Amritansh Raghav abruptly resigned as executive vice president of engineering at Seattle-based Outreach on Thursday after making an insensitive comment during a staff meeting earlier in the week.
Raghav on Tuesday sent an email to the Outreach team apologizing "for making a comment in poor taste."
"I realize that while I attempted to make light of a question at the all hands this morning with a joke, it was not received that way," Raghav wrote in the email obtained by the Business Journal. "I, too, am always learning and will make more of an effort to be cognizant of the words I choose."
An Outreach spokesperson confirmed Raghav left the company but didn't elaborate further on the comments that led to his resignation. Raghav's apology email was the same day Outreach decided to lay off 12% of its staff, about 120 people.
"We’re grateful for Amritansh’s many contributions to building a great engineering team and appreciate his commitment to ensuring a successful transition to new engineering leadership,” the Outreach spokesperson said in a statement.
Raghav declined to comment on the situation when reached by the Business Journal.
Raghav worked at Outreach for more than four years, according to his LinkedIn page. Between various stints, he spent more than 16 years total at Microsoft throughout his career, and his most recent role there was as corporate vice president.
Outreach, founded in 2014, helps sales reps create playbooks, manage deals and analyze their sales pipelines. The company has 6,000 clients, including Zoom and DocuSign. Outreach in June 2021 raised $200 million and hit a valuation of more than $4.4 billion. In October of 2021, Outreach acquired Indianapolis-based revenue intelligence software company Canopy.io but didn't disclose the financial terms.
In August 2022, however, Outreach confirmed it had laid off less than 5% of its staff, followed by about 70 employees in February of this year. The company then laid off 5% of its employees in August of this year, after which Outreach had about 1,000 employees.
Along with Tuesday's announced layoffs, an Outreach spokesperson said at the time the company is "moving certain limited business functions to Mexico City and India," adding that the company aims to be profitable next year. In addition to Seattle, Outreach has offices in Indianapolis, Atlanta, London and Prague.
