Bolt CEO fires entire HR team — blames them for – Business News
The 31-year-old CEO of a traditionally troubled fintech company, Bolt Financial, revealed this week that he fired his entire HR division as half of a 30% discount in headcount earlier this yr.
Ryan Breslow made the admission on Tuesday at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit, the place he blamed the downsizing, partially, on an inept, lazy and entitled employees.
“We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist,” the CEO, who as soon as described Silicon Valley as a “boys club” full of “mob bosses,” mentioned on the summit.
Bolt Financial CEO Ryan Breslow. Getty Images
“Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”
Breslow reportedly instructed his workers that “going forward, Bolt will be operating as a much leaner organization and leveraging AI at our core.”
He framed the transfer as a regression from a “larger” company back to “start up mode.”
“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 mentioned.
Breslow additional asserted that a tradition of laziness and “entitlement” had grown throughout the company in his absence from Jan. 31, 2022 to March 2025.
Speaking on the alleged delinquents, he mentioned that “Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.”
“We have a team a quarter of the size, who are much more junior, who work a lot harder, who have better energy,” Breslow mentioned.
“And our customers are telling us, ‘We haven’t had this type of attention in four years.’”
Bolt Financial
Bolt was based in 2014 and makes checkout funds technology. The company noticed a whopping valuation collapse from $11 billion in 2022 to $300 million in 2025.
A number of short months after Breslow’s departure from Bolt, the company was sued by its largest buyer, Authentic Brands Group, as a result of Bolt’s merchandise did not combine with Forever 21, leading to $150 million in losses for the clothes company, in keeping with Yahoo Finance.
Breslow claimed that this was a “transparent attempt” to renegotiate the businesses’ agreements. Bolt and ABG settled in 2022.
