The CEO who fired HR was right. About the wrong thing.

Ryan Breslow, CEO of Bolt, made headlines (at Fortune and beyond) recently when he eliminated his entire people function. His explanation at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit: it was “creating problems that didn’t exist.”

He told Fortune editorial director Kristin Stoller that his people team was manufacturing problems rather than solving real ones. And that once they were gone, those problems vanished with them.

Here’s the thing: Breslow isn’t wrong that something was broken. He’s wrong about what broke it.

I’ve spent my career building people functions, and I’ve also watched them get built to fail. What Breslow describes – reactive, process-heavy, better at documenting problems than solving them – is a real pattern. The instinct to blow it up is understandable. But the that misses the diagnosis entirely.

How people functions get built to fail

HR started as a compliance function. In most organizations, it never fully evolved past that framing. It moved from “how many complaints were filed?” to “what’s the turnover rate?” – a different flavor of the same trailing-indicator thinking. Neither question asks what the business actually needs. Both ask what already went wrong.

The problem isn’t people functions. It’s CEOs who set up people functions as compliance mechanisms, then express surprise when compliance is all they get back.

Consider what Breslow himself acknowledged: even after eliminating HR, Bolt still needed a people operations team to handle required training and serve as a resource for employees. Which is to say, he fired his HR team and then rebuilt … an HR team. He just called it something else.

On LinkedIn, he argued that “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach” and that “People Ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.” 

I’ll give him this: the term HR is outdated. It does........

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