Bolt Misfired. The Answer Was Never Letting HR Go.
Imagine a ship navigating difficult waters. The captain decides the navigation team is slowing things down. They are preparing too many charts, building excessive protocols, and debating the right course when what the ship needs is speed. So he throws the navigation team overboard and replaces them with a smaller group focused purely on execution. The ship moves faster immediately—for a while. Then the rocks appear.
This is, in essence, what Ryan Breslow did at Bolt. The CEO of the San Francisco payments company, speaking at Fortune's Workforce Innovation Summit, announced that he had eliminated his entire HR team. His reasoning was direct: the HR team was creating problems that did not exist, and those problems disappeared when he let them go. A company once valued at eleven billion dollars, now valued at roughly three hundred million, had identified its culprit, according to its CEO. It was HR.
This piece takes a clear position: that conclusion is wrong. Not because HR functions are beyond criticism, or because every HR team is equally effective, but because the problems Breslow described—a culture of not getting things done, of complaining, of slowing the organisation down—are not HR problems. They are leadership problems. And eliminating the function meant to address them does not fix the underlying issue.
"An HR team that creates problems rather than solves them is not an argument against HR. It is an argument against that specific HR team."
— The case for fixing the function, not deleting itWhat Breslow actually said, and why it matters
Breslow's argument had three parts. First, the HR team was creating problems that did not exist, and those problems vanished once they were removed. Second, Bolt was back in startup mode, and HR professionals are more suited to larger, more stable organisations. Third, a smaller people operations team focused on execution was a better fit for where Bolt is today.
Each point contains a grain of truth—and each, examined more carefully, points to a conclusion Breslow did not reach. The answer to a function that is not doing its job well is to fix how it does the job, not to eliminate the job. The claim that HR suits peacetime but not startup mode is especially damaging, treating HR as a compliance checkbox that mature companies run because they are large enough to need it and stable enough to afford it.
This gets it precisely backwards. Startups that scale without building people management capability do not avoid the problems HR addresses. They accumulate them until those problems threaten to boil over.
"The problems that HR prevents do not disappear when HR leaves. They go underground—and resurface in forms far more expensive and harder to resolve."
— On the problems worth worrying aboutWhat gets removed isn't the danger
Breslow said the problems the HR team created disappeared once he let them go. That is almost certainly true—and entirely irrelevant to whether the decision was right. The problems HR creates as a bureaucratic obstacle—slower decisions, excessive process, complaints about process rather than progress—are real frustrations. They are also the least dangerous problems HR exists to prevent.
The problems HR prevents when functioning well are often invisible: the disputes resolved before they reached senior leadership, the manager behaviour corrected before it produced mass resignations, the compliance risk caught before it became a legal claim. These do not vanish when HR leaves. They go underground, then surface in costlier, more damaging forms.
What Breslow got partly right
Breslow's frustration points to something real. HR functions that operate primarily as compliance gatekeepers—creating process for the sake of process, positioning themselves as the organisational conscience—genuinely impede the organisations they are meant to serve. His concept of people operations, a leaner team focused on execution, on empowering managers, on streamlining decisions, describes what good HR should already be doing.
The mistake is concluding that this reorientation requires the elimination of HR rather than its improvement. A people operations team that empowers managers is still an HR function—it still needs to understand employment law and manage compliance requirements that do not disappear because the company is in startup mode. Call it what you like. The work does not disappear with the name.
What happens when HR is removed
Organisations that gut their HR function in the name of speed typically experience a predictable sequence. In the honeymoon phase, things feel better: friction disappears, decisions move faster, conversations shift from process to outcomes. In the second phase, the problems HR was quietly managing surface in unmanaged form—a manager with no accountability mechanism, a performance issue handled inconsistently by individuals with different standards and skill levels.
In the third phase, the costs arrive: legal claims, regulatory investigations, and high disengagement among employees. This does not always happen quickly—sometimes it takes two or three years—but it happens with a consistency the research on HR effectiveness supports. Bolt's fall from $11 billion to $300 million came from market conditions, strategic decisions, capital allocation, and operational execution—not from HR. Blaming the function afterward is scapegoating, not leadership. The legitimate lesson is sharper: the answer to poor HR is better HR, not no HR.
A misdiagnosis, not a fix. Eliminating HR because it creates friction treats the symptom, not the cause. An HR team acting as a bureaucratic obstacle is an argument for fixing that team—not for scrapping the function.
The real risks go underground. The disputes, manager behaviour, and compliance exposure HR quietly prevents don't vanish when HR does. They resurface later in far more expensive and harder-to-resolve forms.
Startups need HR more, not less. The claim that HR suits stable companies but not startups gets it backwards. Scaling without people management capability accumulates problems until they become unmanageable.
The honeymoon phase is temporary. Decisions move faster and the org feels leaner—briefly. Then inconsistent performance management, unchecked manager behaviour, and quietly building legal risk arrive, with no one responsible.
Better HR, not no HR. A leaner people operations team focused on execution is what good HR already does. The employment law, compliance, and people work remain—HR must earn its seat by delivering practical business value, not by insisting on its own importance.