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ICCOLLECTION/ALAMYMARCH 20 20TECHNOLOGYINNOVATIONMail. Expecting profound feedback, she instead
received a simple message: Follow your growth.
“There was something about her, a competitive-
ness and assuredness, that spoke to us,” says
Geoff Ralston, Yahoo Mail’s creator, who is now
president of Y Combinator. “It was counterintui-
tive. Really, email? That’s the thing that’s going to
create a new billion-dollar company?”
It’s well on its way, thanks to investors—but
also loyal followers. At Edge Logistics in Chica-
go, president William Kerr says he needed a full-
time employee to manage emails before he dis-
covered Front. Now the company can automati-
cally distribute inbound requests for quotes even-
ly across its reps, who compare notes and reach
consensus on rates within the email before an as-
signed salesperson responds. “In my business, a
lot of times you can win the job just by being the
fi rst guy to quote it,” Kerr says. “Over the course
of 60,000 or 70,000 jobs a year, it makes a really
big diff erence.”
Collin and Perrin’s eventual goal is to undercut
Gmail and Outlook while connecting more pro-
ductivity apps to Front so its collaborative emails
become an employee’s central hub. Analysts re-
main skeptical that it can challenge the duopo-
ly. Both companies bundle their email products
with suites of other tools—G Suite for Google, Of-
fi ce 365 for Microsoft. “Many startups have found
opportunities under the noses of Microsoft and
Google,” says Daniel Ives, a managing director at
Wedbush Securities. “But I view email how most
consumers view napkins at a restaurant: They’re
not paying for it.”
Patrick Collison, CEO of customer Stripe, says
he recognizes in Front a similarity to his pay-
ments business, now worth $35 billion: a will-
ingness to tackle an industry others shunned. To
Collison, the question isn’t whether Front can
carve out a market, but how big it will be. “It’s as
likely that Mathilde fi gures that out as any other
early-stage CEO I’ve met,” he says.
Collin is betting on herself. Recently, some of
tech’s biggest CEOs have reached out, she says,
including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Sales-
force’s Marc Benioff. To Collin, their motives are
clear. She says she has no interest in selling: “We
are at .0001% of what we could do.”together, the seven-year-old fi rm has 5,500 cus-
tomers, and revenue has quadrupled since 2017
to an estimated $32 million last year.
It’s tiny, but its elite backers, including Sequoia
Capital and founders of software leaders Atlas-
sian, Qualtrics and Zoom—and even email kill-
er Slack—are betting on Front. They have poured
nearly $140 million into the San Francisco–based
company, most recently boosting its valuation to
more than $800 million in January, four times its
fi gure just two years earlier.
Unlike others who have been quick to declare
the “death” of email—Slack rode a mission to re-
place it all the way to a stock debut last year—
Collin and her cofounder, Laurent Perrin, 38, be-
lieve that the problem with the years-old proto-
col, dominated by Microsoft Outlook and Google’s
Gmail, is in the packaging, not the product.
The French cofounders met via eFounders, a
startup studio in Paris, in 2013. Collin, who stud-
ied mathematics and entrepreneurship at HEC
Paris business school, had quit her job over disil-
lusionment with its culture. An engineer, Perrin
was looking for a new gig after nearly four years
as CTO of a French online radio service. After
some brainstorming, the pair determined that a
collaborative shared inbox—think any email you
receive from a company whose address starts
with “info” or “help”—would serve as their tick-
et into a company’s workfl ows.
Before Front, one customer inquiry could set
off a fl urry of emails inside a business as col-
leagues copied each other and forwarded feed-
back in order to come up with one answer. With
Front, users got access to a shared email that
would treat incoming messages like living docu-
ments, appending notes, tagging colleagues and
drafting responses without sending any emails.
With about a dozen test companies onboard,
the cofounders fl ew to California to interview for
prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator’s
summer 2014 program. Collin got to pitch part-
ners including the creators of Gmail and Yahoo46
FINAL THOUGHT“SOMETIMES THIS
HIGH-TECH WORLD CALLS
FOR LOW-TECH SOLUTIONS.”
—Christopher MooreLong Live Email Cont.HOW TO PLAY IT
by Jon D.
MarkmanFrom smarter
email to intranet
chat, enterprises
are desperate to
improve produc-
tivity. The best
way to play this
trend is Service-
Now, a maker of
cloud-based en-
terprise soft ware.
Its Now platform
brings employ-
ees, customers
and networked
devices into a
single system.
It connects
customer service,
HR, IT and secu-
rity, and gives
developers tools
to integrate cus-
tom applications.
Everything is ac-
cessible with an
internet browser
or mobile device.
Companies are
eager to sign up.
Fourth-quarter
subscription sales
were $899 million,
up 35% year over
year. The gross
profi t margin was
83%. Shares are
up 55% in the last
12 months. Buy
pullbacks.
Jon D. Markman
is president of
Markman Capital
Insight and the
author of
Fast Forward
Investing.The VaultGOING, GOULD, GONE!
In the late 1800s, Jay Gould amassed a fortune worth
a billion-plus in current dollars through railroads and
telegrams—the 19th-century equivalent of emails—
aft er seizing control of
Western Union. At the start
of the 20th, son George
Jay stopped “climb[ing] to-
ward the summits of busi-
ness success” and instead
“plunged headlong into
the gayeties,” squandering
his old man’s money on po-
nies, mansions and yachts.
—September 15, 1917