Mathilde Collin
Co-Founder & Executive Chair, Front · 2 appearances on the record.
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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.
52statements → 16claims → 2claims resolved → 3.79/5average certainty → 1.98/5average debate potential → 3said about them ↓
2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 14 not checkable as stated how the 16 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 15 assertions · 4 opinions · 24 insights · 8 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 16 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 14 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Mathilde argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Front hit product-market fit at Series A with $1.5M ARR
“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 …”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
Everything Mathilde Collin said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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 …”
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.”
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…”
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: 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…”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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 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…”
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%.”
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.”
The other half of the tape: Mathilde Collin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 3 episodes on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Paul Buchheit 1Gustaf Alströmer 1Craig Cannon 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator | Oct 24, 2018 | 39m |
| Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator | Oct 3, 2018 | 38m |