Mathilde Collin

“She's been on three times since, like, no revenue up to, you know, well north of where she is, say, at, like, 1.4 per month, and it's been fascinating all that journey.”

“I actually think it doesn't matter if you don't have a grand vision from day one, because as soon as you know that you're operating in a market that could be huge, then you'll have all the time you need to figure out what will be step two, step three, and then…”

“So I can tell you very honestly that the vision up front I pitched during our Series B 18 months ago is very, very different from the vision I had pitched after my seed round or Series A round.”

“I think, you know, you can put a 10% weight, that's important, but 90% should be, okay, now how confident I am that the person can execute on this brand vision, because it's super easy to say, this is how big my company could be, and this is insanely hard to m…”

“And I quickly noticed that the entrepreneurs who were sending the updates in the same format as At the same time of the whatever month, week or quarter were people that were making more progress than the people that would change the format all the time. Someti…”

“The first one is you should choose the metrics that you will track and you should not change them. Too often I've seen entrepreneurs For example, track revenue, and then maybe revenue is not going as well as expected, so all of a sudden we'll switch to DAUs be…”

“And advice number three is be very precise in the asks that you have for your investors. So for example, at the end of the day, every founder wants more customers and new hires. But if you're saying, do you know any backend engineer? And do you know any compan…”

“And I've been doing that since I started France and I have only missed sending this email once, which was when demo day was happening, which was really crazy.”

“Yeah, so every week, all hands meeting, I show revenue. So, meaning every single week, they know exactly how much churn we've had, how much expansion we've had, and how much new business we've had, and we divide that by the different teams.”

“So I think there is some misconception about engagement being created by the energy of announcing good news versus engagement created by the trust and the transparency and the context that you will give to your employees.”

“I always talked about the one that was the best, but also I always said that, so let's, let's say I was at 30 KMR. I would say we're at 20 KMR. So I would always give a number that's below so that, you know, if I raise it in two months and for some reason thin…”

“When I chose Brian, Brian is actually one of the only investors during our series B that I didn't know much before. And so I hadn't built a relationship with him. And so I knew it was very important to understand if we would work well together. So I think I to…”

“If you, let's take, for example, women versus men, if you spend the time to evaluate a lot of people, you should end up with fifty-fifty. If you don't, then you will probably not end up with that ratio.”

“I don't believe that transparency is good in itself. And that's why you should be transparent. I believe that that's the most efficient way I've found to create engagement at scale.”

“I think the most important thing is discipline, and I think that discipline is actually more important than having a grand vision. And my personal belief, and I am sure that not a lot of people agree with me, is one of the reasons why we've been successful so …”

“We have so much respect for one another, and that's the thing that you need to optimize for. It doesn't matter how well you get along, you just need to be so impressed by whatever your other person or other persons are doing.”

“The truth is, if with all the knowledge I have about the company, I can't figure out something, I think it's very rare that someone would come and figure it out.”

“And I kept interviewing everyone till, like, employee number 80 or something.”

“In a company that's fast growing, like you think, for example, I've been willing to hire a head of finance for, I don't know, six months, and it's so important, like, we don't have any finance person at France, and we, I don't know, we're a 110 people, we've r…”

“When you want to listen to some feedback, you should listen to feedback of people that are paying some money because otherwise you can be overwhelmed with feedback From people that will never pay for your products.”

“I think the biggest danger is you have a customer and then, you know, you care so much about growing your revenue. So then they're telling you, I want this. And so then you build this. And I want that, and you build that, and then you just pull your, you push …”

“I think that the input is far more important at this stage than the output, because the truth is, If they don't hit their target, first, your target could be wrong, and how could you know what your target should be when you are so early? and two, maybe your p…”

“Every every time we've raised in a week.”

“I've invested in a few companies since, like, I don't know, in the past few years, and you can't imagine how I can tell you after two or three emails, so two or three months, which companies are going to be successful.”

“A lot of people inside the team that needs to handle these emails, and they struggle managing that as a team because email wasn't made for teams.”

“I feel like most of the Decisions, progress decision that we made that led to like a significant change in behavior were the most painful.”

“I think from our beta, we had 3000 companies that signed up to our product, and I think, I don't know, 10 of them ended up using our product, so the conversion rate is not high, but any time I was, ah, onboarding someone, and the person was not interested, I l…”

“So at scale, content is not at all how we get users today. But in the early days, or at least it's still some of the way we get users, but not the main source. Which is paid acquisition.”

