Ryan Breslow co-founded Bolt in 2014 from his Stanford dorm room. The fintech company soared to an $11 billion valuation in 2022. It employed thousands of workers at the height of its success. But fortunes reversed sharply soon after.
Breslow stepped down as that same year. By 2024, Bolt’s valuation had reportedly collapsed to around $300 million. That represented a decline of nearly 97% from its peak.
Multiple rounds of layoffs dramatically reduced the company’s headcount. Breslow attributed the collapse to poor decision-making and excessive spending.
He returned as CEO in 2025 with a single mission: survival. Speaking at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit on 19 May, the 31-year-old described his approach as operating in “wartime.”
Breslow also eliminated the company’s HR team entirely. He told Fortune editorial director Kristin Stoller the team had been creating unnecessary problems.
“We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go,” he said.
He said Bolt had re-entered full “startup mode”, and the HR team lost its value. The company has since been stripped back to roughly 100 employees. A recent layoff affected approximately 30% of the remaining workforce.
“We’re back in startup mode again, and those HR professionals have really important insights when you’re in a peacetime and when you’re at a larger company,” he said
He later brought in a smaller people operations team as a replacement. On last year, he wrote that HR represented “the wrong energy, format, and approach.” People operations, he argued, empower managers and keep companies moving faster.
Culture Reset
Beyond structural changes, Breslow identified a deeper cultural problem within Bolt. He said employees had grown too comfortable during the company’s boom years. A sense of entitlement had spread across the organization, he argued.
Workers felt empowered but were not actually delivering results. “This is the number one thing that I had to battle,” he said at the conference.
When he returned as CEO, he gave existing employees 60 days to adapt. The goal was to transition them into a leaner, -style working culture.
The result was stark: 99% could not make the shift. Breslow eventually replaced nearly the entire leadership team from scratch. He said the old guard had grown accustomed to spending freely and avoiding difficult work.
The reset required abandoning several progressive workplace policies he had once championed. Four-day workweeks were eliminated. Unlimited paid time off was also scrapped.
“As someone who was a pioneer of conscious leadership,” he said, “I had to bring a company back to a very gritty place.”
Breslow now argues the painful strategy is delivering results. Bolt currently markets itself as a one-stop financial super app. It allows users to send money, earn rewards and trade cryptocurrency. The company operates with a team described as more junior but significantly more driven.
“Our customers are telling us, ‘We haven’t had this type of attention in four years’,” Breslow said.
He acknowledged that experienced, credentialed professionals were no longer central to Bolt’s model. Instead, he credited a smaller, harder-working team with the company’s renewed momentum.