The Merits of Discipline over Vision - Mathilde Collin + Bryan Schreier

I'm thrilled to be chatting with you, Bryan. So Front is reinventing email for the way teams work. What we're doing is adding collaboration, workflows, accountability, transparency in your inbox so that every knowledge worker in the world who's using email is more efficient.

Sure. Obviously the goal is not to say that the vision doesn't matter. I think having an ambitious vision is super important to attract people and to give people a sense of purpose. But I think it's clearly not enough. If you're not disciplined enough, then you have no consistency, and if you have no consistency, then you can't succeed. I can tell you more about what I mean by discipline. I think there are three main ways I am disciplined. The first one is I'm very consistent in the communication that I do about my priorities and the metrics of the business. For example, every Monday morning at 10:00 a.m., Bryan receives an email with my priorities for the week, and all my direct reports do as well. Another example is we do a company-wide all-hands every Monday morning at 9:00 a.m., always the same format. We review all the metrics that are important to the business. So that consistent communication is one part. The second part is I'm very careful about how I spend my time. At the beginning of the week, I know exactly what I want to do, and then my EA will always track what I'm doing every single week. At the end of the week, she will send me an email with how much time I have spent on, let's say, executive hiring, product and strategy, sales calls. I have a goal for every week, so I can make sure that I'm following closely what I've said I would do. The last thing is no distraction. I have no notification on anything on my computer and my phone. One thing that I've started doing a few months ago is spending half a day a week, every Thursday afternoon, I'm going back home and I have just a notebook, no computer, no phone. The only thing I'm thinking about is: am I making progress on the top priorities of the business? Am I not seeing an opportunity that I should be seeing right now, or a risk that I'm not seeing? I think no distraction has been one of the best ways to be efficient and is a part of this discipline.

Yeah, I knew you would ask me this question, so I called my dad this weekend and I was like, 'Was I disciplined when I was a kid?' And he laughed. So I don't think I was at all. I think it took me some discipline to be disciplined. It was not required before, so I didn't do it. And then I understood how much of a requirement it was if you wanted to build a successful company.

For sure. Most of my direct reports do the same thing of sending an email at the beginning of the week with their priorities. I try to force them to take half a day a week outside of the office, in a coffee shop or at their place. I'm so convinced that it's the right thing to do when you can easily be overwhelmed with the amount of work and the conflicting parties that I try to force them.

Yeah. The first job that I took after college was in a company that was not transparent at all, and I wasn't happy. So I think that's the first time I realized I didn't know if transparency would lead to more happiness and efficiency, but I knew that no transparency would mean not happy, which I didn't want to experience. I was thinking about that, and I think there are two parts of my personality: one is I care a lot about human beings, and two is I care a lot about winning. I think transparency is this unique thing that can help you achieve both. There are two merits of transparency. One is efficiency: if people know what the priorities are, what's the context behind what they're doing, then you don't need to do as many meetings, and it makes them more effective. But also transparency builds trust. At Front, most people know everything about the business, and I feel like that's one of the reasons why they're happy to come to work every day. I can talk more about what it means for us to be transparent as a company if you want to, but you tell me and I will be disciplined.

Sure. I think there are a few categories of things we're transparent about. One, we're super transparent with our customers. Our roadmap is public. You can go on front.com/roadmap and you'll see everything that we've built, everything we're currently building, and everything we're thinking about building. On transparency with customers, every time we have the slightest issue with email, it's always a big deal, so we always communicate and explain exactly what happened. Two, transparency with the team. Every single week we review all the metrics of the business. Every single month we send a report with everything you want to know about Front. Everyone knows what's our runway, how much we burn every month, what's our churn, what's our revenue growth. Everyone has access, thanks to Front, to all the customer feedback, good and bad. So people always know what they should be working on because they can know what's great and what's less great. One of the things that we do is whenever someone joins Front, they have to go through a radical candor training. At the end of this training, they need to be radically candid with someone in a good way and give some constructive feedback. That's a muscle that they build, and then they're more able to be transparent in their personal life and at work. There are a million other things that we're doing, but by default we try to share as much as possible with our employees, with our investors, and with our customers.

