The CEO who fired HR team and the question he accidentally asked.

Ryan Breslow did not restructure his HR department. He eliminated it. When fintech startup Bolt's valuation crashed from $11 billion to $300 million, a decline of nearly 97%, the 31-year-old CEO returning to lead the company had a diagnosis that was either brutally honest or breathtakingly convenient, depending on where you sit. The HR team, he said, was creating problems that did not exist. So he let them go. All of them. "Those problems disappeared when I let them go," he told Fortune's Workforce Innovation Summit. What followed was one of the more radical corporate restructurings in recent memory. Bolt went from thousands of employees to roughly 100. Unlimited paid time off — abolished. Four-day working weeks — gone. The 99% of the leadership team that could not adapt to the new culture within 60 days — replaced. In their place: a leaner, more junior team that Breslow described as working harder and bringing better energy. The customers, he said, had not felt this kind of attention in four years.

When HR becomes the problem and when it becomes the scapegoat

Ryan Breslow's diagnosis is uncomfortable precisely because it is not entirely wrong.

There is a version of HR that most senior professionals recognise not too fondly. The version that pathologises normal workplace tension. That turns a difficult conversation between two colleagues into a formal process. That mistakes compliance for culture and bureaucracy for structure. High performers feel this most acutely, their directness gets mediated, their edge gets smoothed, and the friction that makes them effective gets institutionalised into a grievance.

Breslow described a culture of entitlement that had festered across Bolt. Whether HR created it or failed to challenge it is worth asking honestly. In organisations that scale fast and distribute perks the business model cannot sustain, HR operationalises those decisions. When the music stops, HR manages the hangover and sometimes that looks like protecting a culture that should have been dismantled earlier.

But here is where Breslow's story gets complicated. In January 2026, Bolt asked staff to swap cash pay for equity. That is not an HR problem. That is a leadership problem. And when that pressure lands on the workforce — the anxiety, the attrition, the disengagement — HR carries the consequences of decisions it had no authority to prevent.

The honest assessment: HR can create problems that do not need to exist. And HR can become the lightning rod for problems that leadership created and does not want to own. Both are true. The question is which one was happening at Bolt and whether eliminating the function entirely was a diagnosis or a deflection.

Three generations. Three relationships with HR.

GenX built HR as institutional necessity. They knew what workplaces looked like without it.

Millennials expanded HR into culture, wellbeing, and experience, championing the unlimited PTO and four-day weeks that Breslow later abolished. The backlash against those ideas, embodied in CEOs like Breslow, is partly a backlash against the version of work Millennials fought to create.

GenZ is entering a world where a CEO can eliminate HR entirely and receive serious coverage for it. They are the most sceptical generation when it comes to institutions but their need for protection and recourse inside organisations is no less real. They will decide, by what they demand from work, whether HR in its current form survives the next decade.

Is HR required in the future of work?

The version of HR that Breslow fired — the pressure valve for problems it did not create and could not solve — was always fragile. That was not HR at its best. That was HR being asked to manage what leadership refused to address.

What organisations need as AI reshapes work and the employment relationship becomes more contingent — is a function that genuinely governs the human side of institutional decisions. Not a function that manages people and creates problems amongst them. One that protects them. That names dysfunction rather than smoothing it over. That advocates for clarity when leadership creates ambiguity.

That is not friction. That is infrastructure. And it is arguably the most important infrastructure a company in 2026 can build because AI is automating everything else, and the one thing it cannot automate is accountability.

‍The question this story leaves open

Does the future of work need less HR or better HR ?

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Sources

Fortune Workforce Innovation Summit — Ryan Breslow interview on eliminating HR at Bolt, 2025
Fortune — Bolt's valuation decline from $11 billion to $300 million, 2024
Bloomberg / TechCrunch — Bolt workforce reduction from thousands of employees to approximately 100, 2025
Business Insider — Bolt internal email inviting staff and contractors to swap cash pay for equity, January 2026
Fortune — Ryan Breslow steps down as CEO, 2022; returns as CEO, 2025
Bolt company announcements — Abolition of unlimited paid time off and four-day working week policies, 2025
Fortune Workforce Innovation Summit — Breslow quote: "We have a team a quarter of the size, who are much more junior, who work a lot harder, who have better energy", 2025
Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) — Research on HR's role in organisational health and employee protection
Harvard Business Review — Studies on psychological safety, HR accountability, and organisational dysfunction
McKinsey Global Institute — Research on AI's impact on the future of work and human capital functions, 2025-26

WOCULT

WOCULT