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Uber has lost yet another top executive. The company’s head of finance, Gautam Gupta, is leaving to join a startup, Uber told the Wall Street Journal.
After its former CFO Brent Callinicos left Uber in 2015, Gupta became the top finance executive at the company. It’s not a great time for the ride-hail player to lose the person who would ostensibly steer the company through the IPO process, which people speculated could begin in the next two years.
That may be pushed back given the company’s many recent scandals, from a lawsuit brought against it by Alphabet to allegations of sexism at the company.
Uber is now looking for someone to fill the CFO role Callinicos left vacant. The company’s head of strategic finance Prabir Adarkar will be heading up the finance department in the interim.
“Gautam is a world-class financial talent,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in a statement. “Over the last four years, he has been indispensable in helping build Uber from an idea into the business it is today. We couldn’t have done it without him, and I will miss his energy, focus and infectious enthusiasm. All of us at Uber wish him well in this next challenge.”
The company is doing a tad better financially in the first quarter. Uber narrowed its losses to $708 million in the first three months of the year from $991 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to the Journal report. The ride-hail player also generated $3.4 billion in revenue this past quarter, an 18 percent jump from the last three months of last year.
Gupta will be the third executive to either step down or be fired from the company just this week. On Monday, both the company’s New York General Manager Josh Mohrer and one of the top self-driving engineers Anthony Levandowski left the company — under completely different circumstances. While Mohrer was leaving to pursue a role at Tusk Ventures, Levandowski was fired for not cooperating with the lawsuit Alphabet has brought against it.
The three now former Uber staffers will join other top executives who’ve left in the past few months. There was its vice president of product Ed Baker, the president of the company Jeff Jones, the vice president of engineering Amit Singhal, the head of the policy and communications team Rachel Whetstone, the head of mapping Brian McClendon and other top self-driving engineers like Raffi Krikorian.
That will likely continue as the company prepares for Eric Holder and Tammy Albaran to produce the results of the investigation they conducted into former Uber engineer Susan Fowler’s claims of sexism and sexual harassment at the company. Sources say some engineers in the self-driving department — which has already lost at least a dozen of its top staffers in the last few months — have begun looking for outside opportunities. Most recently, some Levandowski loyalists have become angered by his firing.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
