The CEO of fintech company Bolt revealed he fired his entire human resources department as part of sweeping layoffs, telling the audience at a Fortune magazine event the “HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist.”
Ryan Breslow, Bolt’s 32-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer, announced at the Tuesday conference in Atlanta that he “got rid of our HR team,” and that the “problems disappeared when I let them go.”
Bolt sliced its workforce by 30 percent in April after Breslow said productivity hit a slump.
“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,” the CEO told Fortune editorial director Kristin Stoller.
He continued on to say there is “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. Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go,” Breslow stated.
Breslow reportedly told his remaining employees that Bolt will use more artificial intelligence (AI) going forward.
In place of a full HR department, Bolt has since set up a smaller “people operations team” to handle new employee onboarding and training.
“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,” Breslow explained.
Bolt is now down to just about 100 employees, Fortune reported.
“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 at the event. “And our customers are telling us, ‘We haven’t had this type of attention in four years.’”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.