Bolt CEO: HR Was 'Creating Problems That Didn't Exist'

What happens when a company gets rid of its entire HR team? 

According to Ryan Breslow, CEO of fintech company Bolt, it can help make problems “disappear.”

Speaking at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit, Ryan revealed that the company had made the decision to cut its HR department as part of efforts to return it to a more agile, startup-style operating model. 

“We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist,” he said. “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”

Instead of an HR team, Ryan says the company has brought in a smaller “people operations” team. 

This team, he wrote on LinkedIn, is: “More focused on efficiency, less focused on fluff.”

A return to startup culture

Ryan has been making significant changes to the way the company operates since returning as CEO.

After first founding the company in 2014, when he was a student at Stanford University, Ryan led the company through significant growth before stepping down as CEO of Bolt in 2022. 

He then returned as CEO in March 2025, following a 97% valuation drop from the company’s peak of US$11bn. To grow the company again, Ryan says he is operating in “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 told attendees at the Workforce Innovation Summit. 

Operating outside of “peacetime,” Ryan says, involves being part of a leaner organisation – which he says many employees struggled to adapt to upon his return.

“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 shares.

According to Ryan, he gave employees 60 days to work under a more agile model – with those unable to adapt let go.

“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,” he says. “Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.”

Layoffs at Bolt

The cuts to Bolt’s HR team have not been made in isolation. 

In April, the company announced that it was laying off around a third of its employees as part of efforts to develop this lean, startup-style company culture. 

These layoffs, Ryan said on the company’s Slack channel, were “unavoidable.” 

“Going forward, Bolt will be operating as a much leaner organisation and leveraging AI at our core. 

“Developing products and operating in 2026 is very different than it was in prior years and we need to adapt as an organisation to be leaner and more AI-centric than ever to keep up with competition.”

The company previously laid off around 250 employees in 2022 due to restructuring challenges, laid off a further 10% of its workers in January 2023 and announced further layoffs in December of the same year – reducing its workforce by more than half since May 2022.