- Mathilde Collin, CEO of Front, shares her journey of building a $100 billion business
- She initially lacked confidence to start a company but joined a small startup and discovered her passion for software
- She left the startup due to a terrible culture and realized the importance of transparency and trust in creating a happy work environment
- Mathilde emphasizes the importance of having a clear vision and discipline in the early stages of a company
- She met her co-founder and future husband at different times, who both believed in her and supported her decision to start her own company
- Mathilde and her co-founder had complementary skills and easily decided on their roles as CEO and CTO
- Their strong relationship is characterized by respect and has been crucial to their success.

- The co-founder of Front reflects on the importance of having a strong relationship with their co-founder, based on respect rather than personal friendship.
- In the early days, the CEO of Front took on multiple roles, including product manager, recruiter, marketer, sales rep, support rep, and customer success person.
- As the company grew, the CEO hired people who were better than them at specific tasks, but only after they had figured out the job themselves.
- The CEO's role evolved to focus on hiring and finding heads of functions to make them work together.
- The CEO emphasizes the importance of hiring people who align with the company's values and being disciplined about not compromising on those values.
- Transparency is a key aspect of Front's culture, with the CEO sharing information about revenue, churn, customer feedback, board meetings, and their own emotions with the entire company.
- The CEO advises new startup founders to be demanding and not hesitate to make tough decisions about letting go of underperforming team members. They also stress the importance of transparency in the early stages of a company.

- The company Front values transparency and believes that openly discussing and addressing problems leads to better teamwork and alignment.
- Front has a high employee retention rate and positive reviews, which they attribute to their transparent approach.
- The CEO of Front emphasizes the importance of talking to users and customers to understand their needs and improve the product.
- Front initially struggled with product-market fit but gained insights from conversations with customers that helped them make necessary changes.
- The company started with a freemium model but eventually removed it due to low usage and increased prices over time.
- The CEO acknowledges that starting with lower prices is common but believes it is possible to increase prices later.

- The speaker advises not to spend too much time thinking about pricing, but rather to pick a number and go with it.
- They suggest talking to customers who are paying more for useful feedback and using different methods to gather feedback, such as talking to customers, publishing a public roadmap, and emailing customers for input.
- In the early stages, it is important to understand customers' pain points and workflows to determine if the product is a good fit for them.
- It is crucial to say no to customers who are not a good fit to avoid pushing the product in the wrong direction.
- The speaker discusses different sales approaches and emphasizes the importance of activity and input in the early stages rather than focusing solely on the end number.
- They advise listening to customers and asking questions rather than immediately showcasing the product.
- The speaker mentions their unusual fundraising experience, attributing their success to discipline and consistently hitting targets. They emphasize the importance of having good metrics and a good product.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of admitting when a company is not growing and finding excuses for not growing is detrimental to success.
- They recommend sending regular emails to the team and investors with key performance indicators (KPIs) to maintain focus and accountability.
- The speaker shares the personal experience of their co-founder getting sick and how it made them realize the importance of prioritizing happiness and health over the success of the company.
- They discuss the benefits of meditation in reducing stress and overwhelm.
- The speaker advises finding enterprise customers willing to take risks and implementing security measures to gain their trust.
- They explain their decision to use a subscription-based pricing model for their product.
- When raising prices, they suggest notifying users sooner rather than later and offering incentives for switching to a yearly plan.
- Setting targets for the first salesperson hired can be challenging, but a common ratio is between 3x and 6x the amount they are paid.
- It is important to reassess and be realistic about what is feasible in terms of sales targets.

- The speaker discusses the importance of building trust with customers and reassessing goals regularly.
- They mention using technologies like Clearbit to reach out to potential users who bounce from the website.
- The speaker shares their experience of implementing pricing during a private beta and using creative methods to gauge customer interest.
- Content marketing was the main strategy used to acquire the first 3,000 signups for the private beta.
- Adjusting pricing based on feature demands is seen as an opportunity for upselling.
- The speaker explains how they chose to build a product in the email market based on personal pain points and market viability.

