In the beginning, VFA was an institution beloved by many of its fellows. “It was a wonderful way to leave college and enter the real world because you’re surrounded by a community and there’s support from the organization,” says Jamie Norwood, co-founder of feminine hygiene brand Winx Health. Norwood and her co-founder, Cynthia Plotch, are a VFA success story. They met as fellows in 2015 and VFA eventually helped them launch their company with a grant and advisement. “We always say, Winx Health would not be here without VFA,” Norwood says.

Norwood and Plotch went through the standard VFA admissions protocol, which was rigorous. It required two written applications, a video interview, and in-person interviews at an event called “Selection Day,” many of which were held in New York City and Detroit over the years. By the end of each university term in May, accepted fellows would get access to Connect, VFA’s job portal, and have until November to land a job. For each fellow hired in a full-time job, VFA received a $5,000 placement fee, paid by partner companies. This fee became a crucial revenue stream for the organization—effectively wedding the professional success of its fellows to its bottom line.

Selection Day interviews were conducted by judges who often pitted interviewees against each other. Candidates were told to organize themselves in order of least to most likely to be successful, or according to whose answers had the most value per word. The format felt ruthless. “People cried” during the interview process, Plotch remembers.

The problems with the business bled into the fellows’ experience in 2023 and 2024, leaving them disenchanted, financially struggling, or expelled en masse from the program for reasons they believe were beyond their control. Despite a multitude of financial red flags, VFA leadership still insisted on recruiting for the 2024 class. “The talent team was traveling nonstop, using prepaid Visa cards since the corporate cards didn’t work,” explains a former director who worked closely with fellows.

Onboarding fresh recruits became increasingly crucial if VFA was going to survive. The organization asked companies for placement fees upfront in 2023, according to internal VFA documents and conversations with former employees. The policy change gave companies pause. Fewer companies signed up as partners, meaning fellows weren’t getting jobs and VFA was losing money.

In the spring of 2023, “there were 15 jobs on opening day,” for a class that eventually grew to over 100 fellows, the former director explains. Gabriella Rudnik, a 2023 fellow, estimates that when training camp began in July 2023, less than half of her peers had jobs, “whereas in previous years it would be closer to like 80 percent.”

Fellows were made to pay the price for the shortage of companies partnering with VFA in 2023. “We weren’t getting more jobs on Connect, and that’s what led to so many fellows being off-boarded,” explains a former director who worked closely with fellows.

Traditionally, VFA gave fellows a deadline of November of their class year to find a job, which typically meant a few stragglers were given extra help to find a position if they were late. In those rare cases during earlier years, fellows were offboarded by the organization, a former director says.

In previous years, expulsion was a much more serious and infrequent occurrence. “Removal from the fellowship was not something done lightly. During my tenure, we instituted an internal investigation process, similar to an HR investigation,” says the former executive who worked at VFA from 2017-20.  In total, at least 40 fellows from the 2023 class were expelled for failing to get jobs that weren’t available, according to research by former VFA fellows who tracked the number of fellows purged from a Slack channel. Records of their participation were removed from the VFA website, the fellows say.

Many fellows had made sacrifices to be part of the highly selective and prestigious VFA, which cited acceptance rates of around 10 percent of applicants. “There were fellows who turned down six-figure jobs to be a part of this program, and were told that the program that Andrew Yang started would live up to its reputation,” says Paul Ford, a 2024 fellow.

Though internal documents show that VFA was slowly imploding for months, in all external communications with fellows, the nonprofit still maintained that 2024 training camp would take place in Detroit.

“From an ethical perspective, it does reek of being problematic,” says Thad Calabrese, a professor of nonprofit management at New York University. “You entered into an arrangement with people who don’t have a lot of money, who believed that you were going to make them whole. Then you’re going to turn around and not make them whole.”

Maybe we’ll get to a point where the novelty will be that a human being wrote something: This person proved that they were in a box away from any A.I. when they wrote this thing

as writers and creators, you want people to watch your show, so if you can make something look and sound like something else that people already want to watch, then you might be able to convince a producer that it will have legs. But I discovered through doing “Fleabag” that you have to write something that is more dangerous, more honest, more unusual and more provocative — especially if it’s going to go into a pool with a million other things. Honing the uniqueness of whatever you do is your best chance. I know I’m saying that having just signed up to do “Tomb Raider,” which has an audience already, and I know that’s what Amazon wants, and Amazon made this unbelievable deal8 8 In 2019, Variety reported about Waller-Bridge’s development deal with Amazon Studios, that “sources say the deal is worth around $20 million a year.” with me. I care so much about delivering for them. Being able to do that dangerous, naughty, transgressive stuff in the heart of something that is very valuable to them in terms of I.P. satisfies both of those things, but the discipline for me is to not just give them the “Tomb Raider” they think they want, but to give them something else.

People are going to interpret everything I do as my feelings on contemporary womanhood because I’m a contemporary woman. I don’t want to escape that part of me. I can see how I’ve gone into masculine roles with Bond and “Indiana Jones,” but those worlds are the ones that always intrigued me. The high-stakes action world appeals to me, whether it’s masculine or feminine. I like the urgency of it and the idea of being able to write a female character in a world like that.

It’s a window into your psychology: You want to be a pleaser and do the assignment well, but what you actually want to do is something riskier. Oh, my gosh. That’s exactly what it is. But the best thing is when you satisfy both. The journey there can be quite [laughs] — I love the feeling of having done what’s been asked, but I hate the feeling of pleasing.

I think that with Bond there is something dangerous, transgressive and incendiary about that character, and it’s the same with Indy. He completely revolutionized the action hero, which Harrison1 1 Harrison Ford, of course, who has said “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” will be his last go-round with Indy’s famous whip and fedora. is dead set against him being described as, but there was something that broke the form. We accept them now as the biggest franchises, but in the kernel of these characters is something naughty and dangerous. They were the rascals of their time, and I feel like Villanelle and Fleabag are rascals.2 2 Villanelle is the name of the assassin character, played by Jodie Comer, in “Killing Eve.” “Fleabag,” for those who haven’t seen it, is that show’s title character, played by Waller-Bridge. The show earned six Emmy Awards and 11 nominations for its second season. So it was less like, “I want to go do this big movie,” and more, “I want to play in the sand pit with these rascals.” That’s one way of looking at it.

I couldn’t write anything that I felt didn’t have that deeper element sincerely at the heart of it, and that writer is with me everywhere I go. It’s ever-present: What does this mean? Because I’m obsessed with having an audience be moved.6 6 Waller-Bridge said the most recent things that moved her were the TV series “Dead Ringers,” a concert by the singer Christine Bovill in which she performed Edith Piaf songs and a revival of “Guys and Dolls” at the Bridge Theater in London. I was moved when I read the script, and I was moved when I heard Jim7 7 James Mangold, the director of “Dial of Destiny.” He is the first director other than Steven Spielberg to direct an “Indiana Jones” movie. and Harrison and Kathy talk about it. I mean, I wasn’t in tears on the floor, but I felt that tingle of, this has got some human stuff going on. But the day-to-day? Some of the days were superfun, and we did look really cool. But the proper actors don’t want to just look cool. They want to make you cry while looking cool.

The game is that every time we create a new technology, we’re creating new possibilities, new choices that didn’t exist before. Those choices themselves—even the choice to do harm—are a good, they’re a plus.

We want an economy that’s growing in the second sense: unlimited betterment, unlimited increase in wisdom, and complexity, and choices. I don’t see any limit there. We don’t want an economy that’s just getting fatter and fatter, and bigger and bigger, in terms of its size. Can we imagine such a system? That’s hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible.