Bolt Gave Employees Unlimited Vacation for 11 Years. Its CEO Says the Best Workers Never Used It.
Bolt, a San Francisco checkout fintech, offered its roughly 130 remote employees unlimited paid time off from the company's 2014 founding — no accrual, no cap, take what you need. Eleven years later, CEO Ryan Breslow killed it, and his explanation doubled as a confession: the policy hadn't been abused by taking too much time off. It had been abused by taking too little.
The Perk With No Bookkeeping, By Design
Unlimited PTO is pitched, at Bolt and everywhere else that offers it, as a trust signal — a company confident enough in its people not to count their days off. For a fully remote workforce, it doubled as a recruiting line that cost nothing on paper. The entire design premise was the absence of a ledger: no accrual, no balance, no number anyone could point to and say "that's too many" or "that's not enough."
"The Good Ones Don't Take PTO. The Bad Ones Take Too Much."
Internal data reviewed by Bolt's head of people operations, Kelly Lawson Pihl, found the abuse ran in both directions at once. High performers under-used their time off, wary of appearing uncommitted against a benchmark that didn't exist. A smaller group over-used the same ambiguity in the opposite direction. Breslow summarized the mechanism in one line: "When time off is undefined, the good ones don't take PTO. The bad ones take too much."
No Ledger Means No Way to Flag Either Direction
That absence of bookkeeping wasn't a bug that crept in over time — it was the entire point of the policy, and therefore the entire vulnerability. Unlimited PTO has no accrual record to catch someone quietly burning out from never taking a day, any more than it has one to catch someone else quietly checked out for a month. A system built to remove all friction removed the only mechanism that could have told anyone something was drifting.
The Fix Was a Number, for Everyone
In July 2025, Breslow ended unlimited PTO company-wide, replacing it with four mandatory paid weeks off for every employee — a defined, enforced benefit that applies the same way to the person who never took a day and the person who took too many. Bolt didn't try to identify which employees had drifted in which direction and correct them individually; that would have required exactly the kind of tracking the unlimited policy was designed not to have. It just gave everyone a number instead, and made the number mandatory.
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