The Turn: Why We're Obsessed With Bad Leaders
On the over-coverage of one CEO's statement about HR
I saw one share. Then a LinkedIn post. Then 10. Then all of the thought pieces came flooding in next.
Yes, a fintech unicorn-turned-dumpster-fire named Bolt “fired” their HR team. The Bolt CEO dropped this banger during an interview on stage:
“We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go.” — Ryan Breslow
It’s a dumb statement but there is an element of truth hidden in there somewhere, isn’t there?
HR is often built to create problems for bad leaders. In a regulated environment like financial services, that’s probably a good thing.
But HR isn’t above criticism. Sometimes they are too risk averse. Sometimes they do slow things down. Sometimes they are out of alignment with the organization. And their position makes them easy to target.
It happens.
But this isn’t getting coverage because every loves to hate on HR. It’s because Breslow is not a good leader and people love piling on. I love a good pile on and he deserves it. He built Bolt based on inflated metrics and what The New York Times called stretching the truth.
That’s called lying when you’re not the CEO of a Silicon Valley startup.
He stepped down from his role as CEO in 2022 when he called out Stripe and Y Combinator as being tech mobsters and gatekeepers. Even out of the CEO seat, problems followed. He hired a fraudster to build his social impact project Movement DAO and that predictably turned out bad. When he loaned himself $30M from Bolt and then defaulted, the company responded not by asking Breslow to pay back the loan but by buying out the investor causing a stink.
He returned as CEO and the hits continued, with valuations plummeting to just 3% of its eight-figure highs. Bolt’s promised SuperApp has fizzled. They continued layoffs and gave the old post-layoff pep talk to the remaining 100 or so people: “Everything will suck more but at least you still have a job.” Or something like that.
He even caused problems for another company named Bolt based in the EU, which had to clarify that their HR team still was around (and that they were hiring).
I think bad leadership press like Bolt’s is fun because the stakes seem relatively low. Like when Adam Neumann of WeWork or Elizabeth Homes of Theranos captured the attention of business press, the most consequential victims seemed to be a bunch of bankers, billionaires, and VC funds (in reality, employees got the short end of all of those sticks).
I also believe part of it is escapism. There have been so many consequential leadership failures, both in business and in the world, that a CEO that declares his problems solved by ignoring those problems is just plain funny. If Bolt flames out, we’ll feel bad for the employees and customers who bought in but we can live without it.
There’s probably something to learn here but not for leaders. Still, it can feel like we are growing as people if we can point out the mistakes and wonder what sort of lessons we can learn from the Bolt CEO.
There’s no lesson, though. A poorly behaved CEO of a hundred person company are a dime a dozen. Investors getting taken by a slick guy who cooked his books happens to even some of the best firms.
But hey, at least we had some fun reads.
What else is going on this week?
AI Prices Are Going Up, Up, Up — Maybe Workers Are More Productive Than You Thought. Josh Bersin does the math on roughly a trillion dollars of annualized AI infrastructure spend and makes the case that Moore’s Law doesn’t apply here: prices are going up, the “adoption before value” era is ending not by choice but by invoice, and the organizations that thrive will be the ones treating AI as a capital investment with a real return requirement.
How 100s of People Feel About AI Interviews and 5 Questions for You. Glen Cathey classified 486 comments on AI interviewing, found 79% objecting in some form, and then asked the harder question: what does the deal-breaker position mean for the 97% of Fortune 1000 applicants who are already invisible to human recruiters anyway?
Hiring Is Missing One Thing. Her Name Is Sarah. Basketball meets hiring in Susan LaMotte‘s piece on Texas Longhorns walk-on Sarah Graves, whose case for the personality hire is sharper than most consultants can articulate. Sports has been scouting for ceiling over polish for decades, and early talent hiring still hasn’t caught up.
Poppulo Acquires Sociabble to Forge the Future of Employee Experience. Congrats to Mark Brandau and the Poppulo team. I love the EX space and it feels like it will be coming back stronger than ever once we figure out that AI investment isn’t a panacea.
Work Is Broken and Nobody’s Being Polite About It. Francesca Ranieri and Mel Plett pull in David Rice and Adam DeRose for a frank conversation on how messed up work is right now.
Skills Are Particles. Stop Trying to Bottle Air. Jess Von Bank takes on the whole skills-based apparatus and argues that the industry spent a decade building infrastructure to measure a simulation of learning rather than learning itself. The real thing missing was permission to try something before you’re certified to try it.
The Hiring Market Is Lying to You. Steve Smith reads past the record-high job posting headlines and finds a broken entry-level pipeline, a federal lawsuit suggesting the resume distribution industry may be a single monopoly operating under multiple brand names, and 44% of Gen Z workers sabotaging AI tools in ways the data says are accelerating their own obsolescence.
AI, Productivity and the Bigger Question We Need to Ask. Mervyn Dinnen calls out the work design problem the productivity conversation keeps avoiding: AI gains concentrating in a handful of firms and regions don’t automatically translate to better outcomes for workers or places. That’s a design choice, not an inevitability.
The Missing Workforce: Capacity Planning in the AI Era. Charlotte Zhang tells us what most workforce plans are still ignoring: agents doing real work and consuming real budget while appearing nowhere in the org chart, headcount model, or capacity plan. The case for a unified planning layer that treats token capital alongside salary cost is the kind of thinking that will feel obvious in three years.
How SMBs Are Turning AI Into Growth. Gabby Burlacu shares Upwork research showing smaller businesses are moving faster on AI than the enterprise because they don’t have the luxury of waiting: 17% of SMBs have fully integrated AI-first process design and nearly 80% are increasing AI spend.
The Primordial Credit Argument for Unconditional Basic Income (UBI). Scott Santens builds a UBI argument from David Graeber’s anthropology of debt and reframes the whole conversation: it’s the smallest possible acknowledgment of a debt civilization owes every person it brings into existence and can never repay. One of the best long reads you’ll come across on the subject.
Leadership as the Operating System of Scale: Meg Bear. Marcin Murawski interviews Meg Bear on what it takes to scale leadership in the AI era, and her answer is that companies buying identical tools will be differentiated by the culture and mindset work no vendor can deliver.
Is It Time to Measure Burnout? Heather Bussing cites research showing 86% of workers at moderate to high burnout and burnout as the single strongest predictor of diminished innovation capacity, with unclear AI role expectations now among the leading drivers. We should be talking about this a lot more than we are.
Flexible Recruiting Expertise, On Demand. Congratulations to friend Robin Schooling and the BelleSage Partners team on the launch of this service.
The AI Resist List. A catalog of workers organizing and pushing back on AI deployments that treat people as machine-interchangeable, from Kaiser Permanente hunger strikers to Amazon employee open letters. Hat tip to John Sumser for the share.
What Good Thought Leadership Actually Looks Like. Jonas Barck on what separates thought leadership worth reading from content that just takes up space, and the observations land.
Three Insights About HR Technology from the 2026 Acadian Ventures Conference. Steve Hunt finds the investor-organized HR tech conference clarifying because money focuses conversations on problems that actually matter. The sharpest takeaway: established vendors are restricting data access now that sharing it means funding agents competing with their own revenue streams.
Things I Want Founders to Know. Alexis Fink also came away from Acadian Ventures with 15 things she wants HR tech founders to hear, starting with “be more curious about my problems than you are excited about your solutions” and getting sharper from there.
Have a great rest of your week!