Bolt Killed HR. Was That an EX Move?

Ryan Breslow is the founder and CEO of Bolt — a San Francisco fintech building a payments and crypto super-app. This week he fired his entire HR department and made a public statement about it.

Stuart Leo

"We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn't exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go."

The internet split immediately. Half the room cheered. The other half recoiled. Both responses, I think, missed the real question.

This piece is not about whether Breslow was right. It is about the distinction that separates a genuine people reset from an expensive subtraction — and the one diagnostic every operator should run after reading that headline.

The collapse and the comeback

At its peak in 2022, Bolt was valued at $11 billion. By 2024 that number had fallen to roughly $300 million — a ninety-seven percent collapse in two years. Breslow founded the company, stepped down as CEO in 2022, and came back in 2025 to turn it around. He now has a hundred employees and a thesis.

The sequence of moves since he returned:

Move one. A culture reset. He inherited a leadership structure built without him, gave the existing team sixty days to adapt to a leaner, startup-style culture, and found — by his own account — that ninety-nine percent of them couldn't make the shift. He replaced nearly all of them.

Move two. A thirty-percent workforce reduction in April 2026.

Move three. This week: the entire HR team eliminated, replaced by a smaller People Ops function focused on training.

Three moves. One logic: remove what is generating drag, build lean, move fast. I am not arguing with the logic. A company that collapses ninety-seven percent in two years does not need a slow rebuild.

But the quote is interesting. "Those problems disappeared when I let them go" describes a result. It also describes a theory — that the HR team was the source of the problems, not the symptom of them. That theory has enormous implications for what Breslow builds next.

HR is not EX

Before the framework, a distinction that most operators conflate — and the conflation is the episode.

HR manages people to policies. Someone needs sign-off. A leave form has a missing field. A clause in the handbook got breached. HR is the compliance machinery — it keeps the organisation legal, the paperwork straight, the liability contained. Necessary. And not designed to make anyone better at their job.

Employee Experience — EX — asks a completely different question. Not "are they following the rules?" but "are they equipped to win?" It is the onboarding that gives a new hire genuine clarity before their first meeting — not a stack of forms, but a real answer to what good looks like in this role. The manager who has a career conversation at ninety days, not a performance review. The role definition clear enough that someone knows, without asking permission, whether a decision is theirs to make. The values articulated not as a poster in the kitchen but as a set of behaviours you would hire for, promote for, and if necessary, let someone go for.

HR manages people to a standard. EX equips people to achieve an outcome. One constrains. The other designs. The chasm between them — in the culture they produce, the talent they attract, the results they generate — is enormous.

Most businesses do not have an EX function. They have HR, and they assume that is the same thing. That gap is the episode.

The framework lens

Leadership Question 6 in Resolute opens with the distinction directly: HR counts heads. EX designs journeys.

The question I would put to Breslow — not as a criticism but as the most useful diagnostic available to him — is this: did he delete the administration, or did he delete the design too?

Deleting an HR team that was generating bureaucratic friction while keeping an intentional, designed employee experience in place is a clean, defensible call. Deleting the administration because it was a source of friction, without replacing the design function underneath it, produces a lighter org chart and a thinner culture. You do not discover the difference until the next hiring round, when you find out what you are actually offering a talented person.

Bolt has a hundred employees. What does a talented engineer joining that team in August experience? Is there a designed onboarding? A culture signal in week one? A career growth conversation at ninety days? Or is there a fast, lean operator who expects people to figure it out? Neither is wrong — but one is a choice and one is a gap.

The second connection goes deeper.

Chapter 7 of Resolute holds the principle I come back to constantly: values reveal character. Character scales culture.

Breslow's recent sequence — the sixty-day ultimatum, the near-total leadership replacement, the HR elimination, the public statement — are all data points. They reveal a values set: speed, directness, intolerance of friction, a conviction that simplicity is the correct answer to complexity.

Not inherently wrong values. Some of the best operators I know hold them. The question the framework asks is not whether those values are right. It is what happens when they scale.

Bolt has a hundred people. Whatever Breslow's character is right now, it is running through all of them — in how decisions get made, what gets celebrated, what gets corrected, what a new hire learns in their first thirty days about how things actually work here regardless of what the People Ops deck says. That is what character scaling culture means. Not aspiration. Physics.

One more line from the book that lands hard in this context: values lived, hired-for, fired-for, promoted-for — those are EX. The experience always wins.

Breslow is firing-for and hiring-for right now. The brief question is whether those values, translated through a hundred people, produce an experience worth having — for the next talented person who joins, and for the customer that person is supposed to serve.

Three questions for your own business

Here is how I would sit with this if I were Breslow — and how I would sit with it at any scale.

01 — Administration or design? In your organisation, what is the ratio between administration and design in how you manage your people? How much of what your HR or People function does is tracking compliance, managing leave, counting heads — and how much is actually designing the experience a talented person has from day one to year three? If you deleted the function tomorrow and the only thing that disappeared was the compliance work, you did not have a people design function. You had a payroll team with a better job title.

02 — What do your decisions reveal? Map your last three personnel decisions against your actual values. Not the poster values — the ones that show up in the decisions. Breslow firing the HR team is a values declaration. The question is whether those values, as declarations, are the ones you would be proud to scale to a thousand people. Most leaders I work with have never done this mapping. Most of them are surprised by what they find.

03 — Where is the culture design actually being done? If the HR function in your business disappeared overnight and the problems disappeared with it — what does that tell you about where the culture design work is being done? If the answer is nowhere, that is the real problem. Not the HR team.

The takeaway

Subtraction is not design. They look identical at the announcement. They diverge completely in the execution.

Bolt's move might be exactly right. A company that had collapsed ninety-seven percent needed a radically different logic, and it is entirely possible that the inherited HR function was generating institutional drag without generating institutional design. Breslow might have made the right call, for the right reason, at the right moment.

But the test of that is not whether the problems disappeared when he let them go.

The test is whether the experience of being a talented person at Bolt — eighteen months from now, when the lean org is running at speed — is one worth having. Whether the values he is scaling produce a culture that can build the product, serve the customer, and attract the next hire without burning through the hundred people who stayed.

HR is administration. EX is design. You can delete one without the other.

Whether Breslow did — that is what the next twelve months will answer.

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This is Episode 5 of Commander in Brief. Earlier episodes: Nike Forgot What It Was Selling, Why Toyota's Slowness Is Every Mature Business's Trap, Values as the Commons, and AI Business Engineering — A Working Definition. The framework lives in the book — Resolute, in print since December 2024.