Here is my full Fortune Workplace Summit keynote. It takes only 8 minutes to watch at 2x speed. I believe that people ops is the way to go because it puts customers and employees first, better aligning with business priorities that keep the company moving forward. Bolt would not be standing today if it weren’t for an extremely lean, efficient, business-oriented people operations team. This shift was a crucial one for our business, and I believe many businesses can benefit from making a similar change.
Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow On Why He Eliminated HR
https://www.youtube.com/
Wrote an article here (well, Claude did), drew a lot of inspiration from your story! Reminds me of how Atlassian used to not have a sales team! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ats-trap-how-hr-engineered-its-own-irrelevance-fix-stefan-caliaro-4rvzc/
Massive D-bag that was posting ragebait memes the first time he posted this. Who would work for someone so arrogant who views HR as problematic? Walking flight risk. Might as well hire a Reddit admin.
This video will never be understood by the LinkedIn crowd. I'm not surprised 99% of his leadership team had to be let go. Startups are an entirely different animal. I've watched brilliant FAANG engineers get eaten alive at startups because they were obsessed with fully understanding every nook and cranny of problems instead of shipping. In certain companies I've experienced, leadership was rewarded for pontificating and rambling endlessly at 4:00pm meetings instead of getting their hands dirty to help save sinking ships. The HR thought leaders on here two got triggered at this initial post are the 99% that live in a scarcity-free corporate world.
I think many people are focusing on the headline and missing the shift you are describing underneath it. What stood out to me was not removing a department, it was readjusting attention back to the work that moves the business forward. As organizations grow, it becomes easy for processes, roles, and initiatives that were initially helpful to slowly take on a life of their own. Growth naturally creates complexity. The challenge becomes continuously asking whether what is being added is strengthening customer value and execution, or unintentionally pulling focus away from it. Interesting conversation because maintaining alignment during growth is harder than creating it in the first place.
The future belongs to leaner, commercially disciplined people functions that understand operations, move with the business, remove unnecessary friction, and create the conditions for high performance. In many ways, this exact shift is what led me to launch Align360: Execution & Performance Advisory - focused on helping leadership teams scale with stronger alignment, accountability, speed, and execution discipline. https://align360.biz/
It’s not really “getting rid” of HR is it? It’s repurposing it to the scale of the business and giving it a new name 🤓
The lean people ops point holds even more weight on the finance and engineering side. Most scaling companies carry team structures built for a different headcount trajectory, and the org chart tends to outlast the strategy that created it. Getting that right before the next growth phase is harder than most founders expect.
Glad to hear that you didn't total extinguish HR from your company but rather replaced it with a team of professionals who know and understand the people operation in a business.
Investors are the worst sometimes. I'm glad you turned the ship around. This is a really cool story.
Agree or disagree with eliminating HR, that's not what caught my attention. What caught my attention is a leader willing to ask a question most organizations avoid: "If we built this company from scratch today, would we design it this way?" Most transformations optimize around yesterday's assumptions. The interesting ones challenge them. Respect for having the courage to touch a sacred cow.