- Mathilde Collin, CEO of Front, shares her journey of building a $100 billion business
- She emphasizes the importance of transparency and trust in creating a happy work environment
- Mathilde and her co-founder had complementary skills and easily decided on their roles as CEO and CTO
- The CEO's role evolved to focus on hiring and finding heads of functions to make them work together
- Transparency is a key aspect of Front's culture, with the CEO sharing information with the entire company
- Front values transparency and believes that openly discussing and addressing problems leads to better teamwork and alignment
- The CEO advises new startup founders to be demanding and stresses the importance of transparency
- Front has a high employee retention rate and positive reviews, which they attribute to their transparent approach
- The CEO of Front emphasizes the importance of talking to users and customers to understand their needs and improve the product
- The company started with a freemium model but eventually removed it due to low usage and increased prices over time
- The speaker advises not to spend too much time thinking about pricing, but rather to pick a number and go with it
- It is important to understand customers' pain points and workflows to determine if the product is a good fit for them
- The speaker discusses different sales approaches and emphasizes the importance of activity and input in the early stages
- They emphasize the importance of having good metrics and a good product for successful fundraising
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of admitting when a company is not growing and finding excuses for not growing is detrimental to success
- They recommend sending regular emails with key performance indicators to maintain focus and accountability
- The speaker advises prioritizing happiness and health over the success of the company
- Building trust with customers and reassessing goals regularly are important
- Content marketing was the main strategy used to acquire the first 3,000 signups for the private beta
- Adjusting pricing based on feature demands is seen as an opportunity for upselling
- The speaker explains how they chose to build a product in the email market based on personal pain points and market viability.

Mathilde Collin, founder of YC alumnus Front, describes what she learned as she scaled Front to 1000s of paying customers.

Learn more at https://startupschool.org.

Following on from Paul's talk about some of the ways to think about becoming or what it takes to become or whether you might believe you might become a $100 billion business, I am going to have a conversation with Mathilde Collin, who is in the process of building 1 of those $100 billion businesses, and she's going to be able to tell us all about that, and her company called Front.

So Mathilde, What batch were you in at YC?

So tell us about your, if you would, your journey to being the CEO of Front.

Sure, so in just a few seconds, so I think I've always been wanting to start a company, but the main thing is I didn't feel confident enough to think that I would 1 day build a company.

So I was hearing all these people saying, oh yeah, I'll start a company.

And I was like, I wish I could say that, but I just don't feel like I can do it.

So instead, what I did is, after I graduated, I joined a startup that was super small, doing a contract management software.

And that's when I discovered the world of softwares.

And there is something that went well during this first experience and something that didn't do well.

So what went well is I became very passionate about softwares in general.

And I just felt like the fact that you could build something in a few months that could change how people work and people spend so much time at work, I felt was super rewarding.

So you didn't find, contract management sounds painfully boring.

But what was cool about it was that it actually changed how people did their

And so when I was talking to people, so I was in charge of launching a new product for them, and so when I was talking to people using the product and they were telling me how their day-to-day was much better because they were using the product, it made sense to me.

And it's still 1 thing that drives me today.

What wasn't great is the culture was terrible.

And I also understood how much of a responsibility you had as a founding team of a company to create an environment where people would be happy to come to work.

So a year after I joined this company I quit this company.

What was it about the culture that was bad?

So I think the main thing is there was no transparency and so then there is no trust and then there is no engagement from employees.

So I can tell you more about how I've built the front and I think what's unique about our culture but 1 of the things is how transparent we are And 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.

So if you ask people at France, why are you happy to come to work every day?

They will tell you, I'm happy because I can see the impact of my work and that's what I care about.

And how do you make sure that people see the impact of their work?

You make sure that everything is transparent from where you want to go, how you'll go there, what are the goals that they need to achieve and how their work relate to these goals.

It seems like there's something really fundamental there for the companies that are going to be successful.

Paul talked about what it felt like at Google where everyone knew where they were going and everyone was passionate and everyone believed and so you had this energy in the company.

So I guess somehow this is about sharing a vision with the team and having them believe in it and at every step in the way, having them be able to see how that vision is being created.

Yeah, so I think there are 2 things that are incredibly important as early as you are.

And of course you should know where you're going, and of course you don't know yet, and that's totally fine.

Like I didn't know 4 years ago how big Front would be, and I still don't know today.

But I think that will just evolve along the way.

What you need to have is just what you deeply believe in.

