For most executives, that’s a sentence likely to provoke intense anxiety. But for Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow, it was unavoidable.
Speaking at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit on Tuesday, the 31-year-old defended sweeping workforce cuts at Bolt—including a recent layoff affecting roughly 30% of employees—as well as his decision to eliminate the company’s HR team.
“We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist,” Breslow told Fortune editorial director Kristin Stoller. “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”
The move may sound drastic, but Breslow said it was a necessary step to resurrect the struggling fintech company he first cofounded in 2014 in his Stanford dorm room.
After soaring to an $11 billion valuation in 2022, employing thousands of workers, Bolt’s fortunes reversed sharply. Breslow stepped down as CEO the same year, and by 2024, the company’s valuation had reportedly fallen to roughly $300 million—a decline of nearly 97%—while multiple rounds of layoffs dramatically reduced its headcount. Breslow attributed the downturn to poor decision-making and overspending.
Breslow returned as CEO in 2025, operating in what he calls “wartime.”
“We’re back in startup mode again, and those HR professionals have really important insights when you’re in a peacetime and when you’re at a larger company,” he said, adding that Bolt has since brought on a smaller people operations team to oversee required training and serve as a resource for employees.
While Breslow didn’t get into the specifics of the exact differences, he wrote on LinkedIn last year that, “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach. People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.”
“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,” he added at the Fortune conference.
In recent months, Bolt has been plagued by rumors that it was taking back employees’ paychecks and that some contractors went unpaid. In his conversation with Fortune on Tuesday, Breslow denied that Bolt withheld funds from the staff.
Bolt employees developed a sense of ‘entitlement’ and weren’t working hard—so he let most of them go
Beyond HR, Breslow said Bolt had fallen into a broader productivity slump, with employees growing too comfortable during the company’s boom years.
“There’s a sense of entitlement that had festered across the company, and people who felt empowered, felt entitled— but weren’t actually working hard. And this is the number one thing that I had to battle,” Breslo said. “Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.”
When he returned as CEO, he said he gave employees who had been hired under the prior leadership structure 60 days to adapt to a leaner, startup-style culture. But the result was that “99%” couldn’t adapt, and Breslow eventually got rid of nearly the entire leadership team and started from scratch.
“They had gotten used to working at a company where they didn’t have to get their hands dirty, and could spend a lot of money, and we just didn’t have that money to spend anymore, and we didn’t have that luxury,” he said.
The shift, he added, required abandoning some of the leadership ideals he had previously embraced. This included eliminating four-day workweeks and unlimited PTO.
“As someone who was a pioneer of conscious leadership,” he said. “I had to bring a company back to a very gritty place.”
Now, Breslow argued that the strategy is paying off.
Bolt currently markets itself as the “One SuperApp to rule them all”—a one-stop shop for sending money, earning rewards, and trading cryptocurrency—and has slimmed down to roughly 100 employees. According to Breslow, the company is succeeding without what he described as “big credentialed, pedigreed professionals.”
“We have a team a quarter of the size, who are much more junior, who work a lot harder, who have better energy,” he said. “And our customers are telling us, ‘We haven’t had this type of attention in four years.’”
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