I sold to Visa for $2 billion. I could be on a beach right now, but I’m risking my own money to solve the problem that held my first company back
· Fortune
A successful exit brings with it a world of possibilities. You can move your family halfway around the world, back the next generation of brilliant ideas, or never answer a work email again.
My first exit gave me that freedom, but also a sense of unfinished business. In the years leading up to and following our acquisition by Visa, I watched Tink change, and slow down in a way that will be painfully familiar to many founders. Ideas my co-founder Fredrik and I used to dream up in a taxi and ship within a week now needed to be cross-checked by dozens of people across half as many departments.
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Compliance as we know it has a way of eroding the very things that make building in tech attractive: speed, agility, and the confidence to try something that’s never been done before. Growth is what every founder chases – it opens doors and tells you you’re doing something right. But the bigger Tink grew, the harder it became to move at the speed of our own ideas.
Don’t misunderstand me — I love compliance. It is necessary for a well-functioning society. But I left Tink jaded with compliance processes and relieved to never think about that again. Now, ironically, I think about it every day. Instead of a beach holiday, we put our money into freeing others from the worry of a looming fine or, worse, an ‘urgent’ email from legal. And, selfishly, into building Freda – the platform I wish we’d had when scaling Tink.
Ticking boxes
One thing we certainly did not realise as new entrepreneurs is that what looks like a tedious protocol today can, in five years, determine whether you get to be first into a new market.
The last thing a 24-year-old with a big idea wants to think about is VAT registration in a market they have never even travelled to. But nothing slows a young company down faster than discovering, halfway through market entry, that the product it promised to every market isn’t yet compliant in most of them.
And the rules never stand still. By the time Tink reached 700 people and 19 markets, we were learning about a new obligation every day that started applying to our business, each one assuming we had already ticked the thousands of boxes that came before it.
The myth of unregulated America
Listen to European founders talk about their ambitions over dinner after a few glasses of wine, and you’d think the U.S. is a gung-ho frontier where founders build first and ask permission later. In much of America, you can share customer data with partners until someone opts out, and most websites don’t greet you with a cookie banner. Compliance, the common wisdom goes, is a European problem.
I believed that too, until we took Tink to the States and found that its reputation misunderstood the reality. It’s true — Europe has a rule for almost anything. But the upside of having a rule for everything is that everyone follows the same one, you plan for it from day one, and there is a guide online telling you how to make your subscription GDPR-compliant.
America regulates after the fact. Hidden in case law, 50 state legislatures, and 500-page commercial contracts, some of our least expected bottlenecks come from its ad hoc rules. A lack of legal clarity means businesses have to pay through the nose for the disputes that inevitably arise out of the murkiness.
So ignore the stereotypes and do your reading before you expand. Is America less regulated? Yes, but this doesn’t save a business from the compliance nightmare. Crossing the Atlantic is worth it, but it comes with its own maze. And for Americans eyeing Europe, it may end up less daunting than it looks.
The promise of AI
The promise of AI is that you’ll never meet an unsolvable problem again. I watch founder friends put that promise to the test and come away disappointed when their vibe-coded compliance system turns out to be no better than pasting documents into a chatbot and hoping for the best.
Part of the trouble is the word itself, as compliance is not really a single ‘thing’. It is both an umbrella term for everything a business does, and a very nuanced end goal. What compliance means for one company depends on its size, sector, the markets it targets and what’s already been promised to customers and regulators.
Anyone who has worked at a fast-growing company at the edge of technology knows that obligations, circumstances and products change daily. AI is only as good as the context it gets fed, and so far, it’s only ever playing catch-up to how quickly the landscape changes. Meanwhile, companies are deploying AI agents by the thousand, and not one of them has read the company policy or heard the new local court ruling.
That’s why I still spend my evenings talking to founders about the very thing I once celebrated never thinking about again. As AI makes inroads in the world’s most critical industries, regulation will only become more complicated and more important, because the work it governs matters more and more. I’m betting my own money that this problem is worth fixing.
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