Mathilde Collin built a $1.7 billion email startup by the time she was 32. She’s now stepping back at an inflection point for Front.

And so last fall, Collin kicked off a search for a new board director, to fill in her knowledge gaps. In January, she met Dan O’Connell, an executive at Dialpad who sold a previous company to the customer support software giant, for a walk in her San Francisco neighborhood. In the midst of a downpour, they talked about their values, their journeys, how he had ramped speech recognition technologies at Dialpad, and how they inspired loyalty at work.

Collin was walking home in the rain when a thought crossed her mind.

“For the first time in my life, I’m thinking, he could do a better job than me,” Collin said on a Zoom call. “And it’s a scary thought because I care so much about this company, but once you see something, it’s hard to unsee it.”

Now, Collin says she will step down as chief executive of Front after her hunt for a board director took an unexpected turn. She will move into an executive chair role on April 15, when O’Connell takes up the mantle as chief executive, Front tells Business Insider exclusively.

Known for her sharp wit and radical candor, Collin started the business out of college in her native France. She helped create a shared inbox for businesses to collect, assign, comment, and reply to those emails they received at “info” or “support” addresses. After a spin at Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, where the team gained mentors like Garry Tan and Gmail’s creator Paul Buchheit, Front moved into the fast lane with thousands of signups for its beta and a stacked roster of angel investors.

The last decade has seen Front widen its ambitions. It expanded into sluggish, less technical industries like travel, logistics, and financial services where email is still the bedrock of work. It tried to make its product useful even for people who don’t work with shared inboxes, though it’s since zeroed in on its power users.

“If you try to be everything to everyone, then you are good for everyone and great for no one,” Collin said.

‘This isn’t her running away from Front’

Collin resigns at a time when chief executives are leaving their jobs in record numbers. Last week saw shake-ups in the AI industry as the CEOs of two high-profile startups, Inflection.ai and Stability AI, resigned. In recent months, Jack Altman left Lattice, Kyle Vogt quit Cruise, and Jeff Lawson is out at Twilio after a losing battle with its activist investors.

Some people might suggest that Collin’s exit means trouble on the home front. They would be wrong, insiders say.

The company is approaching $100 million in annual revenue and is almost breaking even, according to two people with knowledge of its financials. It hasn’t touched the $65 million it raised in Series D funding in 2022. The round doubled Front’s valuation to $1.7 billion and made Collin, who was 32 at the time, a rare female founder at the helm of a unicorn software firm.

“We’re at a scale now where the CEO can’t come in and sort of wave the proverbial magic wand and make things happen,” said Mohammed Attar, Front’s chief product officer. Every decision on how to change the product has downstream effects. “Having an operator who has been through this scaling and knows how to make those decisions really matters, and to Mathilde’s credit, she saw that and very much viewed this as an opportunity.”

He added, “This isn’t her running away from Front.”

In control of destiny

Front is also coming off a stretch of slower growth. Front prices its plans based on seats, so when its customers were doing more firing than hiring in 2022 and 2023, they could reduce their subscription costs. During that time, Collin said Front traded some growth for profits — paring back its own expenses, laying off more than 20% of staff, and lasering in on software for customer support.

The software market is now showing signs of life. Interest rates are steadying. Hiring will pick back up. Collin’s shrewd spending, says Front investor Josh Stein, puts the company in a strong position to capture that growth.

“It’s exactly where you want to be as a growth-stage startup,” said Stein, “which is fully in control of your own destiny, including having the room to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to take some risks.'” Stein is a managing partner at Threshold, and led a DFJ investment in Front in 2018.

This year executives say Front — which is now hiring across the organization — will invest heavily in artificial intelligence to help teams deliver exceptional customer service. It will let users drain the queue faster by automating how they route and track emails, and draft better responses by pulling in context from the company’s knowledge base. In January, Front acquired the video personalization startup Windsor to speed things along.

This is an area where Collin’s successor has expertise. At Dialpad, O’Connell led the $2.2 billion business to build speech recognition and natural language processing technologies, as well as a proprietary large language model trained on six billion minutes of conversations.

Companies are racing to disrupt the modern inbox using artificial intelligence. The popular email app Superhuman and Shortwave, a newer entrant founded by a team of ex-Googlers, are using the large language models behind ChatGPT to sum up emails and write responses. Front competes more directly with Zendesk and Intercom, both older and better funded than Front, on customer support.

“If we execute well and make the right decisions on how to build this product, how to deliver value to our customers, we have an opportunity to be a leader in our space,” Collin said, “which is very rare that you have an established market and at the same time you can completely reshuffle all the cards, and that’s the case” with artificial intelligence.

“And so I do believe that there is a new energy, a new —” Collin pauses, searching for the right word.

“Un nouveau souffle,” she breathes. A second wind.