“We hired our first marketing person in January, 2017. So two and a half years after we launched the product.”

“So it got us to probably one million in ARR, and so that was probably a thousand customers, maybe? Something like that.”

“And I think the thing that we tried to do for two months was asking ourselves all these tough questions that can happen in the journey of two founders. Like, what happens if I want to fire you, or you want to fire me, or you want to sell, and I don't want to s…”

“But so I think for us, a startup studio was great for two reasons. One, the fact that we met and two, the fact that we got initial funding.”

“I log out of every app Slack front every weekend, and anytime I'm on PTO, I don't have any notifications, so I'm never distracted by, ah, by work.”

“So if you are a manager, you have access to your direct reports inboxes.”

“The way I think about transparency is if something is going to create more primes and raise more questions, then bad use of transparency. If something is going to answer a lot of questions and solve a lot of problems, then good use of transparency.”

“We don't share the salaries of everyone.”

“So, you know, when people sometimes ask questions about the insights that you have and other people don't have something, something, the fact that you don't have any insight and you have a, like New pair of eyes is actually super insightful.”

“So like you're emailing friends and families. I don't think that email will last forever. So if you look at the growth year over year, it's actually decreasing every year. Whereas if you look at work emails, it's increasing year over year. So I believe that em…”

“Now, in a work environment I feel like email, the protocol is actually perfect because it's the only protocol that you can use to communicate with people outside your company. And so even if you have great tools like Slack that enable you to Slack in, to messa…”

“I strongly believe that people could spend 90% of their time in their inbox versus today, it's probably not as high as 90%.”

“So, you know, I think I would probably wipe out most of the structural features. Cause when you think about, you know, the main things are you have a subject, you have a signature, you literally carbon copy and blind carbon copy. And so I think I would remove …”

“And I think when we raised our series A, and so we raised our series A, we were making, I think, 1.5 million in AR. So a little over a hundred K MR. I think that's where, when I felt like some companies were using the product, and even if I had demoed All the …”

“You need to be so brutally honest with yourself and with your team about what's working and not working. I think startups are so hard that there is Almost like as a human being, you want to be happy. And so you don't necessarily want to face every reality caus…”

“I've been meditating for every day for, I think, 500 days.”

“I wanted to work on email because I was spending probably six or seven hours per day in my inbox.”

“So I scheduled all the partners meetings the week after. So 11 partner meetings in one week, which was pretty tiring.”

“For us, at least, we've been fortunate enough, and every round has been super easy, so seed series A and series B, we raised pretty quickly. So if there is one thing that's not hard, and that's probably the only thing about building front, for us, it's been ra…”

“So my job changes probably at least every six months. And every time I need to learn a new job, and every time I don't know if I'll be great at the next job I feel like, one, having, ah, a coach is useful, and it can be a different coach every six months.”

“One thing I've realized is people will give you a lot of milestones that you need to hit in order to raise. So they will tell you raise a seed run when you hit that, and then a series A when you hit One million in AR, whatever. And Series B when, but at the en…”

“So, at Front, everyone knows everything about our runway, our NPS, our revenue, our churn, like, everything.”

“The thing that I think is dangerous is transparency is not about sharing, ah, everything that's on your mind and the way you feel. And that's true internally and externally. So for example, in, inside the company, I can't say I'm freaking out about this compet…”

“I think the thing that keeps me up at night is as the company is growing, like people put so much expectations on front and specifically on me. And so I keep hearing from a lot of different people, like the reason we're betting on front is because you're the C…”

“I had to wait till our series B, I think, to look at our net retention.”

“Right now, I'm confident at least that we can do a series B. With, and I think that's probably the moment when I'll think about putting some money aside.”

“I think with press, people expect that they will have customers and people going to their website, et cetera. What we see is it triggers the interest of candidates and investors. That was, that's what press is good, at least for us.”

“And so we make two millions in revenues after two years.”

“One million.”

“I mean, the thing is, they can advise whatever they want, but at the end of the day, I'll make the decisions, right?”

“I think now it's my responsibility to always have a few years of runway. Otherwise I would not sleep well.”

“And so I would recommend that to every founder, even the one that maybe will join a few months after. If you look at the beginning of the company, it seems like it makes a difference. Maybe someone is investing a little bit more money, more time is joining a b…”