And so what I've always believed in is, front should be a place where people come to work every day and are happy, and our customers should be happier because they use front.

Either because the impact of their work is higher or because it's an email product so they spend hours in the app every day.

And so today our mission is work happier and I make sure that I explain to people what it means for us and I think it should be clear to everyone in your company and to you why you care so deeply about what you're doing.

And it doesn't need to be this huge idea because the truth is I didn't know what front would be but I knew that I cared so much about it and people could relate to it.

Yet, I don't think that that's the most important thing.

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 1 of the reasons why we've been successful so far is because we've been incredibly disciplined in many things.

So for example, always having 1 focus and making sure that it's clear to the entire company.

So in the early days, we wanted to make sure that we were making something that people wanted.

And the way we would track that was, can we generate revenue?

And so every single day, everyone in the company would know where our revenue was, and the next day where it was, and the next day, et cetera, for at least a year.

And anything that we would work on was aimed at increasing that revenue and I was sending daily emails that became weekly emails.

There are still weekly emails telling everyone how we're doing against our core targets and I think having this discipline of focusing on a few things and making sure that in every presentation you do, in every email you send, even to investors, to whatever, you show that will be 1 of the key to succeed.

So let's back up before we dig further into the sort of the unique culture and the success you've had at front.

You left the lousy startup, the lousy company with a lousy culture and somehow you ended up deciding you were going to start your own thing.

What led you to start your company, to find your co-founder Laurent, and get going with Front?

Yeah, so I think I was very lucky for a few reasons.

So the story of my co-founder and I is not that we were best friends or brothers and sisters or whatever.

I actually met my co-founder 3 months before we started the company.

And then we spent so much time together trying to go through every hard conversations that I could think about.

Like, I don't know, what if I want to fire you?

What if you want to sell and I don't want to sell?

And we were just aligned on most things, actually everything, so that's 1 thing that led me to start this company with him.

So you knew you wanted to start a company.

Yes, so I knew I wanted to start a company.

I knew I wanted to start a company in the email space because I love softwares, but I was using email to get work done, I wasn't using contracts.

And so I knew that, and I knew that I needed money to start a company because I had to have a loan for my school, and so I couldn't start a company if I didn't find money.

And so I was lucky enough to meet with an angel investor in Paris who committed to giving us money.

that's the biggest risk I took or when I moved here with all our employees and their family and they quit their jobs and sold their house.

And the last thing that I think is incredibly important is I found someone that became my husband later on who believed in me.

And I think that it's so important to find someone, whether it's a mentor, a friend, or whoever, who can tell you that you can do it.

And maybe you already know that you can do it, but at least for me, these 4 things were equally important.

I would have never started this company if someone was not telling me every day, you can do it.

So you found your future husband and your co-founder, different people by the way, at about the same time.

Although your husband does work at Front.

But you met them at the, he didn't work at Front at the time, and you met them about the same time.

No, no, I met my future husband a few years before.

But he was the 1 telling me that you can do it at that time.

So he was supportive of you quitting your job and jumping in headlong into the startup?

Yes, and he did the same thing at the same time.

So in Paris we met in a startup studio called eFounders.

How did the 2 of you decide who was going to be CEO?

So basically everything I love he hates and everything he loves I hate.

So he's the CTO of Front, he loves building the product but he doesn't like doing what I'm doing right now.

And I think that when I reflect back on Front, the thing that I've been most lucky with is my relationship with my co-founder because we have the most amazing relationship and what I mean by that is not that we're super close in a sense that we would hang out together and like he's actually he's a friend but he is not like my best friend or my buddy but we have so much respect for 1 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.

And you had sort of a unique process to figure that out.

In the beginning, you sort of grilled each other until you were both sure that you were compatible.

So When you began as CEO, can you talk a little bit about how you split up responsibilities and what the role of CEO was?

There's a lot of people here who have similar questions as to what exactly they should be doing as CEO.

How did you think about that from the beginning?

So my role as a CEO, in the early days, I was basically doing everything but being an engineer because I wasn't an engineer.

But so I was the product manager, the recruiter, I was, for the longest time, the only marketing person for 3 years.

And I guess my job was just to do the job of like what ultimately will become our team.

We talked a bit with Elad Gil about how the role of CEO evolves as a company gets much larger but it changes a lot even as you go from 2 people to 5 people to 10 people, right?

