Interview with Mathilde Collin of Front, which makes tools for sharing inboxes with teammates, on company's vision to build an asynchronous version of Slack
Front's Mathitlde Collin on why email is making a comeback — It's been four years now since Slack arrived to kill email — and yet, email persists.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years before this interview, Todoist's developers launched Twist, explicitly built as a Slack competitor organized around asynchronous threads — so Front is not inventing the async category, it's joining a small field attacking Slack's real-time model from the same angle. What distinguishes Front is its base camp: shared team inboxes, where email is the workflow rather than the enemy.
Slack had spent the prior year wrestling with the same problem from the other direction — its threading redesign was an admission that always-on chat needed structure — and weeks after this interview ran, Slack moved onto Front's turf by acquiring Astro, whose tools surface important information from email and calendar. Both sides are converging on the middle.
First-order effects
- Teams running shared inboxes — support, ops, sales — get a credible pitch that their email workflow can absorb Slack-style collaboration instead of being replaced by it, with Front's CEO arguing publicly that email is making a comeback relative to Slack.
- Slack now faces a named challenger positioning directly against its core premise, alongside Twist, forcing it to defend the 'email is dead' narrative it helped popularize.
Second-order effects
- Slack's response is visible in the corpus: within months it acquired Astro to bring email- and calendar-aware tooling inside Slack, absorbing the adjacent workflow rather than conceding that email-centric teams need a separate product.
- The async challengers' rise pressures Slack to keep deepening thread-based features — the design work documented in its earlier threading overhaul — shifting product competition from raw messaging speed to conversation structure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the 'chat versus email' framing dissolves into a single structural shift: collaboration platforms converge on threaded, asynchronous conversation as the default unit of work, with vendors differentiating on which legacy inbox they anchor to rather than whether email survives.
- That convergence sets up the later phase of the market seen in Slack's trajectory under Salesforce — paid structuring features like Slack Lists and agent integrations — where the conversation layer becomes the transaction layer for work.
The trend: Team communication tools are converging on asynchronous, threaded collaboration, with email-native and chat-native vendors meeting in the middle rather than one killing the other.