Bolt’s CEO Just Fired His Entire HR Team. More Founders Should Do the Same.

The uncomfortable truth is that many of the workplace problems HR claims to solve are problems it helped create.

Ryan Breslow, the 31 year-old CEO of payments company Bolt, has done what most founders only fantasise about on a Friday afternoon. He fired the entire HR department.

His reasoning, delivered last week at Fortune’s Workforce Innovation Summit, was admirably blunt: “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 cull was part of a wider 30% headcount reduction. Breslow framed it as a shift from “peacetime” to “wartime” – leaner, AI-first, gritty, stripped of the entitlement culture he believes had been throttling the company.

Anyone who’s sat through a mandatory unconscious bias workshop will recognise the impulse.

I have written before about how marketing departments have been quietly colonised by people who care more about how their work makes them feel than whether it sells anything. HR has the same disease, just further along. It started life as Personnel. A small function. Handled contracts, payroll queries, the occasional disciplinary. Useful, unglamorous, finite. Then somewhere along the way it rebranded as Human Resources, then again as “People and Culture,” and now sits in the executive team with a seat at every strategic conversation it has no business attending.

So what changed?

Well, the function did what bureaucracies always do. It expanded to fill the space. A department that once existed to keep the company out of an employment tribunal now runs “listening sessions,” polices language in Slack, commissions unconscious bias training from external consultants at £15,000 a pop, and produces 40-page wellbeing strategies that nobody reads. It generates work for itself. It has to. Otherwise the headcount can’t be justified.

Here’s what founders won’t say out loud. Most of the problems HR claims to be solving are problems HR created.

Take the modern grievance process. In a healthy company, two adults have a disagreement, a manager has a quiet word with both of them, and everyone gets on with the job. In an HR-captured company, one of them files a formal complaint, an investigation is launched, statements are taken, the manager is sidelined because they are “too close to the matter,” and three months later both employees are still in post, hate each other more than they did at the start, and the company has spent fifteen grand on an external consultant to write a report nobody acts on. Productive? No. But it justifies next year’s headcount.

Breslow’s instinct is correct. The defenders of the status quo will say, as some already have, that the problems only “disappeared” because nobody is left to report them. Perhaps. Or perhaps the problems disappeared because they were never problems in the first place. Invented problems, generated by a department that needed them to exist.

The deeper damage is what HR has done to the role of the manager. Time was, a good manager hired well, fired when they had to, and told you the truth. That was the job. Now the modern manager is a glorified compliance officer, terrified of saying the wrong thing in a one-to-one, forced to run every personnel decision past a 26 year-old with a CIPD qualification who has never managed anyone in her life. The good ones leave. The cautious ones get promoted. You can see where this ends up.

Credit where it’s due: there is a legitimate operational core to people management. Payroll runs. Contracts comply with employment law. Visas get processed. Someone handles a genuine harassment complaint properly. None of that requires a department of fifteen and a Chief People Officer on £180,000.

This matters for marketing because the two functions have converged. Both are staffed by humanities graduates who speak the same therapeutic dialect. Both have somehow convinced CEOs that “culture” matters more than what the company actually ships. The result is companies that produce mediocre work, slowly, while feeling extraordinarily good about themselves.

Look at Unilever. For the best part of a decade they lectured the rest of us about brand purpose, with then-CEO Alan Jope insisting every brand needed a social mission or it had no future. Then last year Hein Schumacher took over and quietly conceded that purpose was, in his own words, an “unwelcome distraction.” Plastic targets pushed back. Diversity commitments trimmed. The whole edifice gently dismantled in favour of “performance, growth, productivity and returns.” You don’t say. Even Josh Bersin, who has spent a career inside the HR consulting world, now argues the profession as we know it is doomed. Automated away. Shrunk down. No longer trusted to justify itself. When the high priests admit the temple is empty, it’s usually worth listening.

What should founders do?

Start by shrinking it back to the operational core. Payroll, contracts, compliance, recruitment admin. Nothing else. Anything beyond that is somebody else’s job.

Then push authority back to the managers. They’re paid to manage; let them, and if they can’t, replace them rather than building a parallel bureaucracy to cover for them.

And measure outputs, not inputs. Engagement surveys and culture decks don’t tell you whether the company is winning. Revenue does. So does whether your best people are still around in two years.

Breslow will be called reckless. HBR will run a piece warning about the “risks” of operating without a fully staffed people function. The CIPD will close ranks. Good luck to them.

Every founder watching this already knows what’s going on. Look at Shopify after Tobi Lütke gutted middle management. Look at what’s happening at Anthropic with 500 people. Lean companies, trusted people, no committee in the way. The rest are paying handsomely to be slowed down.

Fire the HR team. Trust your managers to manage. Then get back to selling things.