The Bolt CEO fired HR team decision has sparked a wide conversation about modern workplace culture and what it takes to revive a struggling tech company. Ryan Breslow made the announcement at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit on Tuesday, defending the move as unavoidable rather than extreme. Moreover, he said the HR team had been creating problems that did not actually exist and that those problems vanished the moment he let them go.
Breslow returned to Bolt as CEO in 2025 after stepping down in 2022, describing the current environment as wartime. Furthermore, he said that HR professionals have real value in peacetime and at larger companies but that Bolt needed something different. Consequently, he replaced the traditional HR function with a smaller people operations team focused on required training and serving as a basic employee resource.
How Bolt went from $11 billion to $300 million
To understand why the Bolt CEO fired HR team and made sweeping cuts, it helps to understand how far the company fell. Bolt soared to an $11 billion valuation in 2022 while employing thousands of workers. However, the company’s fortunes reversed sharply after that. Moreover, by 2024 its valuation had reportedly collapsed to approximately $300 million, a decline of nearly 97% in just two years.
Breslow attributed the collapse to poor decision-making and overspending during the boom period. Furthermore, he said employees who joined during that era developed habits that were incompatible with running a leaner and more focused operation. Consequently, when he returned as CEO, he gave employees hired under the previous leadership structure 60 days to adapt to a startup-style culture.
The result was stark. Breslow said that 99% of those employees could not make the adjustment. Additionally, he eventually eliminated nearly the entire leadership team and rebuilt from scratch. He also ended several employee-friendly policies that Bolt had championed during better times, including four-day workweeks and unlimited paid time off.
The entitlement problem Breslow says he had to fix
Beyond the HR decision, Breslow described a deeper cultural problem at Bolt. He said a sense of entitlement had spread across the company during the boom years. Moreover, employees felt empowered but were not actually working hard. Furthermore, he identified that disconnect as the number one challenge he faced when he returned.
Employees had grown used to a working environment where they did not have to get their hands dirty. Additionally, they had access to generous budgets that no longer existed. Consequently, the shift to a lean startup culture was too difficult for most of them to accept.
Breslow was direct in saying that most of those employees simply had to go. He also acknowledged the personal tension that came with making these changes. As someone who had previously championed conscious leadership and progressive workplace policies, he said he had to bring the company back to what he called a very gritty place. Therefore, the turnaround required him to abandon some of his own earlier ideals about how companies should be run.
What Bolt looks like now and what comes next
Today Bolt operates with roughly 100 employees. Breslow describes the current team as smaller, more junior, harder working, and more energetic than the workforce he inherited when he returned. Moreover, he says customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with clients telling him they have not received this level of attention in four years.
Bolt currently markets itself as a one-stop app for sending money, earning rewards, and trading cryptocurrency. Additionally, Breslow has said the company is succeeding without what he called big credentialed and pedigreed professionals. Consequently, the leaner model appears to be producing results, at least according to his own account of the company’s current trajectory.
Breslow also denied rumors that Bolt had taken back employee paychecks or left contractors unpaid, calling those claims false. Furthermore, the company’s new people operations team is designed to maintain basic HR functions without what he sees as the bureaucratic overhead that slowed the company down during its previous phase.
Source: Fortune
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