Mathilde Collin

Everything Mathilde Collin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.

20VC Disclosure

Collin Understated Front's MRR to VCs to Guarantee Growth Later

“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…”

Mathilde Collin May 24, 2019 ▶ 21:14 20VC: Front's Mathilde Collin on Why Discipline Is More Important Than Vision, The Right Way To Approach Investor Updates and Director Reports & How To Effectively Structure 1-1s

Y COMBINATOR Insight

Mathilde Collin would eliminate subject lines, CC, and BCC from email

“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 …”

Mathilde Collin Oct 3, 2018 ▶ 39:34 Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator

20VC Insight

Collin: VCs Should Weight Founder Execution at 90% and Vision at 10%

“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…”

Mathilde Collin May 24, 2019 ▶ 6:42 20VC: Front's Mathilde Collin on Why Discipline Is More Important Than Vision, The Right Way To Approach Investor Updates and Director Reports & How To Effectively Structure 1-1s

20VC Insight

Collin: Employee engagement stems from trust and transparency, not relentless good news

“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.”

Mathilde Collin May 24, 2019 ▶ 16:42 20VC: Front's Mathilde Collin on Why Discipline Is More Important Than Vision, The Right Way To Approach Investor Updates and Director Reports & How To Effectively Structure 1-1s

20VC Assertion Not checkable as stated

Collin: Evaluating enough candidates naturally yields a 50/50 gender ratio

“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.”

Mathilde Collin May 24, 2019 ▶ 27:06 20VC: Front's Mathilde Collin on Why Discipline Is More Important Than Vision, The Right Way To Approach Investor Updates and Director Reports & How To Effectively Structure 1-1s

Y COMBINATOR Insight

Collin: Hires rarely solve company problems founders cannot figure out themselves

“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.”

Mathilde Collin Oct 24, 2018 ▶ 12:26 After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Assertion Not checkable as stated

Collin: Front reached 110 employees and $80M raised with zero finance staff

“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…”

Mathilde Collin Oct 24, 2018 ▶ 16:22 After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Insight

Collin: Early sales teams must be evaluated on inputs, not revenue targets

“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…”

Mathilde Collin Oct 24, 2018 ▶ 35:54 After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Opinion

Mathilde Collin: Slack cannot replace email for external business communication

“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…”

Mathilde Collin Oct 3, 2018 ▶ 38:11 Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator

20VC Insight

Collin: Early-Stage Startups Don't Need a Grand Vision From Day One

“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…”

Mathilde Collin May 24, 2019 ▶ 5:42 20VC: Front's Mathilde Collin on Why Discipline Is More Important Than Vision, The Right Way To Approach Investor Updates and Director Reports & How To Effectively Structure 1-1s

20VC Insight

Collin: Founders who send consistent investor updates make faster progress

“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…”

Mathilde Collin May 24, 2019 ▶ 8:11 20VC: Front's Mathilde Collin on Why Discipline Is More Important Than Vision, The Right Way To Approach Investor Updates and Director Reports & How To Effectively Structure 1-1s

20VC Disclosure

Collin: Front Discloses Exact Revenue, Churn, and Expansion Metrics Weekly to Employees

“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.”

Mathilde Collin May 24, 2019 ▶ 14:32 20VC: Front's Mathilde Collin on Why Discipline Is More Important Than Vision, The Right Way To Approach Investor Updates and Director Reports & How To Effectively Structure 1-1s

20VC Disclosure

Collin Reference-Checked Sequoia's Brian Schreier With 90% of His Portfolio CEOs

“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…”

Mathilde Collin May 24, 2019 ▶ 25:54 20VC: Front's Mathilde Collin on Why Discipline Is More Important Than Vision, The Right Way To Approach Investor Updates and Director Reports & How To Effectively Structure 1-1s

Y COMBINATOR Insight

Collin: Transparency is just a tool to generate employee engagement at scale

“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.”

Mathilde Collin Oct 24, 2018 ▶ 2:47 After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Insight

Collin: Operational discipline is more important than having a grand vision

“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 …”

Mathilde Collin Oct 24, 2018 ▶ 4:49 After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Insight

Collin: Co-founders should optimize for mutual respect over personal friendship

“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.”

Mathilde Collin Oct 24, 2018 ▶ 9:53 After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Assertion Not checkable as stated

Collin: Front lost just two employees in its entire history

“Our NPS is 87th, which is super high. If you look at Glassdoor, we only have five stars reviews. If you look at our attrition no one has, there are just two people that have left Fronty ever, and it was one to go back to school, one to join the company of thei…”

Mathilde Collin Oct 24, 2018 ▶ 20:18 After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Insight

Collin: Chasing revenue by building custom requests derails product direction

“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 …”

Mathilde Collin Oct 24, 2018 ▶ 34:01 After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Insight

Collin: Delaying SaaS price increases makes customers angry twice

“The temptation is to say we're going to raise our price, but we'll do that maybe in a year, and so you want to be nice, and so you give a lot of time. The problem is, you actually make your customers angry twice, because by then they had forgotten, and so then…”

Mathilde Collin Oct 24, 2018 ▶ 47:49 After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Disclosure

Front managers have full access to direct reports' personal company inboxes

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

Mathilde Collin Oct 3, 2018 ▶ 29:33 Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Insight

Transparency is harmful if it creates more problems than it solves

“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.”

Mathilde Collin Oct 3, 2018 ▶ 30:23 Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Insight

Lacking domain expertise can be an advantage for product founders

“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.”

Mathilde Collin Oct 3, 2018 ▶ 34:06 Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Prediction Not checkable as stated

Mathilde Collin predicts personal email will die while workplace email grows

“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…”

Mathilde Collin Oct 3, 2018 ▶ 37:40 Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator

Y COMBINATOR Opinion

Modernized interfaces could keep workers in their inbox 90% of the time

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

Mathilde Collin Oct 3, 2018 ▶ 39:06 Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator

Show 24statements(93 left)

The other half of the tape: Mathilde Collin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 47 times in 23 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 19Nathan Latka 14Mamoon Hamid 5Olaf Matei 2Jason Lemkin 2Wasim Daher 1Paul Buchheit 1Lloyed Lobo 1

Statements about Mathilde Collin, by other people (1)

TOP FOUNDERS Assertion Supported

Front Reached Well Over $1.4 Million In Monthly Recurring Revenue

“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.”

Nathan Latka Nov 2, 2019 ▶ 17:32 1561 How To Get 5 Team Members Paying Personally Onto One Team Account with $5m ARR MixMax

Every mention by year

One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Mathilde's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.

Show	Role there	Eps	Statements	Record
Y COMBINATORLEDGER	Co-Founder & Executive Chair, Front	2	52	100% 2/2	full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast →
TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER	Co-Founder & Executive Chair, Front	2	38	50% 1/2	full record on Top Founders →
SAASTRLEDGER	Co-Founder & Executive Chair, Front	1	15	100% 1/1	full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast →
20VCLEDGER	Co-Founder & Executive Chair, Front	1	12	—	full record on 20VC →