former CFO Jason Wheeler congratulating her for an "amazing run at a company that wasn’t always easy to work at," Venkataratnam said that working for Tesla is "definitely not for the faint of heart."
Venkataratnam is one of several Tesla senior employees to quit in recent months. Drew Baglino, Tesla's senior VP of powertrain and electrical engineering, who worked with the company for 18 years, quit shortly before the layoffs began in April. Another VP of public policy and business development Rohan Patel also left the company at the same time.
Rich Otto, the former head of product launches at Tesla, quit amid the mass layoffs at the company.
"It's a company I love and that has given me so much, but has also taken its pound of flesh," he wrote on LinkedIn. "Great companies are made up of equal parts great people and great products, and the latter are only possible when its people are thriving. The recent layoffs that are rocking the company and its morale have thrown this harmony out of balance and it's hard to see the long-game. It was time for a change."
In April, as Tesla cut over 10 percent of its workforce, Musk told employees that the company needed to be "absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction."
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