I guess everyone is scared about transparency. It's the thing where it seems obvious that you should be transparent, and then when you're actually doing it, it's insanely hard. I can tell you that anytime I need to send an email to our customers saying we've had an outage, my first instinct is let's not do it. But you should force yourself to do it. To answer your question, whenever people join the team, there are a few things that we do. For example, our calendars are shared. You can see anything I'm doing anytime. One of the things that a few employees do is they share their inbox with their peers and their manager. On all these things, I can tell you that the first reaction of everyone is like, 'No way, are you crazy?' And then I'll tell them, first of all, you don't have to do it, but try it and you'll see if you see value. So yes, I try to find people that are inclined to like transparency and can deal with a lot of information, but it's also something that we need to train them on because it's never easy.

Yeah. We're actually publishing a book. The story of this book is there are a few metrics about Front that are unique. We have an internal NPS of 97, we have a lot of good reviews on Glassdoor. A lot of time people come to me and ask me how do you do it. The truth is it's my first company, so it's very hard for me to know what we're doing right and wrong. So we've reflected on everything we do at Front and we've written a book. We're publishing it I think today or tomorrow, can't remember. What we do is we explain exactly what our culture is. We have some values, but it's easy to have values. It's harder to know how you will live these values and what you do exactly in order to be a transparent company, a high standard company, a low ego company, a collaborative company. In this book, we describe exactly what it means for us and what are the concrete ways you can see we live our values.

Sure. Just so you know, before I go into what the vision is, the reason I started this company, as naive as it sounds, is because when I was a kid I was raised in France and most of the people in my family didn't make their job. I was a super happy kid and I didn't want to grow up and not enjoy what I would be doing every single day. So I wanted to create a company where I would be happy to come to work every day and hopefully other people would be happy to come to work every day. But I didn't know what I would work on. Then the first job I took after college was a software company. What I liked about software is the fact that you could build something that would impact how people work, and so you can have an influence on their happiness at work. I was using email to get work done and I felt like email was the thing that every single knowledge worker in the world is using and is also the only software that has not evolved in the past 15 years. Because part of me is very competitive and that seemed to be a super ambitious thing to do, I decided to start a company in that space. I think today what drives me and the reason why we're excited about working on an email product for teams is because first of all, when you think about where people spend their days, most of them spend their days in their inbox. So if you can create an experience that's different and better because it's collaborative, it's real time, it's integrated with the tools that you use so you don't have to switch tabs, then I feel like I have an impact on how people work because they spend many hours in our product. The second thing is no matter what you do, usually you will use email to get work done. So if you have a product that enables you to achieve more in less time, which is the promise of Front, then the impact of your work is better. So not only I have an impact on how people work because they use the product, but also because what they build will actually be built in a faster way and more efficient way, and hopefully the world will be a better place.

So many learnings. I don't know, I can tell you what I'm looking for when I'm hiring money from a VC, maybe they will be interested to do it. So I think the thing that I was looking for when I raised money was someone that would care because I want to make sure that no matter what happens we have a good relationship, but also someone that challenges me. Same thing, if I want to win, I know that I've never done it before and so I know that there is so much I don't know and I know that other people have seen much more than I've seen. I think Bryan was this combination of someone that cares and someone that challenges me. I think it's in every person that we hire at Front. We try to find these very empathetic people and thoughtful and caring, and at the same time very focused on performance.

On the topic of transparency, I also like one thing. We're transparent with our customers and our employees, but I feel like I've learned most by having people like you sharing with the world what they've learned. So I also try to share as much as I can about our journey. It comes from sharing all our decks when we raise money, to sharing this book about how we build our culture, to sharing all our numbers. Next week I'm publishing a post about how we run all-hands because I feel like that's how I can give back all the things that have been given to me.

Pleasure. Thanks for your time as well. Thank you.