Transforming the last Front(ier) of email inboxes

**Ilana Strauss** (0:04)
Remember the 90s when e-mail was fun? The little white envelope that would appear on your screen? You've got mail.
Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan even made a rom-com about it. But today, e-mail is hardly ever described as fun. There's so much spam and so many reply-alls. It all adds up to hundreds of unread messages each week.
For most of us, e-mail means work, with a tool that hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.

**Chris Schwass** (0:32)
I think there's a lot of companies that try to redo e-mail or kill e-mail, but it's just too entrenched.

**Ilana Strauss** (0:42)
In the last year alone, it's estimated 320 billion e-mails were sent and received worldwide. Yet, it took a 20-something from Paris to see the opportunity in building a better inbox.

**Mathilde Collin** (0:56)
And it was crazy to me that all this innovation happened everywhere except for the place where most of your work gets done.

**Ilana Strauss** (1:08)
I'm Ilana Strauss, and you're listening to When It Clicked, an original podcast from ClickUp. On this podcast, we meet the people behind the businesses you think you know and share the secret history of how it all came together, to the one moment when it all finally clicked. Today, how frustration with email led two entrepreneurs to start a company to make it better, at a time when tech giants were trying to kill it. This is When It Clicked for Front.
The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the pastries. The city of light is one of the world's most popular places to visit. But growing up there, Mathilde Collin saw a different side.

**Mathilde Collin** (2:05)
I was a happy kid, and most of the people around me didn't like their jobs as much. I really wanted to make sure that when I would grow up, I would enjoy the five days a week, 50 weeks a year that I would spend working.

**Ilana Strauss** (2:20)
Mathilde didn't want to punch the clock. She wanted to love her job.

**Mathilde Collin** (2:26)
So after I graduated, I joined a startup. It was a contract management software, and it was a really great product, but a really bad culture for me, like really bad culture fit.
I was so miserable, and really didn't want to go to work. And I was like, okay, I've criticized my parents and everyone in my family for not enjoying the job that they were doing, and then now I'm doing the same.

**Ilana Strauss** (2:55)
Mathilde was frustrated, not just by how the company was run, but how she had to do her job.
So much time was wasted every day. Email was the biggest problem.

**Mathilde Collin** (3:07)
So the main tool that I was using to get work done was email, and we were a very small team, and we were receiving emails, and people were asking me, did you get back to this person? I was like, yeah, I got back to them. Like, that's my job.
Just the fact that I needed to say this like bothered me.

**Ilana Strauss** (3:24)
As someone who always wanted to start her own business, Mathilde began to see everything that was wrong with email as an opportunity.

**Mathilde Collin** (3:32)
It was crazy to me that all this innovation happened everywhere except for the place where most of your work gets done, and you're still using a tool that hasn't evolved in the past many, many, many years. It was both a huge market, a huge opportunity for impact, and a pain point that I had experienced.

**Ilana Strauss** (3:55)
Mathilde was convinced she could build a business around making email more efficient, but she was still paying off her student loan. She needed funding and a partner who understood technology.
The French founder of Fotolio provided both. After hearing Mathilde's pitch, he provided project funding and an introduction to software engineer Laurent Parrain.

**Mathilde Collin** (4:18)
You know, it was not this typical co-founder relationship where you've been brothers or best friends and all of a sudden you're deciding to start a company together. With Laurent, it was, we were having dinner together. Let's try to see if it would work out.
And, you know, we don't have like a year to figure that out, so we were literally asking ourselves the most difficult questions.

**Ilana Strauss** (4:37)
Turns out, Laurent and Mathilde saw eye to eye in how to run a business. They decided to become partners and started working on different ideas for software to improve email.

**Mathilde Collin** (4:51)
We need to have a clear pain point to start with because email is so big. It is used by many different industries, teams, size of companies.