Boss of US fintech firm fires his entire HR team for ‘creating problems that did not exist’

The boss of an American fintech firm fired his human resources team because they were ‘creating problems that did not exist’.

Ryan Breslow, co-founder and chief executive of software group Bolt, laid off almost a third of the workforce in April, saying of the HR team: ‘Those problems disappeared when I let them go.’

Bolt, which develops software to speed up online checkouts, was set up in 2014 in San Francisco by Breslow and fellow computer scientist Eric Feldman.

But Breslow, 32, said: ‘There’s a sense of entitlement that had festered across the company, and people who felt empowered, felt entitled — but weren’t actually working hard.

‘And this is the number one thing I had to battle. Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.

‘They had gotten used to working at a company where they didn’t have to get their hands dirty, and could spend a lot of money, and we just didn’t have that money to spend anymore, and we didn’t have that luxury.’

He added: ‘We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done, and there is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot.’