When "Firing Everyone" Becomes a Pitch
On May 19, 2026, Ryan Breslow walked onto the stage at Fortune's Workforce Innovation Summit and said the quiet part out loud. The 32-year-old founder of Bolt — the one-click checkout startup once valued at $11 billion and now worth around $300 million — told a room of executives that he had eliminated his entire HR department. Then he smiled. "Those problems," he said, "disappeared when I let them go."
He wasn't done. He'd also cut 30% of the staff who remained, instituted a 60-day "adapt-or-leave" review for everyone left, and concluded that 99% of his original team simply "couldn't make the cut" in the company he was now rebuilding.
If you're not in tech, here's the part to hold onto: Bolt lost roughly 97% of its value in four years. Breslow, who founded the company, left it, and then returned as CEO, has spent the last several months publicly diagnosing that collapse as a people problem. Not a product problem. Not a strategy problem. A people problem — solved, apparently, by removing the people.
The question hanging over the conference room wasn't whether his approach would work. It was whether anyone would say so out loud.