So I think what's super important is I wasn't expecting to hire people to figure out things that I would have not figured out.

So it wasn't like, oh, I'm struggling with marketing.

Like I don't know how to generate leads, so I need to hire someone better than me.

So the way I was thinking about it is there are a few things that I feel are scalable.

So for example, we would have leads that would sign up to front, I would call them and I would be like, do you want to sign up to front?

Here is what front does, what's your process?

And when I started to think that another person could do that and could do it better than me because the person would be more skilled, then that's when I hired people.

And so at every step of the way, I hired people better than me, but once I had figured out what roughly their job would be, and the mistake I've done in the early days was, I've not figured out something, and I hope that someone will figure it out for me.

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.

So that's something that I learned in the early days.

So you can't count on someone else to have the answers

And still today, like even today we are 110 people now and I'm not hiring people to figure out things that I've not figured out, because I think it's incredibly hard.

I'm here to hire people that will scale what's kind of working.

So I hired people that were better than me on things that I had figured out, and then once I had everyone, I hired head of functions.

And then my job now is to find the head of every function and to make them work together.

So it sounds like from the very beginning though, hiring was foremost in your mind, as

So 1 funny thing is anytime, so I was in the summer 14 batch, and so every week we had a speaker, and every time the speaker was talking about hiring that's the moment I was in my phone because I was like you know I don't care hiring is a long time from now on and that's probably a big mistake I've done because then you understand that hiring is the key if you fail on that your company will fail so you should listen and just take notes and read the notes later on.

So at least I can tell you 1 piece of advice that I got from Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, that I thought was super insightful.

So he said, in the early days, every time you hire someone, just think about whether you want 10 times this person, because the truth is, this person will hire people like them.

So I'm interviewing you, and I'm like, do I want 10 Jeff in this team?

So if the answer is yes, then I can hire you.

If the answer is no, but the bar should be as high as that.

And I think that was a good piece of advice that I received.

From the very beginning, it seems like Front has a strong, specific culture.

Did you pay attention to that as you were hiring from the beginning and how did you implement that?

Yeah, so I think very early on I was very deliberate about what we call today our values, but I basically know who I think I would work well with and who I wouldn't work well with, and that's the truth.

Like our values are just extensions of who we are as co-founders.

And so, you know, some of our values are low ego and high standards, care and collaboration.

And I just believe that I'm incredibly demanding and that's why high standards is part of our value and I don't want to hire anyone that doesn't have these standards.

It doesn't mean I don't have an ego, but when I make a decision, I think about front first, and I think about our employees first, and I think about myself after.

And I think that just putting words on what we care about as co-founders, and then making sure that you're assessing that during your interview process is what matters.

It's not useful to display them on a wall and to explain them and all of that in the early days, but at least being just self-aware is what will help you hire the right people.

And it does kind of speak to the fact that you are going to play an important role in hiring everybody in the beginning.

and I kept interviewing everyone till like employee number 80 or something.

Did you ever find yourself in a position of needing or wanting or having to compromise on those values or did the values always take precedence?

Like there was someone who maybe didn't quite match the values but was like the perfect fit for the designer job.

So no, we never, or if we did then we let go the person after, which is worse.

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, 6 months.

And it's so important, like we don't have any finance person at front and we, I don't know, we're 110 people, we've raised 80 million and I don't know what I'm doing because I've never done any finance work before.

But I've never found someone that I was incredibly excited about that had both the skills and would match our values.

And I think being very disciplined about not hiring, even if you desperately need this person, is important.

I wanna move on to product, but before we do that, I'm just wondering if you were going to talk to relatively new startup founders or people with young companies like most of the companies in startup school, is there specific advice you'd give about creating a culture of success, creating the kind of culture you have at front for them?

So I think my biggest advice would be 1, to be incredibly demanding.

So I just feel like in the early days, if you have someone that's not working out, being very tough and letting this person go, I think that's a mistake I've seen because if you have a team of 5 and 1 person is not working out, and you kind of know and you always know and you're not making this tough decision that it has an impact on your entire team.

It's easy to say, hard to do, and I can tell you how we've done it.

I think transparency is just so important in the early days and even if, even at scale.

