A CEO has sparked a fierce debate in corporate circles after sacking the entire human resources department at his San Francisco-based payments fintech, saying the team was "creating problems that didn't exist" — and that most of those problems disappeared the moment HR did. Ryan Breslow, chief executive of Bolt, made the move as part of a major corporate restructuring, according to a Fortune report.
The drastic measure comes as part of a broader turnaround effort at the fintech company, which has seen its market valuation plummet from approximately $11 billion in 2022 to around $300 million.
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Breslow, who returned to the helm as CEO in 2025, has been aggressively cutting costs, slashing overall staff by roughly 30%, and shifting the company toward a leaner, startup-style operational structure focused on efficiency and artificial intelligence.
Ryan Breslow said the company had become slow and inefficient, with a culture of “entitlement.” He explained that the major changes are aimed at bringing back a fast, startup-style work culture focused on execution.
Instead of a full HR department, Bolt now reportedly has a much smaller “people operations” team, reported Fortune.
Breslow said that the problem was not just limited to the HR department, but that Bolt as a whole had become less productive. He said employees had become too comfortable during the company's boom years, which led to a slowdown in performance.
Breslow added, “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. Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.”
Upon returning as CEO, Ryan Breslow stated that he granted employees hired under the previous management structure a 60-day window to adapt to the company's leaner, startup-style culture.
However, the transition proved unsuccessful for the vast majority, with Breslow revealing that “99%” of them failed to adapt. As a direct result, the chief executive eventually terminated nearly the entire existing leadership team to rebuild the company's management 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 told Fortune.
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