Valuetainment - May 29, 2026


＂Finding Problems That Don't Exist＂ - Bolt CEO ELIMINATES Entire HR Staff


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

185.6771

Word count

2,330

Sentence count

186


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.040 Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice.
00:00:04.800 I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community.
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00:00:30.000 A CEO of Bolt, I'm going to go business.
00:00:32.700 We'll come back.
00:00:33.200 We got a lot of other stories we'll get into, but I'm going to go into a business story here.
00:00:36.940 Bolt's CEO all of a sudden decides to fire his entire HR team.
00:00:42.620 And people are like, wait, what?
00:00:44.660 Yep.
00:00:45.420 He decided to get rid of his entire HR team.
00:00:48.400 He or she is explaining why he did so.
00:00:50.220 Go for it, Rob.
00:00:51.280 We got rid of our HR team.
00:00:53.000 Why?
00:00:53.740 We had an HR team, right?
00:00:55.820 And that HR team was creating problems that didn't exist.
00:01:02.340 And those problems disappeared when I let them go.
00:01:06.480 Why?
00:01:07.120 Why did you get rid of your HR team?
00:01:08.260 We replaced it with a couple-person people ops team, which was meant to just streamline
00:01:13.380 people operations.
00:01:14.960 I can't say that I would advise the same in a large company, but we're back in startup
00:01:23.560 mode again.
00:01:24.160 And those HR professionals have really important insights when you're in a peacetime and when you're at a larger company.
00:01:33.300 But, you know, we're a remote company.
00:01:35.040 It's not like, you know, a lot of the potential issues that you would have in a workplace don't really exist because you're not in the same room as somebody.
00:01:43.520 You can pause it right there.
00:01:44.400 Tom, thoughts on this?
00:01:45.320 Because we've been dealing with HR for a long time.
00:01:47.560 Insurance company, currently what we're doing, they play a very important role.
00:01:51.000 But why do you think sometimes HR and the company have issues?
00:01:54.160 Well, I think that as companies are growing, right, everybody in the company sometimes loses sight of the vision of the company and what you're really trying to do.
00:02:04.260 And what he was talking about, Ryan Breslow was talking about, when HR creates problems that really don't exist.
00:02:11.500 And this is what it'll sound like.
00:02:12.720 If you have your own – by the way, this is one of the things we're going to talk about at Vault.
00:02:17.400 So we're going to talk openly about HR, managing people, developing teams, and all that.
00:02:20.580 We're actually bringing employees up on stage to show how we calibrate and we openly expose our conflicts.
00:02:27.040 And it was one of the most biggest highlights we had at SLS that we did.
00:02:30.800 It was everybody was talking about it.
00:02:32.260 Go ahead, Rob.
00:02:32.920 Go ahead, Tom.
00:02:33.460 Exactly.
00:02:33.820 And so what you have is, you know, withholding information or, you know, taking walking into Pat and I built experiences, you know, at we had HR at PHP in Dallas.
00:02:49.760 Everyone is saying that.
00:02:52.140 All the people are talking about.
00:02:54.440 Everybody is upset about.
00:02:56.200 They said this.
00:02:57.120 They said.
00:02:57.800 So they, everybody.
00:02:59.700 I said, okay, send an email to they, everybody, and someone.
00:03:04.520 Have they, everybody, and someone meet me in the conference room?
00:03:08.500 Well, I can't do that.
00:03:10.100 They spoke to HR in confidence.
00:03:12.180 So HR then is divisive.
00:03:14.380 Oh, really?
00:03:15.800 So you're holding all these secret conversations?
00:03:17.860 That doesn't work. And so you then you drill down and you find out it's one or two people and HR in a small organization is getting its legitimacy by by literally manipulating information.
00:03:32.020 And so if you have a small HR group and they're not working to drive the company forward and they're not looking to help hire with speed and they're not looking to, you know, have programs and benefits and things in there, you know, at the lowest cost and work for that, and then you've got this little HR group, which everyone feels like is the Gestapo, then guess what you need to do?
00:03:55.260 Take the Gestapo to the firing squad, you know, and that's what Ryan Breslow did.
00:03:59.540 The firing squad.
00:04:00.540 Well, no, no.
00:04:01.260 Getting them fired.
00:04:02.480 He fired all of them.
00:04:03.240 I'm using fired, fired.
00:04:04.420 I'm not saying be violent, but he brings out a good point.
00:04:08.360 Apparently, he had one of those HR departments that was manipulating things, taking things, and it just doesn't work.
00:04:16.700 If you're not there to help build the company and they're here to build people up and enable people, then you're the cops.
00:04:24.020 Go ahead.
00:04:24.400 You want to finish?
00:04:24.940 Okay.
