Speaking at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit in Atlanta, CEO Ryan Breslow told the audience that Bolt’s HR team was “creating problems that didn’t exist.” Later on LinkedIn, he said, “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”
Breslow cofounded Bolt in 2014 out of his Stanford dorm room, building it into a major player in online checkout before it soared to an $11 billion valuation in 2022. He stepped down as CEO that same year amid allegations of misleading investors and inflating metrics during the company’s 2021 fundraising. The SEC subpoenaed both Breslow and Bolt over potential securities law violations, TechCrunch reported.
By early 2025, with revenue at a $28 million, Bolt, now 31, returned as CEO with unanimous board approval. It’s been reported that he has since reduced the company’s headcount by approximately 30%, including the full HR team.
Bolt now operates with about 100 employees, according to reports.
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‘We did get rid of our HR team’
On LinkedIn after the event, Breslow posted: “I can confirm. We did get rid of our HR team. It needed to happen. Anyone who loves creating problems versus solving problems has no role at a startup.”
He also distinguished what he shed and what he kept. In a prior LinkedIn post, he wrote that “HR is the wrong energy, format and approach. People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.”
At the Fortune summit, he confirmed Bolt has since brought on a smaller people operations team to handle required training and serve as an employee resource.
Some HR pros in the comments didn’t see the value in this announcement. “So basically, people ops is just human resources with a new name,” said one user. Another responded that “this increases an organization’s risk and turnover will escalate.” And: “Shell game. Changing the name doesn’t make the work HR does go away.”
An organizational turnaround
The move reflects a broader workforce reset, which Breslow says was necessary to survive. When he returned, he gave employees hired under prior leadership 60 days to adapt to what he described as a “wartime,” startup-style culture. The turnaround also included ending four-day workweeks and unlimited PTO policies the firm had previously offered as a “conscious leadership” strategy, according to his LinkedIn posts.
By his own account, 99% of those employees could not make the adjustment. He attributed the breakdown to what he called a culture of “entitlement” that developed during Bolt’s high-spend growth years, when employees “didn’t have to get their hands dirty.”
“We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done, and there is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot,” Breslow said at the conference.
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