4 ms·

Bolt CEO says he let go of HR team for creating problems that didn't exist

60 points by cdrnsf 5mo ago

pavel_lishin 5mo ago
I wish he'd described some of the problems. What we get from the article is very vague. > While Breslow didn’t get into the specifics of the exact differences, he wrote on LinkedIn last year that, “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach. People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.” > “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,” he added at the Fortune conference.
- futuraperdita 5mo ago
  The difference between HR, which is often policy and governance driven, and “people operations” probably points enough to the dynamic here. He wants to avoid red tape, hire and fire fast and accept the minimal risk of consequence, and HR sounds like they held him back from liquidity in human capital.
  - seb1204 5mo ago
    Liquidity in human capital. Sounds rife. Hire and fire right? via chat message on Friday night, hire back Monday.
  - impish9208 5mo ago
    > liquidity in human capital I like this phrase!
    - Henchman21 5mo ago
      Disgusting.
    - HacklesRaised 5mo ago
      Hmmmmm, giant blender...
- FatherOfCurses 5mo ago
  "Our HR team gave people the idea that they didn't have to sacrifice their personal lives or mental well-being to work here."
fakedang 5mo ago
In my experience, whatever is typically done by HR and People teams can also be done by a generalist admin team. - Recruiting - Onboarding - Payroll / Insurance - Culture development - Team building - Legal compliance - Offboarding We (~120 employees) have worked with some massive conglomerates and retail enterprises too, and HR is wholly necessary for those formats. Where the line blurs between white collar and blue/brown collar collar is where HR becomes mandatory. For a purely white collar company? Absolutely useless and not worth it.
- socalnate1 5mo ago
  What are you talking about? The people who do the list of tasks you described are literally the HR team. Regardless of what you call that group of people; that’s your HR team.
  - fakedang 5mo ago
    Admin team also handles general administrative tasks within our company - arranging supplies, managing access to resources, liaising with cantonal bodies, etc. i.e. they perform those one-off HR tasks in addition to administrative tasks that are done regularly. It's not an actively separate team within our organization like Compliance is.
    - szszrk 5mo ago
      So? You can do whatever internal structure you want. Who cares. You still have to do the same job, just now with team who is less qualified to do that. But if you guys are all happy about that, you do you.
      - fakedang 5mo ago
        A truck might be more efficient for carrying a lot of things but I don't need a truck to take me to the grocery store downtown.
        deleted 5mo ago
xenospn 5mo ago
Bolt still exists?!
jakub_g 5mo ago
Note: it's about Bolt.com (fintech), not Bolt.eu (taxi).
- watwut 5mo ago
  Lol and I wanted to commend on their pervasive bad driving.
tqi 5mo ago
Cool to see that lack of object permanence does not prevent one from becoming CEO.
lovich 5mo ago
Without examples of said problems this has the energy of saying cases will go down if you stop testing. That or the HR team told him about pesky problems like the law. I checked their careers page and see they operate in Europe. I’ve found it very common for American execs to be surprised and exasperated by the fact that there are actual worker protections there and they can’t just fire people on a whim.
DoctorOW 5mo ago
In my experience, HR is all too willing to explore gray areas for company benefit, so any "problems" created are likely actual laws.
gamblor956 5mo ago
In a few months (possibly a few weeks) we're going to be reading about a huge harassment scandal at Bolt starring this CEO. Given the volume of the whisper network, I'm surprised it hasn't come out already.
deterministic 5mo ago
If you are being interview by somebody from "HR" and not your potential future boss then it is a massive red flag.
mrandish 5mo ago
As an entrepreneur who founded a tech startup that grew up to a few hundred people, HR was handled by half an administrative/finance person. It was mostly just payroll, health insurance, onboarding, some compliance paperwork and a little recruiting. When we were acquired by a F500 public company with >10k employees, they had more HR staff than my entire company. I do wish the TFA had more details on the issues this CEO experienced but I don't think he's exaggerating. My biggest issue was that BigCo's HR dept was the source of a lot of disruption and distraction for my people. Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance paperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot. The thing is, before being acquired we were in full compliance with all state and federal regs, yet somehow there was ~5x more HR burden at BigCo. And managers got all that plus an extra side of mandatory "managing people" training sessions and robo-quizzes. Then managers had to enter detailed quarterly evals and everyone had to participate in a pointless "360" peer review process that couldn't help feeling vaguely dystopian. And BigCo was proud to be the sector leader in employee satisfaction and retention. Everything was first-class, top-quadrant and 'industry best practice" yet my startup had substantially better satisfaction & retention numbers with an "HR Team" of 0.5 people and a tiny fraction the cost, time and cognitive burden on everyone.
- jfil 5mo ago
  I used to work at a large global company that was part of a uopoly in its industry. We had a lot of mandatory training about bribery, how its forbidden to offer bribes and receive bribes. A lot of training and processes around data retention, for privacy and also for lawsuit discovery... I guess the training was mandated because of previous egregious violations. A F500, older company likely comes with a long history of mandatory remediations for past transgressions.
  - mrandish 5mo ago
    > mandatory remediations for past transgressions. Weirdly, this can actually cause companies that didn't do the bad thing (bribes, etc) to voluntarily, proactively adopt widespread, comprehensive, mandatory, highly-audited training to tell every single employee NOT to do that bad thing. That way, if some rogue employee(s) do that thing, having the audited paper trail proving how very hard the company tried to NOT do that thing, can be invaluable in defending the company. In the event of prosecution it can lower the penalties but even better, it helps in diverting potential prosecution into a settlement / consent decree - as well as negotiating lower penalties and settlement amounts. This was actually the source of one onerous training requirement at BigCo, which I learned about over drinks with our Chief Legal Officer. Apparently, one company (not us) having an extreme punitive penalty slapped on them generates scary WSJ headlines every compliance training vendor uses on Slide #1 in their sales pitches.
richardfey 5mo ago
"We fired all of the QA people, now there are no QA issue reports anymore".
DrScientist 5mo ago
From the wikipedia page: > nstead of cash, the fundraising partly involved The London Fund pledging up to $250m in influencer marketing credits Is that stock for 'influencer marketing credits'??? Even more scammy than equity for OpenAI tokens... While I'm not a big fan of HR - I suspect the current problems at Bolt are more fundamental in nature - apple/google pay/ banks getting their act together leaves little space for a dedicated app.
JimRoepcke 5mo ago
All I can think of when reading this headline is this scene from IT Crowd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMW8VYb_GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMW8VYb_GE

