Sabina Zetkova started her career as a lawyer in Slovakia. After deciding that a career in law wasn’t for her, she joined the support team at MailerLite, a remote-first company that makes an email newsletter platform. Today, Sabina leads customer experience operations there while also living as a digital nomad. When I talked with her, she was living in Indonesia. You can find Sabina on LinkedIn.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me a little bit about your career and where you started.
Sabina Zetkova: I graduated from law school in Slovakia, and that was also my first professional path. I worked for two years as a lawyer for a regulatory body overseeing radio and television in Slovakia. Later, I worked as a lawyer for an NGO focused on human rights, where the main area of focus was refugee law.
Currently, I’m leading customer experience operations at MailerLite. I work mostly with our processes, all with the final goal of helping our customers in the best possible way.
ABY: What originally drew you to law?
SZ: That’s a good question. I think figuring out what drew me into it also helped me move away from it eventually. I was one of the smart kids at school, and where I’m from, when you were a smart kid, you were supposed to aim for a career that had prestige. It was either becoming a lawyer or a doctor. I didn’t like blood, so for me, the path was law.
Even my parents would say they were very surprised I chose to pursue this degree. But I loved learning, and I loved challenging myself. It seemed like the right choice for me at the time.
ABY: What prompted you to move away from law after a couple of years of working in the field?
SZ: Law was never a dream of mine, even though I was naturally inclined toward justice, seeking fairness, and protecting others. When I chose law as my degree, I had never talked to a real lawyer in my life and never really understood what that life would look like. Law school was amazing. It was super challenging, super interesting studies. I was very busy with it, and I didn’t really think about whether this was what I was going to do. I just liked studying it.
Two years into my legal career, I figured that I would like to learn what the world looks like. I applied for a scholarship and was granted one to go study in Indonesia for a year. After that, I traveled more and went down to Australia. Then COVID hit, and I felt like it was time to figure out my life.
I felt like I needed to give law one more chance, but I wanted to do something where I felt needed and where I could make a real impact on people’s lives. I secured a job back in Slovakia and started working as a refugee lawyer. This was supposed to give purpose to my life and be very meaningful for me. It definitely was, but I didn’t feel content. It was quite an unhappy period of my life, trying to be in a place where maybe I didn’t belong.
I think the post-travel depression was also catching up with me. Europe was going through the second wave of COVID, so we were in lockdown, and I worked very long hours on very sad stories. While I was making a lot of impact on other people’s lives, at times I felt like I was pouring from an empty cup.
Around that time, I got an offer from MailerLite. It was a dream offer, and one that allowed me to create the life I’d wanted for myself.
ABY: What led you to look at a company like MailerLite? What appealed to you about that type of job versus what you’d been doing?
SZ: I think it was mostly the lifestyle. I first traveled to Indonesia in 2018, when the concept of digital nomads and remote work wasn’t that widespread. That’s where I saw for the first time that people were able to work from these amazing tropical places. For them, traveling didn’t mean letting go of a job, which was always the case for me.
I started observing that it was usually IT or software companies allowing people to work location-free. That’s also how I learned about MailerLite and them being a remote-first company. It wasn’t a company that adjusted to a remote setup, but a company that built its culture around being remote. That was something that really caught my attention.
I’ve been traveling full-time for the past six years.
ABY: Were you nervous at all about moving from law to a software company?
SZ: 100%. It’s a change of identity. You build up this perspective of yourself playing the role of a lawyer in a society that outlines a path for you, professionally and maybe personally. With each stage of my pivot, I was more sure about the final change.
I was definitely nervous when I said yes to the offer from MailerLite. But what helped me was that I left both of my legal jobs on very amicable terms, and I knew the doors were open if I ever changed my mind. That helped me venture out. But the move to MailerLite was definitely a risk.
ABY: What skills from your legal career fit with your new role at MailerLite?
SZ: I definitely believe in the transferability of skills. When you look at what you’re actually doing on a day-to-day basis, many jobs can have a lot of similarities, despite their titles and despite being in a different field.