But so making sure that everyone in your company knows everything, like there is no reason why you should hide anything, maybe except for, I don't know, salaries.

Yeah, so I was going to ask, when you say transparency, people throw that word out a lot.

How do you, in actual practice, what does that mean for you at Front?

So it means that everyone knows what I, so a few things.

1, I think there is bad transparency and good transparency.

Good transparency is everything that you can share that will help people do their job better and help answer questions they have, bad transparency will raise more questions and create more problems than you need.

And so, for example, like sharing salaries, like we can have a debate about that, but I think it raises more questions than it actually solve problems.

But then, everything else, so everyone knows our revenue, our churn, every email about, I don't know, leads coming in and telling us what they want, customer complaining about this or being happy about that, every NPS score that is here, either people are super happy, super upset, everything is public, our runway, the amount of cash we have in the bank account, every board meeting that we do, we publish the board deck, then I do an O-end and I share what the board said and or I answer a question on the board deck.

Every, I don't know, I share just everything that's business related.

And also how I feel, like I'm happy to say, I'm extremely happy about that, and I'm extremely unhappy about that.

And everyone in the company ends up knowing that.

And they know that and I think it's good because then if you really want people to work on the thing that are broken, there is no point in hiding what's broken.

And there is always this human feeling of, I will not share because you know they will be worried.

And some people joined 2 days ago and they're gonna know that it's broken.

But that's fine because what you gain is the fact that they will all work on that problem.

And that's better than avoiding the question.

And it feels like people stay aligned and moving in the same direction.

Yes, and I mean, you know that, but I think Fronte is like at least 1 thing, there are lots of things that we struggle with, but 1 thing that we've done I think really well is our retention of employees.

If you look at Glassdoor, we only have 5 stars reviews.

If you look at our attrition, there are just 2 people that have left front ever and it was 1 to go back to school, 1 to join the company of their best friend.

So I think we've done a good job and I believe that we've done a good job because of this engagement that we've created thanks to this transparency.

We were talking earlier about 1 great sign for a company, for a company's product is having really high retention.

But likewise, I guess, having really high retention of your employees is a pretty fantastic sign for a company.

Yeah, and it's so important because so much knowledge is gathered.

Institutional, right, And every time, especially if you lose someone good, you lose...

So you guys are a really interesting case because you're an enterprise company that started with a handful of customers, well, 0, eventually a handful, and then you've scaled to thousands.

Can you talk about the early days of figuring out that you had product market fit, and then a little bit about the evolution to going from, we were just talking about 10 or 100 people who love you to many more.

So first thing is, I remember when I arrived here in OAC 4 years ago, Kevin Hale came to me and was like, what's your company?

I think it's 1 of the coolest company from this batch.

And then I was sure that he was talking about another company.

He was confused about, oh, you must be confusing me with another company in the back.

Yeah, it's just like, I wasn't confident.

And another example is my batch mates would come to me and say, should we use your product?

And I was like, no, no, use our competitor, it's much better.

It's true, I've always been very ashamed with the current state of the product.

And so, of course, convinced that we didn't have product market fit.

Isn't that 1 of the definitions of product market fit is a product that your customers love but that you're ashamed of.

Maybe, I think it's actually a good thing that you're ashamed of your product.

So, product market fit, at least I can tell you that if you feel like you don't have product market fit, great, doesn't mean that you're doomed.

But then I think that there is a lot of things that we, I'm also someone that's incredibly honest with myself and I can't just wake up and think that I don't have product market, I need to fix every single problem that I have.

1 is, I've been incredibly disciplined about talking to as many users as possible.

So my day to day at OAC 4 years ago, and I can tell you what my day-to-day is today, but it's not very different.

I was talking to leads and customers all the time.

And I made sure that every single day I had at least, I don't know, 7, 8 meetings with people that signed up to our product.

Even if they ended up not using our product, it doesn't matter.

I want to talk to them and I want to understand why they got initially interested.

Do you remember, this might be a stretch, but do you remember any specific conversations that maybe changed the trajectory or at least changed the product in significant ways?

Yeah, and actually in YC, so we started with this email that was helping companies manage shared inboxes, so shared email addresses like support, add, sales, add, and that's what it was doing.

And then we talked to Adora, the CEO of Homejoy.

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After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin