alt.hn

5/20/2026 at 8:34:18 PM

Bolt CEO says he let go of HR team for creating problems that didn't exist

 https://fortune.com/2026/05/19/bolt-ceo-ryan-breslow-cut-hr-department-causing-problems-fintech-startup-turn-around/

by cdrnsf

5/20/2026 at 8:48:48 PM

I wish he'd described some of the problems. What we get from the article is very vague.

> While Breslow didn’t get into the specifics of the exact differences, he wrote on LinkedIn last year that, “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach. People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.”

> “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,” he added at the Fortune conference.

by pavel_lishin

5/20/2026 at 8:54:20 PM

The difference between HR, which is often policy and governance driven, and “people operations” probably points enough to the dynamic here. He wants to avoid red tape, hire and fire fast and accept the minimal risk of consequence, and HR sounds like they held him back from liquidity in human capital.

by futuraperdita

5/20/2026 at 10:54:06 PM

Liquidity in human capital. Sounds rife. Hire and fire right? via chat message on Friday night, hire back Monday.

by seb1204

5/21/2026 at 12:32:00 AM

> liquidity in human capital

I like this phrase!

by impish9208

5/21/2026 at 6:54:32 AM

Hmmmmm, giant blender...

by HacklesRaised

5/21/2026 at 1:11:15 AM

Disgusting.

by Henchman21

5/21/2026 at 3:33:26 PM

"Our HR team gave people the idea that they didn't have to sacrifice their personal lives or mental well-being to work here."

by FatherOfCurses

5/21/2026 at 4:02:46 AM

As an entrepreneur who founded a tech startup that grew up to a few hundred people, HR was handled by half an administrative/finance person. It was mostly just payroll, health insurance, onboarding, some compliance paperwork and a little recruiting.

When we were acquired by a F500 public company with >10k employees, they had more HR staff than my entire company. I do wish the TFA had more details on the issues this CEO experienced but I don't think he's exaggerating. My biggest issue was that BigCo's HR dept was the source of a lot of disruption and distraction for my people. Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance paperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot.

The thing is, before being acquired we were in full compliance with all state and federal regs, yet somehow there was ~5x more HR burden at BigCo. And managers got all that plus an extra side of mandatory "managing people" training sessions and robo-quizzes. Then managers had to enter detailed quarterly evals and everyone had to participate in a pointless "360" peer review process that couldn't help feeling vaguely dystopian. And BigCo was proud to be the sector leader in employee satisfaction and retention. Everything was first-class, top-quadrant and 'industry best practice" yet my startup had substantially better satisfaction & retention numbers with an "HR Team" of 0.5 people and a tiny fraction the cost, time and cognitive burden on everyone.

by mrandish

5/20/2026 at 9:23:27 PM

Note: it's about Bolt.com (fintech), not Bolt.eu (taxi).

by jakub_g

5/21/2026 at 5:10:48 AM

Lol and I wanted to commend on their pervasive bad driving.

by watwut

5/20/2026 at 9:37:47 PM

Cool to see that lack of object permanence does not prevent one from becoming CEO.

by tqi

5/21/2026 at 1:17:11 PM

From the wikipedia page: > nstead of cash, the fundraising partly involved The London Fund pledging up to $250m in influencer marketing credits

Is that stock for 'influencer marketing credits'??? Even more scammy than equity for OpenAI tokens...

While I'm not a big fan of HR - I suspect the current problems at Bolt are more fundamental in nature - apple/google pay/ banks getting their act together leaves little space for a dedicated app.

by DrScientist

5/21/2026 at 3:55:53 AM

If you are being interview by somebody from "HR" and not your potential future boss then it is a massive red flag.

by deterministic

5/21/2026 at 6:55:30 AM

"We fired all of the QA people, now there are no QA issue reports anymore".

by richardfey

5/20/2026 at 10:26:50 PM

Without examples of said problems this has the energy of saying cases will go down if you stop testing. That or the HR team told him about pesky problems like the law.

I checked their careers page and see they operate in Europe. I’ve found it very common for American execs to be surprised and exasperated by the fact that there are actual worker protections there and they can’t just fire people on a whim.

by lovich

5/21/2026 at 1:32:40 AM

In my experience, HR is all too willing to explore gray areas for company benefit, so any "problems" created are likely actual laws.

by DoctorOW

5/21/2026 at 2:43:34 AM

In a few months (possibly a few weeks) we're going to be reading about a huge harassment scandal at Bolt starring this CEO.

Given the volume of the whisper network, I'm surprised it hasn't come out already.

by gamblor956

5/20/2026 at 9:17:58 PM

Bolt still exists?!

by xenospn

5/20/2026 at 8:59:41 PM

In my experience, whatever is typically done by HR and People teams can also be done by a generalist admin team.

- Recruiting - Onboarding - Payroll / Insurance - Culture development - Team building - Legal compliance - Offboarding

We (~120 employees) have worked with some massive conglomerates and retail enterprises too, and HR is wholly necessary for those formats. Where the line blurs between white collar and blue/brown collar collar is where HR becomes mandatory. For a purely white collar company? Absolutely useless and not worth it.

by fakedang

5/20/2026 at 10:11:10 PM

What are you talking about?

The people who do the list of tasks you described are literally the HR team.

Regardless of what you call that group of people; that’s your HR team.

by socalnate1

5/21/2026 at 6:20:37 AM

Admin team also handles general administrative tasks within our company - arranging supplies, managing access to resources, liaising with cantonal bodies, etc. i.e. they perform those one-off HR tasks in addition to administrative tasks that are done regularly. It's not an actively separate team within our organization like Compliance is.

by fakedang

5/21/2026 at 10:10:57 AM

So? You can do whatever internal structure you want. Who cares.

You still have to do the same job, just now with team who is less qualified to do that. But if you guys are all happy about that, you do you.

by szszrk

5/21/2026 at 6:44:36 PM

A truck might be more efficient for carrying a lot of things but I don't need a truck to take me to the grocery store downtown.

by fakedang