Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s management style has raised concerns among managers and board members at Ola Electric, according to a report. His “relentless pace and management style” has reportedly raised questions on safety and the business model, stated a report following interviews with about two dozen former and current employees. This comes amid two-wheeler supply chain woes and dip in sales.
Former employees told Bloomberg that the company was an exciting place to work at the time it started operations in 2013. Aggarwal gradually began working on the creation of Ola Electric, and launched the Futurefactory as well as its EV offerings. But inside the company, things had turned hostile.
According to the Bloomberg report, Aggarwal ripped up presentations because of a missing page number, called teams ‘useless’, and directed Punjabi epithets at staff. Aggarwal reportedly cut short hour-long meetings within minutes because he was not happy about a superfluous sentence in a memo or a crooked paper clip or the quality of printing paper.
He reportedly made an employee run three laps around the several-acre-large electric two-wheeler plant upon finding an entryway shut that should have been left open.
Retaining C-suite level executives was also becoming an issue. Zilingo’s former CFO Ramesh Bafna, in fact, did not join Ola Electric even after accepting employment offers.
While nothing much has been spoken by the boards of both the companies in meetings, some top executives who have left the company raised questions about the ethics of a share-swap deal with a startup founded with Aggarwal’s younger brother, Ankush Aggarwal, who heads Ola Electric’s financial services unit.
Aggarwal had in an interview last month said that passions and emotions ran high and that they were not on an easy journey. “But I don’t want to choose an easier journey for myself or for Ola. My anger, my frustration – that’s me as a whole,” he had said.
Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, both alumni of IIT-Mumbai, founded Ola in 2010. The company was incorporated as ANI Technologies Pvt.
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