Bolt CEO says he let go of HR team for creating problems that didn't exist

https://fortune.com/2026/05/19/bolt-ceo-ryan-breslow-cut-hr-department-causing-problems-fintech-startup-turn-around/

by cdrnsf • 2 months ago

60 28 2 months ago

I wish he'd described some of the problems. What we get from the article is very vague.

While Breslow didn’t get into the specifics of the exact differences, he wrote on LinkedIn last year that, “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach. People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.”
“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,” he added at the Fortune conference.

futuraperdita• 2 months ago

The difference between HR, which is often policy and governance driven, and “people operations” probably points enough to the dynamic here. He wants to avoid red tape, hire and fire fast and accept the minimal risk of consequence, and HR sounds like they held him back from liquidity in human capital.

seb1204• 2 months ago

Liquidity in human capital. Sounds rife. Hire and fire right? via chat message on Friday night, hire back Monday.

impish9208• 2 months ago

liquidity in human capital

I like this phrase!

FatherOfCurses• 2 months ago

"Our HR team gave people the idea that they didn't have to sacrifice their personal lives or mental well-being to work here."

fakedang3• 2 months ago

In my experience, whatever is typically done by HR and People teams can also be done by a generalist admin team.

- Recruiting - Onboarding - Payroll / Insurance - Culture development - Team building - Legal compliance - Offboarding

We (~120 employees) have worked with some massive conglomerates and retail enterprises too, and HR is wholly necessary for those formats. Where the line blurs between white collar and blue/brown collar collar is where HR becomes mandatory. For a purely white collar company? Absolutely useless and not worth it.

socalnate1• 2 months ago

What are you talking about?

The people who do the list of tasks you described are literally the HR team.

Regardless of what you call that group of people; that’s your HR team.

fakedang3• 2 months ago

Admin team also handles general administrative tasks within our company - arranging supplies, managing access to resources, liaising with cantonal bodies, etc. i.e. they perform those one-off HR tasks in addition to administrative tasks that are done regularly. It's not an actively separate team within our organization like Compliance is.

xenospn• 2 months ago

Bolt still exists?!

jakub_g• 2 months ago

Note: it's about Bolt.com (fintech), not Bolt.eu (taxi).

watwut• 2 months ago

Lol and I wanted to commend on their pervasive bad driving.

tqi• 2 months ago

Cool to see that lack of object permanence does not prevent one from becoming CEO.

lovich• 2 months ago

Without examples of said problems this has the energy of saying cases will go down if you stop testing. That or the HR team told him about pesky problems like the law.

I checked their careers page and see they operate in Europe. I’ve found it very common for American execs to be surprised and exasperated by the fact that there are actual worker protections there and they can’t just fire people on a whim.

DoctorOW• 2 months ago

In my experience, HR is all too willing to explore gray areas for company benefit, so any "problems" created are likely actual laws.

gamblor956• 2 months ago

In a few months (possibly a few weeks) we're going to be reading about a huge harassment scandal at Bolt starring this CEO.

Given the volume of the whisper network, I'm surprised it hasn't come out already.

deterministic• 2 months ago

If you are being interview by somebody from "HR" and not your potential future boss then it is a massive red flag.

mrandish2• 2 months ago

As an entrepreneur who founded a tech startup that grew up to a few hundred people, HR was handled by half an administrative/finance person. It was mostly just payroll, health insurance, onboarding, some compliance paperwork and a little recruiting.

When we were acquired by a F500 public company with >10k employees, they had more HR staff than my entire company. I do wish the TFA had more details on the issues this CEO experienced but I don't think he's exaggerating. My biggest issue was that BigCo's HR dept was the source of a lot of disruption and distraction for my people. Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance paperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot.

The thing is, before being acquired we were in full compliance with all state and federal regs, yet somehow there was ~5x more HR burden at BigCo. And managers got all that plus an extra side of mandatory "managing people" training sessions and robo-quizzes. Then managers had to enter detailed quarterly evals and everyone had to participate in a pointless "360" peer review process that couldn't help feeling vaguely dystopian. And BigCo was proud to be the sector leader in employee satisfaction and retention. Everything was first-class, top-quadrant and 'industry best practice" yet my startup had substantially better satisfaction & retention numbers with an "HR Team" of 0.5 people and a tiny fraction the cost, time and cognitive burden on everyone.

jfil• 2 months ago

I used to work at a large global company that was part of a uopoly in its industry. We had a lot of mandatory training about bribery, how its forbidden to offer bribes and receive bribes. A lot of training and processes around data retention, for privacy and also for lawsuit discovery... I guess the training was mandated because of previous egregious violations. A F500, older company likely comes with a long history of mandatory remediations for past transgressions.

mrandish2• 2 months ago

mandatory remediations for past transgressions.

Weirdly, this can actually cause companies that didn't do the bad thing (bribes, etc) to voluntarily, proactively adopt widespread, comprehensive, mandatory, highly-audited training to tell every single employee NOT to do that bad thing. That way, if some rogue employee(s) do that thing, having the audited paper trail proving how very hard the company tried to NOT do that thing, can be invaluable in defending the company. In the event of prosecution it can lower the penalties but even better, it helps in diverting potential prosecution into a settlement / consent decree - as well as negotiating lower penalties and settlement amounts.

This was actually the source of one onerous training requirement at BigCo, which I learned about over drinks with our Chief Legal Officer. Apparently, one company (not us) having an extreme punitive penalty slapped on them generates scary WSJ headlines every compliance training vendor uses on Slide #1 in their sales pitches.

deskamess• 2 months ago

Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance pakperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot.

Been through this and it was all for compliance. Legal checkboxes. So the corp can say 'we did what was required'. For the quizzes I had to take (refreshed yearly) I was given the answer key. Whoever took the test first in a given year would jot down the keys. Since it was all for 'compliance' no one gave a hoot. All theater and HR only cared that you took it (their checkbox). In the tech world vendor compliance comes closest to this. I no longer ascribe blame - it is the bigger legal system and framework that drives this. Change has to come from without.

richardfey• 2 months ago

"We fired all of the QA people, now there are no QA issue reports anymore".

DrScientist• 2 months ago

From the wikipedia page: > nstead of cash, the fundraising partly involved The London Fund pledging up to $250m in influencer marketing credits

Is that stock for 'influencer marketing credits'??? Even more scammy than equity for OpenAI tokens...

While I'm not a big fan of HR - I suspect the current problems at Bolt are more fundamental in nature - apple/google pay/ banks getting their act together leaves little space for a dedicated app.

JimRoepcke• 2 months ago

All I can think of when reading this headline is this scene from IT Crowd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMW8VYb_GE

Bolt CEO says he let go of HR team for creating problems that didn't exist

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