CEO fires entire HR team for slacking off - 'People felt entitled'

The CEO of Bolt, a fintech company, fired his entire HR department, alleging that the employees were causing issues that vanished the moment they stepped out of the company. Ryan Breslow, the head of Bolt, said at Fortune's Workforce Innovation Summit in Atlanta on Tuesday (May 19), "We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn't exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go." The CEO said there were employees who were slacking when Bolt was thriving. He stated that the company needed to be revived, after which the decision was made to remove 30 per cent of its workforce in April. However, AI seems to be the primary reason for the cost-cutting measure. According to Payments Dive, Ryan told his staff at the time, "Going forward, Bolt will be operating as a much leaner organisation and leveraging AI at our core."

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Sense of entitlement led to slacking in the staff

He added that what they need right now is a "group of people who are very oriented around getting things done," while slamming "a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot." Ryan said they had to get rid of those who weren't doing anything. “There's a sense of entitlement that had festered across the company, and people who felt empowered, felt entitled— but weren't actually working hard. And this is the number one thing that I had to battle,” he said. This is why he" had to let go" of most of these people. The company is now down to 100 employees, Fortune reported. Ryan said, they now have a team "quarter of the size, who are much more junior, who work a lot harder, who have better energy," and the customers are happy with the kind of attention they are now getting.

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Bolt suffered serious financial losses in the past few years, causing a drop in its valuation. From $11 billion in 2022, it went down to about $300 million in 2024, Fortune reported. Breslow also stepped down as Bolt CEO the same year, but returned in 2025. Now he says the company is almost restarting, and the HR team matters in this scenario. “We're back in startup mode again, and those HR professionals have really important insights when you're in a peacetime and when you're at a larger company,” the 31-year-old said at the summit.