00:04:25.040 Okay. The reason I think that you wanted to discuss this story is because one of the books that you always, always mention that I consistently revert back to when I'm trying to understand business and concepts and startups is Barbarians of Bureaucrats.
00:04:38.620 This would seem to me that this guy was probably the prophet, right? He had his barbarians and he had his flag carriers.
00:04:46.140 At some point, the startup culture turned into a bureaucratic nightmare with red tape.
00:04:51.360 Were you going to make a point or are you going to go to the book?
00:04:55.040 Are you asking a question?
00:04:56.100 Yeah, I'm asking if this is the reason.
00:04:58.740 No, was that really the question to ask if I?
00:05:02.620 You didn't even let me finish my entire situation here.
00:05:05.500 I want to get to the question, buddy, because he's making a point.
00:05:07.380 If you have a point, make the point.
00:05:08.460 I've got a point to make.
00:05:09.300 Go ahead.
00:05:09.700 What's your question?
00:05:10.480 I'm done.
00:05:10.980 Okay, so then let me get into the point because this is an HR.
00:05:13.500 I was done, by the way.
00:05:14.260 I understand that.
00:05:15.240 So the part with HR is the following, Tom.
00:05:18.820 In HR, sometimes you get some people that when it's wartime,
00:05:24.940 and I think the guy was talking about it, they have things to fix.
00:05:28.800 When there isn't a war, they create problems to fix them.
00:05:34.000 And it's not necessary because it's kind of like, am I valuable?
00:05:37.620 Am I valuable?
00:05:38.320 Am I valuable?
00:05:39.200 Let me create a problem.
00:05:40.380 Here's another one.
00:05:42.080 Triangulation is sometimes when you're a business owner,
00:05:46.600 you're running a company,
00:05:47.380 It's kind of like, hey, Adam, what do you think about what Vinny said about you?
00:05:52.420 And I heard Vinny said this.
00:05:54.120 And then, no, Vinny, I heard Tom said this about you.
00:05:57.220 And then I'm creating and I'm pinning all of you guys against each other, which it becomes a problem.
00:06:02.220 I will tell you, there's only one shirt I've ever bought that said I am that department.
00:06:07.960 And you know what it is?
00:06:08.840 I bought a shirt.
00:06:09.940 You know what the shirt says?
00:06:10.860 I am HR.
00:06:12.880 You know why?
00:06:13.460 Because I am HR.
00:06:15.180 I had a meeting with our HR team.
00:06:16.760 I had a lot of meetings with our HR team in the last 12 months.
00:06:19.460 But I went and I said, I am HR.
00:06:21.520 This is not our shirt, Rob, but it looks something like that.
00:06:24.480 So I said, I am HR.
00:06:25.700 There's not a single department that's more important to us right now for our growth level than HR.
00:06:31.000 Why?
00:06:31.920 We hired 17 new people last Monday.
00:06:34.380 You have to get the comp right.
00:06:36.500 You have to get the benefits right.
00:06:38.300 Speed of hiring and growing, very, very important on how HR does it.
00:06:42.380 You understand what I'm saying?
00:06:43.040 So if done right, there's no way you build a big business without a great HR.
00:06:49.440 I remember one time RJ and I were talking, and I had RJ draw up in the interview.
00:06:53.680 I did six interviews with this guy.
00:06:56.360 I had him draw up the Uber chart that they had on how many people in each department,
00:07:04.140 because he used to be at Uber, and he was a chief data officer at Uber, Tom, if I'm not mistaken.
00:07:08.300 Do you know how many talent acquisition people they had at Uber?
00:07:10.800 Talent acquisition is people that hire people.
00:07:13.040 250 were W-2 employees, 250 were independent contractors.
00:07:17.280 All they do all day, you know what they do?
00:07:19.060 Filter to get people to work out.
00:07:20.040 All they do is they hire.
00:07:21.180 500 people?
00:07:22.360 500 is independent, 250 is W-2.
00:07:25.860 And all day, so you got employee relations, you got ground,
00:07:30.020 somebody that's taking care of the ground.
00:07:31.680 It's like, you know who it is, Barney.
00:07:33.200 You know how much stuff Barney has to do?
00:07:34.620 Oh, my goodness.
00:07:35.280 There's a lot of stuff that when you're dealing with HR, it's super, super important.
00:07:38.860 but my god if they get in the way and they play politics they become the CEO's number one enemy
00:07:43.860 because they create problems that don't exist and then you know what happens there's noise if
00:07:47.680 there's noise what do you do you lose speed so this is why I love this story and why it's out
00:07:52.180 there and I think it's necessary for a lot of other entrepreneurs to pay close attention to
00:07:57.840 this because if you don't it has what it takes to create so much noise in your company and slow you
00:08:03.720 down at the last event that we had at SLS at Trump Doral we brought two of our employees who
00:08:08.400 We had massive issues with each other for about a couple weeks.
00:08:10.860 And we had them openly talk about what happened with them calibration-wise.
00:08:14.700 And they openly said, this is the issue.
