On Tuesday, in front of a room full of executives at Fortune's Workforce Innovation Summit, Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow said something most chief executives only think privately. He told the audience he had cut roughly 30% of his workforce and dissolved Bolt's entire human resources department — the team responsible for hiring, firing, payroll questions, complaints, and the general business of looking after employees — and that the company was better for it. HR, he argued, had been "creating problems that didn't exist." When he let them go, "those problems disappeared."
For context, Bolt is a fintech company — short for financial technology, meaning a business that builds software to handle online payments and checkout. At its peak in 2022, investors valued Bolt at $11 billion. Today, that valuation has collapsed to somewhere around $300 million. That is not a rough patch. That is roughly 97% of the company's paper worth, gone.
So when Breslow stands on a stage and says he no longer needs a people function, it lands differently than it would from a CEO running a thriving business. He is not a guru theorising. He is a founder fighting to keep his company alive, and he is telling the rest of corporate America that the support structures built during the boom years might be the first thing to go when the boom ends.