60 points by cdrnsf 5mo ago

I wish he'd described some of the problems. What we get from the article is very vague. > While Breslow didn’t get into the specifics of the exact differences, he wrote on LinkedIn last year that, “HR is the wrong energy, format, and approach. People ops empowers managers, streamlines decision making, and keeps the company moving at lightning speed.” > “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,” he added at the Fortune conference.

futuraperdita 5mo ago
The difference between HR, which is often policy and governance driven, and “people operations” probably points enough to the dynamic here. He wants to avoid red tape, hire and fire fast and accept the minimal risk of consequence, and HR sounds like they held him back from liquidity in human capital.
- seb1204 5mo ago
  Liquidity in human capital. Sounds rife. Hire and fire right? via chat message on Friday night, hire back Monday.
- impish9208 5mo ago
  > liquidity in human capital I like this phrase!
  - Henchman21 5mo ago
    Disgusting.
  - HacklesRaised 5mo ago
    Hmmmmm, giant blender...
FatherOfCurses 5mo ago
"Our HR team gave people the idea that they didn't have to sacrifice their personal lives or mental well-being to work here."

fakedang 5mo ago

In my experience, whatever is typically done by HR and People teams can also be done by a generalist admin team. - Recruiting - Onboarding - Payroll / Insurance - Culture development - Team building - Legal compliance - Offboarding We (~120 employees) have worked with some massive conglomerates and retail enterprises too, and HR is wholly necessary for those formats. Where the line blurs between white collar and blue/brown collar collar is where HR becomes mandatory. For a purely white collar company? Absolutely useless and not worth it.

socalnate1 5mo ago
What are you talking about? The people who do the list of tasks you described are literally the HR team. Regardless of what you call that group of people; that’s your HR team.
- fakedang 5mo ago
  Admin team also handles general administrative tasks within our company - arranging supplies, managing access to resources, liaising with cantonal bodies, etc. i.e. they perform those one-off HR tasks in addition to administrative tasks that are done regularly. It's not an actively separate team within our organization like Compliance is.
  - szszrk 5mo ago
    So? You can do whatever internal structure you want. Who cares. You still have to do the same job, just now with team who is less qualified to do that. But if you guys are all happy about that, you do you.
    - fakedang 5mo ago
      A truck might be more efficient for carrying a lot of things but I don't need a truck to take me to the grocery store downtown.
      - deleted 5mo ago

xenospn 5mo ago

Bolt still exists?!

