HR has never had an easy ride. You only have to search the first page of Google to find forums complaining about HR and its role in companies. But recently, one move has taken this sentiment to its most extreme.
Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow recently made headlines after saying he fired his entire HR team. According to Breslow, “We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist.” The CEO then went on to say, “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”
It was a bold statement and reflects Breslow’s previous view that HR was “the wrong energy, format, and approach,” instead arguing for a People Ops model.
However, having only made the layoffs in April, the CEO made his contentious comments in May, which raises the question: did the problems actually disappear, or did the means of surfacing them disappear instead? That distinction is important, as one could lead to an immediate positive effect, while the other could allow a lingering issue to eventually erupt.
What Was He Actually Reacting To?
Breslow’s frustration with HR did not emerge in isolation. He returned to Bolt after the company’s valuation had collapsed from $11 billion to less than $300 million, and he came back with a clear mandate to cut friction and rebuild quickly. He described a company culture defined by entitlement and an unwillingness to operate in leaner conditions. In his framing, HR had become the formal infrastructure through which complaints were legitimized and escalated.
That frustration is not entirely without basis. Dr. Roz Cohen, Chief People Officer at Laird Norton Wetherby, acknowledges the tension directly:
“HR can absolutely become compliance-obsessed and process-heavy, treating normal workplace tension like a five-alarm fire,” she says.
“When HR operates primarily from a place of fear, fear of litigation or fear of conflict, leaders experience it as friction that slows everything down. And sometimes they are not entirely wrong about that.”
However, even with a less alarmist HR department, Matthew Crook, General Manager at PeopleHR Evo, argues that the current corporate culture, driven by the speed of things like AI, has pitted executives against HR. “We’re living in an age where the objectives of CEOs are increasingly at odds with the goals of their HR departments,” he says. He adds a pointed observation:
“It could be that Breslow’s actions have been inspired on a conscious or unconscious level by the mentality of Elon Musk and his bid to heavily decrease the size of US government departments as part of a highly ambitious cost-cutting effort. This is now the era of aggressive savings and automation, with efficiency becoming all-encompassing.”
These ideas for mass layoffs or dramatic organizational changes may see HR raise objections, and for CEOs who have a clear goal, that can seem like an obstacle.
What Disappears When HR Does
The quiet after firing an HR team can feel like resolution. Fewer escalations. Less process overhead. Faster decisions. But that quiet carries a cost that surfaces later and usually at a much higher price.
Dr. Cohen is direct about what Breslow has actually done. “What he’s done is unplug the early warning system. The problems did not go away; they just stopped being reported. HR, when it is actually functioning well, is how a company protects itself from itself.” She identifies three specific risks now facing Bolt: legal exposure, talent flight, and culture erosion. “Culture does not maintain itself. Without anyone intentionally stewarding it, you get whatever the most dominant personalities in the room create. That is rarely what you would design on purpose.”
Paola Accettola, CEO and Principal Consultant at True North HR Consulting, reinforces the legal dimension:
“Employment law does not pause because you have gone lean. Wage disputes, wrongful termination claims, accommodation requests, and harassment complaints all require documented, defensible processes. Without HR, that burden falls on managers who are unlikely to be trained for it, and one mishandled incident can be enormously costly.”
She also flags what happens when Bolt eventually tries to scale again: “Rebuilding that infrastructure from scratch is expensive and chaotic. High-performing candidates, particularly in competitive tech markets, look at a company’s people infrastructure when deciding where to work. ‘No HR’ can read as ‘no recourse.’”
The data supports these concerns. Organizations without dedicated HR functions show higher annual voluntary turnover that can reach 70 to 85 percent in high-churn sectors, with constant retraining of new staff significantly eating into budgets. First-year employee retention drops sharply without structured onboarding. Docustream found first-year retention improves by 50 percent with structured onboarding. Danielle Balow, Vice President, Customer Transformation at Click Boarding, points to exactly this gap:
“Eighty-six percent of new hires make a decision to stay within their first 90 days, but if that process is fragmented, it can damage a new hire’s momentum.”
Looking at Bolt’s careers page, she notes there is no clear indication of what happens after a job application is submitted.
Manager burnout is the third compounding risk. Accettola is unambiguous: “People operations pushed entirely to line managers works beautifully in a 15-person startup. At any meaningful scale, it collapses. Managers stop managing work and start managing people issues they are not equipped to handle, and the best ones leave.”
Lessons for Everyone Else
Bolt’s situation is extreme. A company that has lost almost its entire valuation is not operating under normal conditions, and Balow acknowledges as much. “This feels more like a short-term move to try to help with profit and loss, because that is probably his mandate, and long-term consequences cannot currently be prioritized.” That context does not make the decision sound, but it does make it legible.
The broader lesson may be, however, not that HR is irreplaceable in its traditional form. Companies like Valve, Morning Star, and AND Digital demonstrate that structured people management can exist outside a conventional HR department. Valve runs entirely without managers, using peer-led stack rankings to manage compensation and performance across 400 employees. Morning Star coordinates a workforce of more than 4,000 through personal mission statements and formal Colleague Letters of Understanding. AND Digital distributes people responsibility across autonomous 50-person clubs while maintaining centralized compliance support.
So there is precedent for Breslow’s idea of a People Ops organization, and it is one Cohen thinks is a valid option. “I’ll give him partial credit here. The traditional HR model genuinely does need a rethink, and I’ve been saying that for years. People Ops, done well, is more strategic, more integrated into how the business actually operates,” she says.
“But ‘HR is the wrong energy’ tells me the goal is to eliminate friction entirely. Some friction is doing its job. The complaint that gets investigated, the manager who gets flagged before his whole team burns out, the pay gap that gets caught before it becomes a lawsuit, that is not friction you want to engineer away. What you want is a people function that leadership actually trusts and treats as a partner. That is a culture problem. Changing the name does not fix it.”
That is the core of Accettola’s critique of Breslow’s alternative vision. “The best people operations functions do exactly what he describes: they empower managers, reduce friction, and treat employees as adults. But rebranding HR as ‘People Ops’ and cutting 90 percent of the team does not automatically produce that outcome. It just produces less HR.”
For organizations watching this unfold, the takeaway is not to resist people operations reform. The push toward flatter, faster, manager-led structures is legitimate and well supported by both research and real-world examples. But there is a clear line between restructuring a people function and dismantling it. The early warning systems, the compliance frameworks, the onboarding structures do not disappear when the team does. They become someone else’s problem, or no one’s problem. In both cases, the company pays eventually. The only variable is when.
