Tech boss sacks HR team for ‘creating problems that didn’t exist’

Chris PriceThu, May 21, 2026 at 10:14 AM UTC

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Ryan Breslow founded Bolt in his Stanford dorm room in 2014 - Fortune

A tech boss has sacked his company’s entire HR team after they created “problems that didn’t exist”.

Ryan Breslow, the chief executive of US payment company Bolt, said he had axed the department to combat the “sense of entitlement” across the company.

Mr Breslow, who founded the business in his Stanford dorm room in 2014, left the company in 2022 but was reinstated as the chief executive in March last year. Bolt axed 30pc of its staff last month in an effort to turn around its fortunes.

“We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist,” Mr Breslow told Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit this week. “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”

Mr Breslow has criticised HR, writing on LinkedIn last year that he wanted staff to be “more focused on efficiency and less focused on fluff”.

He initially rebranded the HR department to “people ops”, saying it had the “wrong energy, format, and approach”.

“People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed,” he said.

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Bolt saw its valuation soar to $11bn (£8.8bn) in 2022 before falling to around $300m two years later – a decline of nearly 97pc. Mr Breslow criticised the culture that had developed at the company in his absence.

He said: “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. Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.”

He added: “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.”

It comes amid a widening backlash against the HR industry, which employs more than 500,000 people in Britain. Critics say the ballooning industry – which has grown by 83pc since 2011 – is slowing down businesses and creating meaningless busywork. HR departments have also been criticised for becoming increasingly political.

Tanya de Grunwald, the host of the This Isn’t Working podcast, says the profession is “constantly being filled with young, Left-leaning, middle-class graduates”, who are “motivated by their own clear views on how to make the world a better place”.

Last year, Whitehall documents released under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that 200 HR events and meetings were held across seven government departments during working hours in May 2025 alone.

These included “listening circle for trans colleagues and allies”, “sapphic sound” music sessions and two-hour-long diversity, equity and inclusion sessions.

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