The 31-year-old CEO of a historically troubled fintech company, Bolt Financial, revealed this week that he fired his entire HR department as part of a 30% reduction in headcount earlier this year.
Ryan Breslow made the admission on Tuesday at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit, where he blamed the downsizing, in part, on an inept, lazy and entitled staff.
“We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist,” the CEO, who once described Silicon Valley as a “boys club” full of “mob bosses,” said at the summit.
“Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”
Breslow reportedly told his employees that “going forward, Bolt will be operating as a much leaner organization and leveraging AI at our core.”
He framed the move as a regression from a “larger” company back to “start up mode.”
“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,” Breslow said.
Breslow further asserted that a culture of laziness and “entitlement” had grown across the company in his absence from Jan. 31, 2022 to March 2025.
Speaking on the alleged delinquents, he said that “Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.”
“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.
“And our customers are telling us, ‘We haven’t had this type of attention in four years.’”
Bolt was founded in 2014 and makes checkout payments technology. The company saw a whopping valuation collapse from $11 billion in 2022 to $300 million in 2025.
A few short months after Breslow’s departure from Bolt, the company was sued by its largest customer, Authentic Brands Group, because Bolt’s products failed to integrate with Forever 21, resulting in $150 million in losses for the clothing company, according to Yahoo Finance.
Breslow claimed that this was a “transparent attempt” to renegotiate the companies’ agreements. Bolt and ABG settled in 2022.
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