First Block: Interview with Mathilde Collin, Co-Founder & CEO of Front

Front’s co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin traces the company’s rise to a simple, repeatable idea: build a “front office” for communication that makes teams feel good while delivering fast, high-signal feedback—then run the organization with radical transparency so employees stay engaged even when results wobble.

Collin’s origin story starts with constraints and alignment. After graduating in 2012, she wanted to start a company but lacked money. An angel investor in France funded Front pre-product and introduced her to her co-founder, who had also been looking for a new venture. They spent an early dinner stress-testing the hardest questions—firing each other, equity splits, and exit scenarios—before taking the leap. The product’s initial focus was email, but the team deliberately avoided building an email-only tool. That choice made it easier to add other channels later, because the underlying concept was always a shared “front office” experience: people want to send messages and get responses, not manage ticket numbers or workflow bureaucracy.

Her motivation for choosing email—and then expanding beyond it—was personal. She experienced how toxic work environments can make people “sad as a human being,” and she wanted to create a workplace where people are happy, regardless of the specific work. Email was the tool everyone already used, yet it wasn’t designed for teams. Front aimed to improve the daily experience of people spending hours in the app by turning communication into a team workflow that still feels lightweight to the user.

Collin also credits service and customer-facing rigor as a growth engine. Support teams aren’t just a cost center; they can become valuable product input and even a sales differentiator when companies publish support metrics and treat service as part of the customer journey. She links this to a broader mindset popularized by Danny Meyer’s “Setting the Table”: engagement comes from learning from customers and building loops back into product and sales, not from deflecting tickets.

Early customer acquisition leaned heavily on content. With a landing page and a beta sign-up, Collin drove early interest by writing about communication and contrasting synchronous vs. asynchronous work as Slack surged. She notes a stark early conversion gap—thousands signed up, only a few used the product—then explains why: the earliest version was email-like but missing attachments, which made adoption awkward. Still, it enabled rapid feedback and iteration.

Scaling culture and engagement became the next major challenge. Collin describes a period in 2017 when her co-founder was diagnosed with cancer and she later developed severe anxiety that forced her to stop working. Recovery came through a mix of hypnosis, therapy, time off, exercise, better eating, meditation, and strict boundaries like removing work apps from her phone. In hindsight, the experience deepened empathy and led to lasting changes.

For engagement, she ties motivation to purpose: employees stay engaged when they know who they serve. Front operationalizes that connection through onboarding support inquiries, recurring all-hands with customer stories and workflow demos, and heavy use of transparency tools so employees can see what customers like and dislike. All-hands are designed around transparency that removes the “should we hide this?” dilemma—calendars, board decks, and goal tracking are shared—so even missed quarters are discussed directly, with a plan and confidence check. The goal isn’t hype; it’s meaning.

Her leadership practices extend to one-on-ones and hiring. Monthly “happiness one-on-ones” ask employees what they’re most and least happy about and what would improve their professional lives, helping leaders catch issues early and avoid surprise resignations. Hiring guidance emphasizes extreme selectivity—would this person be someone you’d want to hire 10 times?—and treating early hires as potential co-founders. She also warns against hiring to solve problems the company hasn’t already solved internally, especially in areas like marketing where channels must be discovered.

Across product, growth, culture, and leadership, Collin’s throughline is consistent: transparency and customer connection aren’t soft values—they’re operational systems that keep teams aligned, learning, and resilient when performance isn’t perfect.