jakub_g 5mo ago

Note: it's about Bolt.com (fintech), not Bolt.eu (taxi).

watwut 5mo ago
Lol and I wanted to commend on their pervasive bad driving.

tqi 5mo ago

Cool to see that lack of object permanence does not prevent one from becoming CEO.

lovich 5mo ago

Without examples of said problems this has the energy of saying cases will go down if you stop testing. That or the HR team told him about pesky problems like the law. I checked their careers page and see they operate in Europe. I’ve found it very common for American execs to be surprised and exasperated by the fact that there are actual worker protections there and they can’t just fire people on a whim.

DoctorOW 5mo ago

In my experience, HR is all too willing to explore gray areas for company benefit, so any "problems" created are likely actual laws.

gamblor956 5mo ago

In a few months (possibly a few weeks) we're going to be reading about a huge harassment scandal at Bolt starring this CEO. Given the volume of the whisper network, I'm surprised it hasn't come out already.

deterministic 5mo ago

If you are being interview by somebody from "HR" and not your potential future boss then it is a massive red flag.

mrandish 5mo ago

As an entrepreneur who founded a tech startup that grew up to a few hundred people, HR was handled by half an administrative/finance person. It was mostly just payroll, health insurance, onboarding, some compliance paperwork and a little recruiting. When we were acquired by a F500 public company with >10k employees, they had more HR staff than my entire company. I do wish the TFA had more details on the issues this CEO experienced but I don't think he's exaggerating. My biggest issue was that BigCo's HR dept was the source of a lot of disruption and distraction for my people. Several of my top engineers complained about all the mandatory training sessions, compliance paperwork and online "learning modules" with nanny robo-quizzes. It was a lot. The thing is, before being acquired we were in full compliance with all state and federal regs, yet somehow there was ~5x more HR burden at BigCo. And managers got all that plus an extra side of mandatory "managing people" training sessions and robo-quizzes. Then managers had to enter detailed quarterly evals and everyone had to participate in a pointless "360" peer review process that couldn't help feeling vaguely dystopian. And BigCo was proud to be the sector leader in employee satisfaction and retention. Everything was first-class, top-quadrant and 'industry best practice" yet my startup had substantially better satisfaction & retention numbers with an "HR Team" of 0.5 people and a tiny fraction the cost, time and cognitive burden on everyone.

jfil 5mo ago
I used to work at a large global company that was part of a uopoly in its industry. We had a lot of mandatory training about bribery, how its forbidden to offer bribes and receive bribes. A lot of training and processes around data retention, for privacy and also for lawsuit discovery... I guess the training was mandated because of previous egregious violations. A F500, older company likely comes with a long history of mandatory remediations for past transgressions.
- mrandish 5mo ago
  > mandatory remediations for past transgressions. Weirdly, this can actually cause companies that didn't do the bad thing (bribes, etc) to voluntarily, proactively adopt widespread, comprehensive, mandatory, highly-audited training to tell every single employee NOT to do that bad thing. That way, if some rogue employee(s) do that thing, having the audited paper trail proving how very hard the company tried to NOT do that thing, can be invaluable in defending the company. In the event of prosecution it can lower the penalties but even better, it helps in diverting potential prosecution into a settlement / consent decree - as well as negotiating lower penalties and settlement amounts. This was actually the source of one onerous training requirement at BigCo, which I learned about over drinks with our Chief Legal Officer. Apparently, one company (not us) having an extreme punitive penalty slapped on them generates scary WSJ headlines every compliance training vendor uses on Slide #1 in their sales pitches.

richardfey 5mo ago

"We fired all of the QA people, now there are no QA issue reports anymore".

DrScientist 5mo ago

From the wikipedia page: > nstead of cash, the fundraising partly involved The London Fund pledging up to $250m in influencer marketing credits Is that stock for 'influencer marketing credits'??? Even more scammy than equity for OpenAI tokens... While I'm not a big fan of HR - I suspect the current problems at Bolt are more fundamental in nature - apple/google pay/ banks getting their act together leaves little space for a dedicated app.

JimRoepcke 5mo ago

All I can think of when reading this headline is this scene from IT Crowd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMW8VYb_GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoMW8VYb_GE