A successful exit brings a world of possibilities: moving your family halfway around the world, backing the next generation of brilliant ideas, or never answering a work email again. My first exit gave me that freedom — but also a lingering 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 feel painfully familiar to many founders. Ideas that my co-founder Fredrik and I once dreamed up in a taxi and shipped within a week now had to be cross-checked by dozens of people across half as many departments.

Compliance, as it is commonly practiced, has a way of eroding the very things that make building in technology attractive: speed, agility, and the confidence to attempt something that has never been done before. Growth is what every founder chases — it opens doors and signals that you are doing something right. But the bigger Tink grew, the harder it became to move at the speed of our own ideas.

To be clear, I like compliance. It is necessary for a well-functioning society. Yet I left Tink jaded with compliance processes, relieved never to think about them again. Now, ironically, I think about them every day. Instead of a beach holiday, we have put our money into freeing others from the worry of a looming fine — or, worse, an "urgent" email from legal. And, somewhat selfishly, into building Freda: the platform I wish we had had while scaling Tink.

Ticking boxes

One thing we certainly did not grasp as new entrepreneurs is that what looks like a tedious protocol today can, five years later, 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 visited. But nothing slows a young company down faster than discovering, halfway through market entry, that the product it promised in every market is not 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 applying to our business every day — each one assuming we had already ticked the thousands of boxes that came before it.

The myth of un America

Listen to European founders discuss their ambitions over dinner after a few glasses of wine, and you would think the United States 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 do not 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 United States and found that its reputation misunderstood the reality. It is true that Europe has a rule for almost everything. But the upside of having a rule for everything is that everyone follows the same one, you can plan for it from day one, and there is a guide online explaining 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 came from its ad hoc rules. A lack of legal clarity means businesses end up paying heavily for the disputes that inevitably arise from that murkiness.

So ignore the stereotypes and do your reading before expanding. Is America less regulated? Yes — but that does not spare a business the compliance nightmare. Crossing the Atlantic is worth it, but it comes with its own maze. And for Americans eyeing Europe, it may prove less daunting than it looks.

The promise of AI

The promise of AI is that you will 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, because compliance is not really a single "thing." It is both an umbrella term for everything a business does and a highly nuanced end goal. What compliance means for one company depends on its size, sector, the markets it targets, and what has 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 is fed, and so far it is perpetually playing catch-up with how quickly the landscape shifts. Meanwhile, companies are deploying AI agents by the thousand, and not one of them has read the company policy or heard the latest local court ruling.

That is why I still spend my evenings talking to founders about the very thing I once celebrated never having to think about again. As AI makes inroads into 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 am betting my own money that this problem is worth fixing.

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