Casper: Philip Krim

In the early 2000's, Philip Krim launched an e-commerce business out of his college dorm, selling everything from window blinds to eczema cream to yes, mattresses. Years later, inspired by online successes like Warby Parker and Harry's, Philip and his partners launched Casper, a DTC company that designed its own mattresses, compressed them into boxes, and helped turn a mundane purchase into an Instagrammable adventure. Within months, sales began to take off; and soon, copycat brands crowded into the DTC mattress space, creating competition and buzz in a previously sleepy sector. (Pun unavoidable) Despite these challenges, Casper's valuation soared to $1 billion in 2019, only to shrink by half for its 2020 IPO. Today, Philip says he's focused on the future, with ambitions to build Casper into a one-stop-brand for all things sleep-related. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get The US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card.

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

  For the first time ever, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card members can earn two Delta Comfort round trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous US states, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve Card members get access to the Delta Sky Club, your pre-flight oasis to recharge with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value.

• 3:40Guy Raz?

  Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the card that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Main to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day.

• 4:23Guy Raz?

  And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port-fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary.

• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobili fuels.com for details.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  I never expected to see so many competitors come at us from so many different angles, and that so many of them would just try to copy what we were doing and be fast followers and really just take everything we were trying to be innovative with. And immediately, buying a mattress online became even more overwhelming and confusing than buying a mattress offline.

• 5:41Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 5:53Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Philip Krim helped transform the way we buy our beds by building Casper, a brand that makes it easier to choose a mattress and more fun to take it out of the box.

• 6:10Guy Raz?

  Venture capital has had a love affair with direct-to-consumer startups over the past decade. Even though the vast majority of products you buy are sold through third parties, the direct-to-consumer brand model has gotten a lot of attention. I'm talking about Peloton, and Allbirds, and Warby Parker, and Bonobos, even Tesla. These are all, more or less, brands that were designed to be sold directly to you, either through the internet or a brick-and-mortar shop owned by the brand. The idea behind DTC brands is simple and elegant. Sell a product directly to the consumer at a price higher than wholesale,

• 6:51Guy Raz?

  but lower than retail, and then use the profits to aggressively advertise your product to acquire more consumers. Over time, you scale, and then soon enough, your brand is worth billions. Except, that model has proved to be a lot harder than it sounds. Customer acquisition costs are really high. And unlike 10 years ago, when the DTC model really took off, there is a lot of competition now. Orby Parker isn't the only one selling glasses directly to consumers anymore, and Allbirds is now among dozens of DTC shoe brands. Same goes for mattresses.

• 7:34Guy Raz?

  Today, there are at least 170 direct-to-consumer brands that sell mattresses online. It's a crowded and confusing marketplace. But when Philip Krim and his partners launched Casper mattresses in 2014, there were just a handful of these types of businesses. Philip was part of a wave of entrepreneurs who saw that the experience of buying something as mundane but important as a mattress actually mattered to consumers. He and his partners launched Casper as a way to make buying a mattress simpler, a mattress that could be ordered online, compressed into a box, and delivered to your door.

• 8:15Guy Raz?

  And Casper kind of created the model for the way many DTC mattress companies manufacture, market, and deliver their products today. Casper's rise was meteoric. At one point, private investors valued the brand at over $1 billion. But since its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020, Casper's market value has dropped by half. And while all of this has certainly rattled Philip Krim, he's also an ambitious CEO with plans to make Casper much bigger than a mattress brand. He wants it to be a sleep brand, sort of how Nike was once a shoe brand but is now known as a sports brand.

• 8:59Guy Raz?

  Philip grew up in Sugar Land, Texas, where his dad was an entrepreneur who tried out all kinds of business ideas. As a kid, Philip knew he would do something in the business world, which was his plan when he started college at the University of Texas.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  I very much knew that I wanted to do business. I didn't think it was going to be kind of the entrepreneurial path. I thought it was going to be more kind of the finance path. I recall fondly playing like the stock market when I was in fifth grade and during the dot com mania and just being, you know, looking at the stock market quotes in the newspaper every day. And, you know, probably have read the Wall Street Journal since elementary school. And so I started UT as a finance major, but obviously pivoted as I started tinkering around with doing my own things. And then ultimately did go down the entrepreneurial journey while I was in school and post school.

