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 May 19 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 University 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 explained why employees “had to be 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,” 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 at the summit.
Across various sectors, AI has changed the traditional HR structure. Companies like IBM, Google, and Amazon have restructured and downsized their HR teams—some replacing employees with AI to process administrative tasks, recruitment, and benefits. As Fast Company reported exclusively, a new survey found that 62% of Amazon and Walmart employees are concerned about HR decisions at those companies increasingly being outsourced to AI.
Recently, rumors circulated that Bolt employees had their wages withheld, and that some of the company’s contractors were unpaid. Breslow denied those claims at the summit. Instead, he said the company has been successful with a smaller, “more junior” team, “who work a lot harder” and “have better energy.”
Time—and Bolt’s next valuation—will tell if Breslow’s strategy works out in the long run.
