On company culture and meaningful work: Mathilde Collin, CEO of Front
Our spotlight for June is the “Future of Work.” We will focus on brilliant investors and operators who bring a fresh perspective to the way we do our jobs. Our first feature this month is Mathilde Collin, Founder and CEO of Front. All Raise’s ‘Woman Crush Wednesdays’ (#WCW) is a series where we highlight genius women who are funding or founding tech companies. Please come back to the All Raise Medium blog every Wednesday to find a new profile of an awe-inspiring female VC or founder.
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Mathilde Collin, CEO and Co-Founder of Front, wants you to be happy when you go into work. After earning her degree and a year as an account executive, Mathilde knew that modern work culture needed a reset. She wanted to found a company that not only had happy employees but helped other employees be their best.
Knowing that modern employees spend hours of their working day responding to emails, she set out to build a solution that would make teams more efficient and engaged in their inbox. Front is reinventing the inbox for the way teams work. Front brings internal collaboration, new workflows, and integrations to more than 50 other business apps to email, businesses’ most critical communication tool that hasn’t been significantly updated in more than 15 years.
At just 23, Mathilde founded Front which was then accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2014 batch when it was just a team of 5, Mathilde, her co-founder and three employees. Front now serves 5,000 customers and has raised Series B funding from investors including Sequoia, DFJ and Uncork Capital. Now that Front has over 100 employees across Paris and San Francisco, Mathilde continues to emphasize strong company culture and running a company with happy employees.
Mathilde and I talked about how to build a company where employees are excited to come into work.
Q: What do you think makes people more people more fulfilled at work?
A: I have spent a lot of time thinking about why someone would find their job meaningful, and I think it comes down to three things. One, the mission of the company resonates with you. Number two is seeing the impact your work has on that mission and having the tools to be as efficient as possible so you can stay focused on the right things. The last one is making sure you have an opportunity to use your unique skills, to make a unique impact. When you have this combination of a mission you believe in, seeing the effect your work can have on that mission, and the opportunity to do the things you are great at, I think you’re far more likely to find your work meaningful.
Q: How do you engage your employees at Front?
A: We recently did an informal internal study at Front where we asked “Why are you happy at Front?” and the number one answer was “I can see the impact of my work on the overall goal of the company.” I believe that one of the best tools companies can use is transparency. Through both process and communication, you can remind people of the company’s mission and by honestly sharing progress, demonstrate the impact each person has on achieving that mission.
Q: What is the best way to learn whether or not your employees are engaged?
A: Ask them! At Front, we do quarterly internal NPS surveys and bi-annual employee engagement surveys to make sure we always have a good understanding of what we need to do to maintain or improve engagement. For a top-level understanding of how engagement is affecting your business, you could look at productivity metrics, such as ARR per employee, as engaged employees are generally more productive.
Q:What advice do you have for founders looking to improve company culture?
A: Start with your values. Make sure you believe in them, that your employees believe in them, and that everyone, particularly leaders, is practicing them every day. Establish systems to recognize people for representing the values. During All Hands at Front, we give out the ‘Fronteer of the Week’ award to the person that best represented our values that week. We also have someone share their Stumble of the Week, a representation of our low-ego value. I also recommend making sure that values play a large role in your recruiting and management process. Hire for values — and be willing to swiftly manage out people that end up not being representative of your values
Q: How do you bring a diverse group of employees to your company while maintaining strong company culture?
A: I consider culture fit a spectrum. Whenever you hire a new person, you want them to be at the edge of the spectrum. They need to push the boundary enough to offer something different than what you already have but also hold the same values so they can integrate well. What’s great is that as you scale and hire more and more diverse people, what is considered a “culture fit” will change, just as your company does. At Front, we have five values — transparency, collaboration, care, high standards, low ego. We hire for authentic commitment to these values, but understand that how they are practiced will evolve as we hire more diverse candidates, grow internationally, and become a larger company. That’s how we aim to keep the heart and soul of Front intact, but allow room for the culture to scale along with our growth.
Q: What should people look for when they are trying to pick the kind of company that’s right for them?
A: I encourage people to spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re uniquely good at and what matters to them, and then find a role and the company that fits with those requirements. Too many people take jobs because they are reasonable — they will make a lot of money, they will meet the right people there, their parents will be proud. I want people to think about what is the absolute best thing for them to do and then do it. I don’t want people to be too reasonable.
Q: How do you find fulfillment even if you are not passionate about your end product or sector?
A: You don’t need to be passionate about your product or industry as long as you can get excited about the purpose. A great example of this is Qualtrics. Their product is a survey tool which all their employees might not be passionate about and lots of other companies offer. But what they did was create this category called “experience management” and brought it to life with amazing events and thought leadership. Now, a survey tool is about improving experiences, which are at the heart of the lives we’re all living. This is something that people can be incredibly passionate about.
Q: You started Front when you were 23, how did you have the confidence to start your own company?
A: I wouldn’t say that I’m inherently confident, I certainly wasn’t when I first started thinking about starting my own company. What I did was find people in my network who believed in me, and I used that as a way to build my confidence over time. One of them is now my husband, one of them is now my co-founder, and another is now my mentor, and their belief in me still motivates me every single day. For so many people, it’s not like you wake up and always feel confident so it’s super important to surround yourself with people that believe in you. For example, when I first started Y Combinator, a Partner said told me that he knew we were going to be huge. I think just that gave me so much confidence because someone as successful as he was believed in me. You should never underestimate the power that you can have and you shouldn’t put too much pressure on yourself. Believe that you will be the one to find all the resources you need in order to be this confident person — and that the inspiration will come from a balance between yourself and other people.
Q: Why is meaningful work important to you and your company?
I believe that figuring out how companies can provide meaning and happiness to their employees is one of the most important issues facing businesses today. Companies that don’t [figure this out] will lose every single employee they would otherwise want to retain, while those that do will be able to harness the drive of people who truly believe that their work matters. I aim to make Front a leader in this space. (I wrote more about this recently on Medium.)
