Bolt CEO says firing his HR team made the company’s problems disappear

Earlier this year, fintech company Bolt laid off 30% of its workforce. In an internal Slack message, CEO Ryan Breslow told employees: “Going forward, Bolt will be operating as a much leaner organization and leveraging AI at our core.” On Tuesday during Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit, Breslow shared the reason behind the layoffs—and why he decided to cut Bolt’s HR team entirely. “We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist,” Breslow said. “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.” In 2022, Breslow stepped down as CEO of Bolt after the company he founded from his Stanford dorm room started to see a decline in its riches. From 2022 to 2024, the company’s valuation dipped from $11 billion to $300 million. When Breslow returned to lead the company in 2025, he said that employees had to be let go because they developed a sense of entitlement. “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,” Breslow said. “Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.” As a result, Breslow removed almost the entire leadership team. “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. About a year ago, Breslow wrote in a LinkedIn post that “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach.” Instead, the company adopted a “people ops” team to oversee required training and be a resource for Bolt employees. “People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed,” Breslow continued in the LinkedIn post. “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,” Breslow added