What definitely helped me was analytical thinking: considering multiple points of view on the same situation and the ability to think a step ahead. And at MailerLite, I like to say that I’m advocating for our customers’ rights within the boundaries of the company. At the end of the day, there’s always a human at the end of the chain, and I’m looking for ways to optimize their experience and deliver the best possible outcome to them.
ABY: And what did you have to unlearn? What was part of working in the legal world that just doesn’t apply to working at a company?
SZ: Working for a software company like MailerLite is very dynamic, and that’s quite the opposite of what working in law can feel like. When I was a lawyer, there were a lot of boundaries. Even though it’s very creative work, the guardrails are very strong. Achieving change takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, and at the end of the day, you might still be limited by what the authorities allow you to do.
When I joined MailerLite, I needed to unlearn that limited thinking. In a product like ours, where new features are being shipped on a daily basis, questioning the processes and the system is very welcome. So I needed to feel brave enough to point out things that I believed could be changed.
ABY: What was a day like working as a lawyer, and what’s a day like now? What’s different about the structure of your day or the work you’re doing?
SZ: First of all, I would have to commute to the office. In the wintertime in Slovakia, it’s dark until 8 a.m., and it gets dark again at 4 p.m. So commuting to the office meant spending your day in the dark. My days would be spent in uncomfortable clothes, sitting on a specific chair in a specific office in a specific city.
In law, a lot of the time, you were analyzing. I needed to read through a lot of documentation and spend hours investigating, then write my argument. Back then, that was very tiring for me. I think that’s why I thrive in a software working environment, where things are shifting really quickly, and you work on multiple tasks. In my legal career, I could spend three days working on one particular task. On some days, I would go to court and need to defend my plea in front of judges, as a young girl in my twenties in a post-communist country. That was another challenge and another stress factor. It all felt so heavy.
I couldn’t relax into it, but I think I was playing my part well. I enjoyed the process, but maybe I was only enjoying it because I believed that this is what was expected of me, and that the path to satisfaction in any form should be challenging and very difficult.
My days now, especially when I’m here in Indonesia, start with a sunrise surf, then coffee with friends. Then I get work done, and then I wait for my colleagues to wake up so we can overlap working hours. I shift tasks quite often and need to readjust priorities based on what’s happening, so it’s much more relaxed.
That’s not to say the job can’t get stressful as well. There are critical moments when I need to work hard and use all my brain cells. But being able to choose where I do the work from, and whether I want to sit on a couch or at a table, adds so much value.
ABY: You’re currently leading customer experience operations. How has your idea of career progression changed?
SZ: When I was younger, I saw the world more narrowly. I felt that to have a place or an impact in society, I needed to define what I wanted to do in my life and what I wanted my profession to be. That would determine how I could grow.
I needed to shake that kind of thinking up, and maybe tame my ego along the way. Along my personal journey, as I tried different jobs and perspectives, I made peace with maybe not knowing what I want to be when I grow up. I prefer to see my life as an opportunity to collect experiences from different areas.
That’s how I see career growth: more as personal growth and as growing into the version of yourself that you’re proud of being, no matter what your job title is.
ABY: What would you say to someone who’s looking at making a big shift like the one you made?
SZ: For me, the most liberating moment was when I realized that I was trying to win a race that wasn’t mine in the first place. I was trying to follow social norms that didn’t make me happy. I was making a high impact, yet I felt very unsatisfied in the evening after my day at work. Realizing that broadened my horizons and allowed me to take responsibility for my own happiness. I don’t want this to sound like a cliché, but based on many beliefs, we have just one life, and it’s our own responsibility to make our 80-year-old self proud when looking back.
I know it takes a lot of courage, and I’ve always been very supported by my family. My parents only dreamed about the freedom that the current regime allows my generation to have. I was also making these changes in my twenties, without any big obligations, so that changes the perspective too. But I think that deep down, if we tune in, we all know whether we’re trying to win a race we want to be in. And it’s never too late to shift and make a difference.
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