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When Ryan Breslow’s fintech company Bolt lost $10.7 billion in value, he had a radical diagnosis: HR needed to go. “They were creating problems that didn’t exist,” Breslow, 31, said at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit. “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”
Breslow, who stepped down as CEO in 2022 but returned in 2025, cut 30% of the workforce in April and replaced HR with a smaller “people operations” team focused on training.
But HR wasn’t the only group to lose their jobs. Breslow said employees had grown complacent during the boom years, when Bolt’s valuation hit $11 billion in 2022 before crashing to $300 million. He gave workers 60 days to adapt to a leaner culture but said 99% couldn’t make the shift. “There’s a sense of entitlement that had festered across the company,” he said. He fired nearly the entire leadership team and eliminated four-day workweeks and unlimited PTO.
Bolt now operates with about 100 employees, down from thousands. “We have a team a quarter of the size, who are much more junior, who work a lot harder, who have better energy,” Breslow said.