Ryan Breslow, the tech entrepreneur who dropped out of Stanford to start one-click checkout e-commerce company Bolt, said Monday that he is stepping down as CEO.

TechCrunch noted that the company is raising a round of funding that is expected to push the company to a $14 billion valuation. Earlier in the month, the company was valued at $11 billion after $355 million in Series E funding. The company has raised $1 billion to date.

Maju Kuruvilla joined Bolt as chief product and tech officer in 2019 and became COO last August and will replace Breslow as CEO. Breslow will remain at the company as the executive chairperson of Bolt’s board.

While CEO of Bolt, Breslow started a four-day work week because “work is changing and the biggest obstacle we have to face is burnout . . . [with] less time, we’ll get more concrete work done,” he wrote on the decision via the company’s blog. The company has around 600 employees.

The 27-year-old also launched the Conscious Culture movement, which encourages a four-day work week and helps companies foster healthy work environments between employers, employees and workspaces. Breslow has also founded two other companies, Eco, a money management app, and The Movement, which provides free dance practices to the Miami community. Breslow was also a founding researcher at the Stanford Bitcoin Group.

Before the announcement, he took to Twitter to call out Stripe and YCombinator, calling them “the Mob Bosses of Silicon Valley.” The thread is 45 tweets long and has been added to over the past two weeks.

“I couldn’t understand why VCs wouldn’t invest [in Bolt], recruits wouldn’t join, and the media wouldn’t cover us. Having a deeper understanding of how Silicon Valley works, I’ve now put the pieces together,” Breslow starts the thread with.

He claims that Stripe, a company building economic infrastructure for the internet, and YCombinator, a technology startup accelerator, purposely made sure that no one would take a risk on or invest in Bolt, and Stripe gets to keep its monopoly on U.S. markets. The vehicle for hire company Lyft uses Stripe for its payment processing service, which is how Stripe became the “darling child of Silicon Valley.”

Stripe, with the initial and continued help of YCombinator and Sequoia, a venture capital firm, “deliberately [took] checks from nearly all the top-tier Silicon Valley investors in order to block new companies [including Bolt]. IN FACT, many of their investors had told [Breslow] as much, and commented on it as a great strategy!”

Breslow also claims that Stripe has a grip on the media, specifically Hacker News.

Some have suggested that the thread taking on the top brass of Silicon Valley is why Breslow is stepping down.

Breslow cited personal reasons for his decision.

RELATED STORIES