A first venture usually follows a well-worn playbook: a gap in the market, obsessive refinement of concept and pitch, eventual conviction that the solution is as bulletproof as it is revolutionary.
Then, the dreaded phase of product-market fit. Instead of building the future of an entire industry, you find yourself forced to focus on a narrow use case and spend the first invaluable years proving that your idea can make money and scale. The grand vision gets put on pause.
For most founders, this journey is the only one available. After all, investors are betting on someone who has never built a company before, so a small check and a narrow product limit what everyone stands to lose. But some ambitions need total commitment from the start, and having built a company before helps when taking them on.
Lessons from the front line
After selling my first venture, Tink, to Visa for €1.8 billion (about $1.9 billion USD) in 2022, I found myself in a new position — and it wasn’t horizontal on a sun lounger. My co-founder Fredrik Hedberg and I had a real war chest of our own, and a brand-new entrepreneurial bug. For the first time in our lives, we had the experience and the resources to undertake something truly world-changing.
Compliance is a gauntlet that any founder will be painfully familiar with. Scaling Tink across Europe, to 700 people operating under a host of regulators, my team and I got used to tearing our hair out over small wording tweaks, reviews that dragged on for months, and perpetual uncertainty that stopped us from iterating fast and boldly. Products were often delayed by months, a slip that meant the world in an industry moving as fast as ours.
A problem with too many heads
Compliance was a problem that could never be solved piecemeal. Every company’s obligations depend on a million different factors, each of which sits in a different part of the business that rarely talks to one another.
Legal tracks regulations; another department oversees how they are implemented. Product teams make their own calls on features, and yet another team opens a case to check whether it was compliant. Policies, standards and regulations belong to other departments entirely, and those are usually the part of a silo a compliance startup builds for — a clear buyer and a budget.
“Solving compliance” was a mission akin to fighting the Hydra: cut off one head and two more grow back. There is no minimum viable product here. Fixing one head changes nothing. What it takes is a maximum viable product from day one.
Why the second time is different
In recent years, we’ve seen a series of inspiring examples of successful founders coming back to take on new problems. Stockholm knows this well: alumni of Spotify and Klarna have gone on to found and back a long list of new companies, using the credibility from their first successes to try something harder.
The second time around, capital and access both come easier. A successful first exit opens doors to talent, partners and investors that we simply didn’t have with Tink. It is a fantastic opportunity, and one I’m grateful for. You get to bring every lesson from what went well and what went badly, and you start with a real tailwind when people want to work with you and back you.
Money also means you can fund the full build yourself, so no investor asks you to shrink the idea before you’ve tested it.
Maximum viable product
Experience and capital used to get you only so far. Ten years ago, building something this broad would still have needed hundreds of people of various backgrounds, and many years. Language models have changed that. Our team today is 22 strong and growing, and ships at a pace I could only have dreamed of when we first built Tink.
We also feel we’ve grown thicker skin from the bruises of our first 15 years as entrepreneurs.
You know the setbacks are coming, and you know that a venture is never a one-man sprint but a team marathon. None of that guarantees success. But it’s a good place to start if you want to stand your ground and build your biggest vision yet.
Daniel Kjellén is the CEO and co-founder of Freda, the Stockholm-based AI-native compliance company that came out of stealth in September 2026. He previously co-founded the open banking platform Tink in 2012 and led it as CEO through its growth to a multimarket operation with around 700 employees before its €1.8 billion acquisition by Visa in 2022.
Illustration: Dom Guzman