Pursuit began with 21 Fellows, an all-volunteer staff, and a donated classroom in Queens. Everything ran on philanthropy. That worked for the inaugural class, but it couldn't work at scale. There simply isn't enough philanthropic funding in workforce training to reach everyone who deserves a shot at a career that will transform their lives.
In 2017 we tried something different. Instead of asking donors to cover every seat, we asked impact investors to put up capital for training, and we asked Fellows to pay it back only after they were in high-paying jobs. If a Fellow didn't get a job, they paid nothing. If Pursuit didn't deliver, Pursuit was the one on the hook to its investors. We had, in effect, tied our own success to our Fellows’ outcomes.
Our first version went by a few names, "Pay It Forward" and the "Job Outcomes Bond" among them, and by 2019 we settled on simply calling it the Pursuit Bond. The structure was straightforward: once a Fellow started a high-paying job, they paid a share of their income for a fixed number of months. If they were not employed or did not hold a high-paying job, they did not pay anything.
The early cohorts taught us a lot. We learned that the name mattered: "Pay It Forward" made payments sound like a donation to future Fellows, when they were really payment for a service that had already transformed their life. We learned that even people earning high salaries hit rough patches, so we added a hardship pause and a way to clear late fees for Fellows who got back on track.
The next version of the Pursuit Bond continued to evolve the model. Payments became progressive: calculated against gross income, with rates that scaled as earnings did. We paired that with a lifetime cap on total payments and a time window, so no one could end up paying indefinitely. Lose your job and payments pause. No interest accrues, ever, and we never looked at a credit score to decide who was accepted into the program.
This is the version that let Pursuit grow. It's how we moved from a handful of Fellows to thousands, and how we were able to bring in significant impact investment on the strength of the model rather than on the promise of it. Fellows in these cohorts went from earning an average of around $18,000 to over $94,000, and a meaningful share of Pursuit's operating costs came from their success.
In 2025, we made a change to tie the agreement directly to our mission. The labor market was shifting fast, entry-level technical hiring was changing shape, and we responded by launching the AI-Native Program. Fellows became Builders. And the Pursuit Bond became the Good Job Agreement.
The new name was deliberate. The Good Job Agreement describes a promise, and it puts the thing we actually care about right in the title. We are not in the business of delivering training. We are in the business of getting Builders good jobs.
We also got specific about what we meant by a good job. It isn't any job in tech. It's a role that pays enough to move a household from paycheck-to-paycheck to real stability. The kind of salary that lets someone support a family, save, and plan.
The Good Job Agreement matters to us for three reasons:
It's beneficial to the Builder. We are invested in the long-term success of our Builders, not just their first offer letter. We commit to career-building services that help Builders keep their jobs, get promotions, and find their next great opportunity. That's good for the Builder, and it's what lets us invest more in our programs to serve the next cohort.
We have skin in the game. The Good Job Agreement makes us accountable for the success of our Builders. If they don't get high-paying jobs, they don't pay. In other words: we're only successful if they're successful. So we give our Builders everything we have to help them land high-paying jobs and build careers.
It makes our impact scalable. Because Builders pay for outcomes rather than donors paying for seats, the Good Job Agreement lets us deliver high-quality programs to many more people, not just in New York City, but across the country in the places where they're needed most.
The market will keep moving. Our answer is to keep changing the training, never the promise. The Good Job Agreement that Builders sign today is the same commitment at its core: we don't get paid unless you get a good job.
At Pursuit, Fellows ring the Gong when they land their first job. Max Mezalon walked through Pursuit's door in 2018 in need of a change. He went from making pizzas at Domino's, to driving Uber as he learned to code at Pursuit, and finally to a new job as a software engineer at Blackstone. Some days he felt great, some days he came close to giving up, and every day there were coaches, office hours, and check-ins to support him on this journey.
In 2025, Max rang the Gong for the second time. This time, he was celebrating his final payment, seven years after he started at Pursuit.
"Pursuit helped me kickstart my career and a new chapter in my life," he told the room. "I'm thankful to grow my career and am proud to uphold my Pursuit Bond so that the organization can continue to thrive and other people can have the same opportunities as I have had." Then he said the thing he's said at every milestone: "This is just the start."
If you're considering the AI-Native Program and want to learn more about the Good Job Agreement, reach out to admissions@pursuit.org.
Max Mezalon
