By Zuny Fester, Head of Operations & Marketing at Loopfour
When I was in college, like most people in my program, I had a pretty specific idea of what success was supposed to look like after graduation. You studied something serious —engineering, business administration, finance, economics— and then you went and got yourself a corporate job at a well-established company. That was the goal. That was what everyone around you was working toward, and for the most part, no one really questioned it because it made sense. The big companies had the structure, the stability, the name recognition, and the career ladder that seemed to guarantee some version of a future.
But somewhere along the way, that picture started to change, and I think it happened in layers rather than all at once. The first wave came with the rise of SaaS companies which brought with them a completely different culture and way of operating that felt almost foreign compared to what we’d been trained to aspire to. These companies were leaner, faster, and far less hierarchical, and for a certain type of person, that was genuinely exciting rather than unsettling. Then, about six years ago, COVID hit and accelerated everything in ways that nobody had planned for. Companies that had never considered remote work as a serious option were suddenly running fully distributed teams, and what most people assumed would be a temporary adjustment turned out to reveal something important: a lot of work could happen outside of an office, and in many cases, it happened better. People found that they could be highly productive while also maintaining some semblance of a personal life, and once they had experienced that, there was no clean way to go back.
That combination —the cultural shift brought by startups and the structural shift brought by remote work— created the conditions for a new kind of professional to emerge. Not someone who had followed the traditional path, but someone who had developed a different set of skills, a different tolerance for ambiguity, and a different relationship to their own career.
I’ve been working in AI for a while now, and what I can tell you is that the environment inside these companies is unlike anything I experienced before, in ways that are both genuinely exciting and genuinely demanding. The pace alone is something that takes adjustment. When I say these companies move fast, I don’t mean that in the vague, motivational-poster sense, which meant that a project with a two-month timeline might need to be functional and testable within a week, because the technology is moving quickly enough that waiting longer risks building something that’s already outdated by the time it ships. You are expected to produce working versions early, run tests to see what holds up and what doesn’t, and make decisions based on real data rather than assumptions about what might work.
This changes what it means to do good work. It’s not enough to have a strong idea or a well-thought-out proposal; you have to be willing to build the first rough version yourself, put it in front of people, take what you learn, and improve it quickly. The MVP, the minimum viable product, stops being a project milestone and starts being a mode of thinking that you apply to almost everything.
For someone coming from a more traditional corporate background, this can be a significant shift. But for someone who thrives on ownership and gets energy from seeing things move, it is exactly the kind of environment where your best work tends to surface.
The quality that I have come to believe matters most in this space (more than any specific credential or technical background) is proactivity. In a lean team operating at speed, there is simply no infrastructure for someone to manage your workload for you. You have to be the person who identifies what needs to happen, figures out how to make it happen, and follows through without needing someone to check in on you every step of the way. That kind of independence is what builds trust, and trust is what opens up bigger opportunities inside these organizations.
Closely related to that is adaptability, which I think of less as a personality trait and more as a practical skill that you develop through experience. Markets shift, priorities change, and what made sense three months ago might no longer be the right direction today. Being able to absorb that kind of change without losing momentum, and being able to take feedback as useful information rather than personal criticism, is what allows you to keep growing in an environment that is constantly in motion.
At Loopfour, as we work in finance workflow automation, we are living this reality every day. One of the things I’m most proud of about our team is how we move not only quickly, but thoughtfully, in a way that stays connected to what the market actually needs rather than what we assumed it would need when we started.
If you are someone who is considering making a move into an AI company —whether you’re coming from a different industry, a larger organization, or you’re early in your career and still figuring out where you want to land— I would encourage you to think less about whether your background is a perfect match and more about whether your way of working is a good fit. The most important questions are whether you can operate independently, whether you can build something before you have all the answers, and whether you are genuinely motivated to keep learning in a space that is changing faster than most fields ever have.
If those things describe you, the opportunity is real and the door is more open than it might appear from the outside.
