Mathilde Collin
Co-Founder & Executive Chair, Front. On 4 shows, 6 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@collinmathilde ↗LinkedIn ↗front.com ↗
Mathilde Collin is the co-founder and Executive Chair of Front, a collaborative customer communication platform. She previously served as the company's CEO, scaling it to a multi-billion-dollar valuation.
4shows
6appearances
117statements
5resolved
4supported
1contradicted
80%fully supported
48said about them ↓ Everything Mathilde Collin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Collin: Startups are screwed if seed VCs do not follow on
“And so you know that if you raise a seed round and then you raise a series A and the firm doesn't follow, then you're screwed.”
Founders should raise on business confidence, not arbitrary ARR milestones
“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…”
Startup transparency means sharing metrics, not dumping personal emotional anxiety
“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…”
Startup board members cannot tell founders how to reach operational milestones
“So not helpful with, I feel like they are not helpful to tell you how you'll get to your next milestone. Like they don't have any answers for you.”
Collin: Intercom creates silos by excluding sales from customer communication
“Intercom is good for customer communication, but what we're trying to do is having more of your communication, so customer success, product, sales on front, and on Intercom, you don't usually have your sales team. You'll use Yesware or ToutApp, which will make…”
Collin: Front's VC board members can advise, but I make final decisions
“I mean, the thing is, they can advise whatever they want, but at the end of the day, I'll make the decisions, right?”
Mathilde Collin: Co-founders should split equity equally to prevent frustration
“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…”
Collin: Front has always maintained net negative revenue churn
“But then our revenue churn has always been negative. Because we have a model where we have to lend and expand. Yeah, exactly. In new teams. And so that's always higher than the downsells.”
Collin: 100% of acquired email startups get shut down
“But also a hundred percent of those companies who have been acquired shut down.”
Collin: Front's Series B Pitch Vision Was Entirely Different From Seed
“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.”
Collin: Founders should not switch update metrics when performance drops
“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…”
Collin interviewed every candidate at Front until reaching 80 employees
“And I kept interviewing everyone till, like, employee number 80 or something.”
Collin: Prioritize feedback only from paying customers
“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.”
Collin can predict a startup's success from its first three investor updates
“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.”
Collin: A first sales rep must generate 3x to 6x their compensation
“There are a few, ah, ratio you can hear off, so for example, they should bring between three X and six X the amount of money they're paid, so then you have a range, because the truth is, if they bring less than what they're paid, probably not good. Ah, 10 X, l…”
Email startups must reach intense feature parity with Gmail to succeed
“In order to have a product that people will use for their individual emails, you need to get to a level of feature parity with Gmail or Outlook that's pretty intense”
Changing user email habits requires a 10x better value proposition
“If you want people to change how they deal with email, the amount of innovation that you need to bring needs to be super high because it's very disruptive to change. So then the value proposition needs to be like, It needs to be 10 X better.”
Mathilde Collin: Google Inbox was not 10x better than Gmail
“I didn't feel like inbox was 10 X better than Gmail.”
The most impactful product changes are initially painful for customers
“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.”
Paid acquisition eventually replaced content as Front's main user source
“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.”
PR and content marketing drove Front to $1M in ARR
“So it got us to probably one million in ARR, and so that was probably a thousand customers, maybe? Something like that.”
Mathilde Collin spent two months debating hypothetical conflicts before co-founding Front
“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…”
Founders must remember their startup is just a company
“Founders are always very committed to making their company work, and that's good, but they should Also realize that, you know, their company is just a company, and you have a life outside of your company that's also super important, and you should enjoy every …”
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)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 24
Top Founders 16
the Official SaaStr Podcast 4
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 3
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2020 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Sequoia's Ravi Gupta on His Lessons From The Hyper-Growth of Instacart, The Key Question To Ask When Building or Evaluating Teams & The Importance of Investing In and Detecting Slopes Rather Than Intercepts
- 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 19 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Bain's Matt Harris on Why Valuation And Market Size Are Not The Most Important Thing At Series A, Why Backing Sociopaths Can Work & Late Cycle Momentum Investing & The Changes That Will Stay in Venture Forever
- 20VC: Clearbit Founder Alex MacCaw on How To Successfully Negotiate with Investors, What Value-Add Do VCs Really Bring & Why You Should Only Have Operators on Your Board
- 20VC: Why Passion Is Overrated When It Comes To Starting Companies, Why VC Is Overrated As A Financing Mechanism & Why You Should Never Sell Your Company with Waseem Daher, Founder & CEO @ Pilot
- 20VC: Why Historical Loss Ratios Are Simply Too High, Why Data Is The #1 Most Important Piece When Evaluating Effective Reserve Allocation & Why Nothing Is Truly Defensible Today with Jonathan Hsu, Co-Founder and General Partner @ Tribe Capital
- 1561 How To Get 5 Team Members Paying Personally Onto One Team Account with $5m ARR MixMax
- 20VC: InVision Founder Clark Valberg on Why True Leadership is Like Writing, How To Be Truly Self-Aware & The Fundamental False Premise of Entrepreneurship
- "Early Gains, Early Pains: 5 Lessons for Surviving Hypergrowth" Harry Stebbings and Robert Vis
- 1310 After GoDaddy Acquisition, He Built Support Version of Intercom, Now $1.5m in ARR, 100% yoy growth
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2017 4 mentions in 1 episode
2016 11 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode
- EP 412: 5 Kids, $5 Million 2015 Agency Revenue With Joe Apfelbaum of AjaxUnion
- 20VC: Social Capital's Mamoon Hamid on Disrupting The Venture Model & Advancing Humanity By Solving The World's Toughest Problems
- EP 414: $70M Raised, $30k ACV, SaaS Success VidYard
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
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 → |