Following his fiery Twitter tirades, Bolt founder Ryan Breslow is no longer CEO — and he says it’s his choice

Ryan Breslow, who founded the “one-click” checkout tech company Bolt as a Stanford student and dropped out of college to build it, is stepping away as the company’s CEO seven years into his reign. Breslow, who says the decision is his own, is being replaced as CEO by Maju Kuruvilla, who joined the company as its chief product and technology officer in 2019 and became its COO in August of last year. Breslow is assuming the role of executive chairman.

On its face, the decision would seem to make sense for the 600-person company, which is currently raising a round of funding that is expected to value the outfit at $14 billion, up from the $11 billion valuation it was assigned just earlier this month when it closed on $355 million in Series E funding.

Bolt — which earlier this month decided to give employees a four-day work week permanently — has raised nearly $1 billion altogether to date.

In Kuruvilla, Bolt gets some serious operational chops. He previously spent seven years at Amazon, the last three of them as a vice president and general manager, helping to scale Amazon’s worldwide Prime logistics and fulfillment business. Kuruvilla also worked previously on products at Microsoft, Honeywell, and Milliman. Put another way, he may be viewed as a safe bet by potential business partners, private investors, and, ultimately, if the company later attempts to go public, investment bankers.

Of course, it’s easy to wonder how closely the move is also tied to the attention that Breslow, 27, attracted after publishing a series of tweets last Monday afternoon and who was back at it this past weekend.

YCombinator is not worth it, a thread:

— Ryan Breslow Read More