Ryan Breslow defended his decision to eliminate Bolt’s HR team on Tuesday, telling a workforce conference that the function had been creating problems the company did not have. He said those problems went away after he let the team go, as the fintech continues to remake itself after a steep collapse in value and a recent round of layoffs.
Bolt, which Breslow founded in 2014 in his Stanford dorm room, recently cut roughly 30% of its employees. The company was valued at $11 billion in 2022, but by 2024 its valuation had reportedly fallen to about $300 million. Breslow, who stepped down as chief executive in 2022 and returned in 2025, told attendees at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit that the company had to move fast and lean again.
“We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist,” Breslow said, adding that “those problems disappeared when I let them go.” He said Bolt now uses a smaller people operations team to handle required training and serve as a resource for employees, but argued that the old setup no longer fit a company trying to operate like a startup.
The comments offered a blunt window into the culture reset Breslow says Bolt is trying to force after years of turbulence. He said employees hired under the prior leadership structure were given 60 days to adjust to a leaner, startup-style environment, and said 99% of them could not adapt. Breslow said he removed nearly the entire leadership team and started over.
He also said Bolt has eliminated four-day workweeks and unlimited PTO, framing the changes as part of a broader push to restore discipline after a period he described as too loose. “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 said. “I had to bring a company back to a very gritty place.”
The remarks land against a backdrop of rumors that Bolt was taking back employees’ paychecks and that some contractors had gone unpaid. Breslow denied that the company withheld funds from staff. Still, the need to rebut those claims underscored how far Bolt’s reputation has slipped from its pandemic-era high. The company that once drew a multibillion-dollar valuation is now being recast by its founder as a scrappier business fighting to survive.
