Just days after launching a Twitter tirade against Stripe and Y Combinator, Bolt founder Ryan Breslow announced Monday he will exit the CEO role and will be replaced by Chief Operating Officer Maju Kuruvilla.
Breslow, who founded the one-click checkout company seven years ago after dropping out of Stanford, will assume the role of executive chairman, a "step up" as he framed it on Twitter.
Kuruvilla, who joined the company in 2019, is a former vice president at Amazon and once held the title of director of software development at the e-commerce giant.
Bolt recently completed a $355 million Series E round to bring its valuation to $11 billion, raising almost $1 billion to date.
The reshuffle can be interpreted as a logical step for a high growth company putting a more experienced executive at the helm — or as a response to recent controversies.
Breslow said the moves were not related to a controversial tweet thread he posted over the weekend accusing its primary competitor, Stripe, and its VC backer, Y Combinator, of colluding to draw funding away from Bolt and toward its smaller direct competitors. He also claimed that Y Combinator's Hacker News aggregation service has been intentionally ignoring Bolt to help Stripe gain more market share in the online payments sector.
"Some think my recent tweets are marketing stunts," he wrote. "The truth: there’s nothing that pisses me off more than the Mob Sh*t that goes on in Silicon Valley."
The Tweet storm drew criticism from major Silicon Valley players such as Marc Andreessen, who claimed the Breslow's decision to lash out at Stripe could be due to Bolt's recent decision to cut employees' work week down to four days.
Breslow was also derided for his baseless claims that Hacker News has been comprised by Stripe's and YC's financial interests, but was lauded by others for commenting on a culture of collusion among big players in the tech industry.
When some media framed the move as a resignation, he said on Twitter he did not resign and will be staying on in the company to help it grow and empower new leaders. He followed the statement up by taking one last shot at YC.
"YC might have started off pure. But money, power, and greed have corrupted it. Today, YC is a lottery factory capturing 10%+ from founders with little concern about the individuals going through the program."