00:08:16.740 I was about to quit.
00:08:17.420 I was going through this, you know, the details.
00:08:19.940 And the audience said, wait a minute, you guys are this open about it?
00:08:21.820 We're this open about it.
00:08:23.100 And we created a system that made it very clear for everybody to calibrate
00:08:26.600 on who succeeds and who doesn't succeed based on five markers that we look at.
00:08:31.340 Effort, attitude, leadership.
00:08:34.060 You got effort, attitude, leadership, innovation, and results.
00:08:37.740 We score you on that, and then every quarter we see who's improving and who's not,
00:08:41.040 and then you can give raises to the people that are,
00:08:43.340 you can give promotions to the people that are,
00:08:45.200 and identify who you have to move on with.
00:08:46.980 Some people you have to move on with with a company,
00:08:48.940 but sometimes HR creates too much noise.
00:08:50.760 We officially have our speakers for the Vault Conference finalized,
00:08:54.760 and I waited until the last one,
00:08:56.620 and the last one I literally got the confirmation last night at 8 p.m.,
00:09:00.680 7 p.m.-ish when I got the texts that were done done,
00:09:04.220 and I wanted to make sure we put an event together.
00:09:06.880 where we talk about everything that's going on with AI.
00:09:09.920 The good, bad, the ugly, and how to leverage it.
00:09:12.060 One of the biggest names on AI we're bringing,
00:09:14.420 are you going to know who he is?
00:09:15.360 Many of you will.
00:09:16.440 I wanted to talk about the importance of having running mates
00:09:19.740 because for me, winning at the highest level, you need a running mate.
00:09:23.060 Tom is a running mate.
00:09:24.060 You go faster when you find your running mate.
00:09:26.580 So I brought two people that ran together
00:09:29.640 and won multiple championships together.
00:09:31.840 And then I wanted to bring somebody that your sons,
00:09:34.060 a lot of you guys are bringing their sons and their kids on social media
00:09:36.680 to be able to know how to build a brand.
00:09:38.500 Maybe the guy that was able to do this at the highest level
00:09:41.000 and he's one of the biggest names right now on social media
00:09:44.400 who's very successful, made a lot of money as well.
00:09:46.800 And last but not least, one of the biggest podcasters in the world
00:09:50.500 who does it in a way that's very different than everybody else,
00:09:54.260 and he's killing it.
00:09:55.080 He's got almost 20 million subscribers on his YouTube channel.
00:09:57.600 With that being said, these are the speakers at the Vol Conference 2026,
00:10:01.500 MGM Grand Arena.
00:10:02.820 Go ahead, Rob.
00:10:06.680 The beautiful thing about these events, you know how quickly it goes?
00:10:15.060 Like this.
00:10:17.920 Is everybody ready to get started?
00:10:22.280 I've helped over 10,000 business owners grow and scale their companies.
00:10:26.860 I'm just passionate about watching entrepreneurs create great business.
00:10:30.800 When you get guys like Jerry Rice, that was his work ethic.
00:10:34.940 We were able to do some great things on the football field.
00:10:37.940 Wow.
00:10:38.940 The single most important trait I had was a healthy dose of delusion.
00:10:41.940 Steven Bartlett.
00:10:42.940 And that delusion is sometimes also referred to as self-belief.
00:10:45.940 Coming from UK.
00:10:46.940 When I can do something that I love, that is good for me.
00:10:50.940 Get out of here, man.
00:10:51.940 And I can get content out of it.
00:10:52.940 That's sick.
00:10:53.940 That's my trifecta.
00:10:56.940 That's so cool.
00:10:57.940 That's a great lineup.
00:10:59.940 Good for you, Logan.
00:11:00.940 It's a phenomenal, phenomenal lineup.
00:11:03.940 Line up, Vault Conference, MGM Grand Arena.
00:11:08.880 If you haven't yet registered, listen, CO tickets, which there's only 500 of, less than 100 left.
00:11:15.020 Go to vault2026.com, vault2026.com.
00:11:20.060 Get your tickets.
00:11:21.280 We have companies that are bringing, one company from France is bringing 500 of their sales reps from France.
00:11:27.420 Did you hear what I just said?
00:11:28.360 Oui, oui.
00:11:28.760 From France.
00:11:29.300 Oui, oui.
00:11:29.620 Yes.
00:11:30.880 So some of you guys are on the sales team.
00:11:32.940 You have your executive team.
00:11:34.080 A lot of guys bring their family, their partners.
00:11:36.320 And also with some of you that want to have your kids learning on how to create content the way that Logan and Jake Paul have.
00:11:44.040 And they became who they are today with their businesses.
00:11:46.260 You may want to bring your kids as well.
00:11:47.840 So go to vault2026.com.
00:11:49.800 Get registered.
00:11:50.800 We cannot wait to see you.
00:11:52.700 It'll be the greatest vault conference we've ever had.
00:11:55.440 Cannot wait to see everybody there.
00:11:56.640 Okay.
00:11:56.880 If you enjoyed this video, you want to watch more videos like this, click here.
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00:12:02.940 We'll be right back.