Founders anchor on rare praise and ignore overwhelming negative feedback
Mathilde Collin · Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator · Oct 3, 2018 · at 42:43
Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO of Front, gives advice on brutal honesty and avoiding confirmation bias when searching for product-market fit.
0:00 / 0:40exact quote · 40.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 cause it can be really hard. And so, you know, if you're working. 12 hours a day and the thing that you keep hearing is, ah, I'm not super interested in your work, whatever. And then at a point someone says, oh, it's pretty good. Then you anchor so much on the fact that someone said it's pretty good. And then you tend to ignore the fact that yes, but 95% told you that it was not good.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mathilde Collin
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…”