They were creating problems that didn’t exist – Bolt CEO defends firing his entire HR team

Bolt’s CEO has defended his decision to fire the company’s entire HR team, claiming they had been ‘creating problems that didn’t exist’.

Ryan Breslow, the co-founder and chief executive of US fintech firm Bolt, said the department was scrapped as part of sweeping layoffs aimed at returning the struggling business to ‘start-up mode’.

The company cut around 30 per cent of its workforce in April in its fourth round of layoffs in as many years.

Speaking at a Fortune event, Breslow said: ‘We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go.’

The 32-year-old added that HR professionals were more suited to ‘peacetime’ conditions at larger companies rather than a start-up environment focused on rapid growth and efficiency.

Bolt has since replaced the department with a smaller ‘people operations team’ responsible for employee training and support.

‘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 said.

Breslow stepped down from the company in 2022 before returning in 2025 in a bid to revive its fortunes.

He claimed Bolt had developed a culture of ‘entitlement’, with some employees no longer willing to work in the leaner conditions required after the company’s decline.

‘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 said.

‘Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.’

Bolt said fewer than 40 staff were affected by the latest cuts, which the company said were partly driven by artificial intelligence.

In a company-wide Slack message sent in April, Breslow reportedly told employees: ‘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.’