Last month a fintech CEO said it out loud, on a stage, into a microphone. Ryan Breslow, back running Bolt after the company slid from an $11 billion valuation to around $300 million, told a Fortune summit: "We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn't exist." He fired them. "Those problems disappeared when I let them go." (Fortune)
Founder feeds did what founder feeds do. The clip got passed around as proof of a thing a lot of people already wanted to believe: HR is overhead, HR invents drama, fire it and watch the company get lighter. One post I saw bragged about never hiring HR at all, just a bot and a contractor handling onboarding and policy questions "without inventing workplace drama."
But look at what Breslow actually kept. He didn't run Bolt with no people function. He replaced the HR team with a smaller "people operations" team to run required training and act as a resource for employees. (Fortune) He cut the department. He kept the work.
That distinction is the whole ballgame, and most of the people cheering skipped right over it.
Theatre is firable. The work isn't.
We've made this case before about engagement surveys and culture decks: there's HR theatre, and there's the people work, and they are not the same thing. The theatre is the stuff that's visible and produces nothing you can file. The workshop. The values offsite. The survey that generates a slide and zero changed decisions. The work is onboarding that actually happens, payroll that runs clean, a contract filed with the right authority, a hard conversation had on time.
When a CEO says firing HR made the problems "disappear," the useful question is: which problems. If a function was generating process for its own sake, approvals nobody needed and policies solving for risks that weren't there, then removing it does feel like the company can finally breathe. That's theatre dying, and good riddance.
But the onboarding still has to happen. Someone still runs the training Breslow explicitly kept. Somebody files the contracts, answers the leave question, deals with the person who's checked out. You can delete the org box labelled "HR." You cannot delete the work that was sitting inside it. It just moves, usually onto a founder, a contractor, or an ops person who never signed up for it.
The engagement industry's own numbers suggest the theatre wasn't earning its keep anyway. After two decades of surveys and programs, Gallup measured global employee engagement at 21% in 2024, and falling. (Gallup) If the performative layer worked, that figure would have moved by now. Cutting it isn't the loss people fear. The mistake is assuming the work underneath was theatre too.
The part where this gets you sued
There's a reason "fire all of HR" is a better post than a plan.
Breslow cut roughly 30% of staff in April, removed most of the leadership team, and said 99% of employees couldn't adapt to the new culture. (Fortune) A mass layoff is exactly the moment the unglamorous side of people-ops earns its whole year's salary. Who documented the selection criteria so the cuts can't be read as age or disability discrimination? Who handled final-pay rules, which differ by country and get expensive fast when you fumble them? Who made sure offboarding didn't leave a former employee with live access to customer data?
None of that is theatre. It's load-bearing, invisible when it works and ruinous when it doesn't. Even HR's sharper critics landed on this about Bolt: the real risk isn't that he cut a bloated department, it's that he cut his guardrails at the precise moment he needed them. (Inc.)
So the honest read on Breslow is neither "HR is useless" nor "you must keep an HR department." It's narrower and more useful. He was right that the theatre was costing him, and he kept a leaner people-ops function because he knows the work doesn't vanish. The headline got the first half and dropped the second.
What to actually cut
If you're a founder eyeing your people function with the same itch Breslow felt, the move isn't to fire the work. It's to split it into two piles and be ruthless about exactly one of them.
Cut the rituals that produce slides, not outcomes. The quarterly survey nobody acts on. The values workshop. The retro about the retro. If you can't name the decision it changed, it's theatre.
Keep, and tighten, the work that touches money, law, or employment. Payroll, contracts, leave, terminations, the required compliance training. A mistake here costs real money, so it deserves more rigor, not less.
Stop paying a department to do it. This is the insight buried under the Bolt headline. The work is real, but it doesn't need a standing HR org with its own headcount and its own agenda. It needs someone competent who files things, answers questions, and closes loops, without building a bureaucracy to justify itself.
That's what the smarter version of "fire HR" is reaching for. Not no people-ops. People-ops without the department. Keep the contracts filed and the team looked after; bin the performance of caring that was standing in for it.
Breslow fired a team and called it a turnaround. The useful lesson is narrower than the headline: he didn't get rid of the people work, he stopped paying a department to perform it. You can do that without the layoff drama, and ideally well before you're down to a hundred people.