• 9:53Guy Raz?

  I think in school, while you were in college, you started your first business, an e-commerce business, right?

• 9:59Speaker 01

  That's right. You know, at the time, I didn't say like, oh, I'm going to go start my business. What should I start? It was more of, well, I don't really want to get a traditional summer job and sit in an office all summer. What are ways that I could use the internet to make money in a non-traditional way, I guess, at the time? And so I learned what dropshipping was. I learned about HTML and how to, you know, build websites using HTML. And so I figured out that if I built a website and could market the website online, others could do dropshipping to do the customer fulfillment. And that could be a way to make money. So just started messing around with that.

• 10:39Guy Raz?

  You had this idea, maybe I'll start some kind of e-commerce business. You didn't know what it was, but you thought it could be a cool. And this is like, what, 2002, 2003, something like that?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 10:49Guy Raz?

  So e-commerce, still really early days. People are still nervous about putting their credit cards online. But what did you, what did you decide to sell?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was early days. This was kind of post the crash of the dot com boom and bust.

• 11:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  So people were still very skeptical about it. You know, to me, though, there were people online searching for products all day, every day. And so I would look up what people were searching for, you know, you could see search volumes. And then I would go look for manufacturers that would ship directly to the customer if I gave them an order. And then, you know, the manufacturer would charge my credit card and do the fulfillment. And I would charge the customer's credit card through my merchant account. And I worked with dozens of different manufacturers who would sell everything from window blinds, where people would give us their measurements, and it would be made to order eczema cream to help children with

• 11:41Speaker 01

  eczema, sofas or futons, to how to play poker software, all the way through to mattresses. So I've actually been around the mattress side of things since the early 2000s as well. But at the time, it was really just anything I could find where I could figure out that people were searching for it, and I could find a manufacturer who would do the fulfillment, I could do the rest from my dorm room.

• 12:04Guy Raz?

  But just to be clear, this was not one website? Because I'm assuming you wouldn't go through a single website and see, you could buy eczema cream and futons and window blinds?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Right. No, this was a portfolio of different websites. So I would generally try to build a targeted website for the specific product or manufacturer that I was working with. And it's actually, at the time, I think at the time, Wayfair was doing something similar.

• 12:31Guy Raz?

  It was exactly how Wayfair started, selling, you know, all kinds of bric-a-brac and then furniture. But they had dozens, hundreds of different websites. And this is essentially what you were doing. Was it pretty cheap to do all this?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  It was cheap enough where I could kind of do it using, misappropriating some student loan money and, you know, starting it with credit cards. So, you know, it was something I did it all myself. I had no money, you know, was on scholarship for school. And so was able to kind of just put it together with, you know, some sweat equity, I guess, and get it going. And then the nice thing about the model, which was true also for Casper when we started it, is just a, it's a negative cash conversion, which is a fancy way of saying, customers give you the money to buy the goods before you have to put the money out. So it's actually a very capital efficient way to start and scale a business.

• 13:27Guy Raz?

  Philip, how did you find these companies? I mean, you were so young and it's such a cool idea. And this is like 2002, 2003. Like, how did you even find companies that were willing to work with you? Did you just? Because this is before you could just like find anything on the Internet. It was still pretty early days. So how did you even identify those companies?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  You know, I wish I remembered the specifics. I remember just trying to call up companies, but it was just trying to understand like who was willing to do the fulfillment and call up the company and see if you could convince them. Oftentimes, they didn't realize that I was a-

• 14:06Guy Raz?

  College-

• 14:06Speaker 01

  In the beginning.

• 14:07Guy Raz?

  Student.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, college kid. You know, it's funny, I remember in my early 20s, I went to a Celtics game in Boston with some of the guys that I'd been buying from for years. And I guess it was my turn to go buy the beers. But in the garden, you can't buy beer until you're 25. And so I had to come back empty-handed. And it was like an acute reminder of my youth-

• 14:29Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  -in business.

• 14:32Guy Raz?

  All right. So you started this company by yourself, but you did end up hiring employees, right?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  So over time, I had employees and then my family also helped. So at one point, I had a conversation that didn't go exactly as planned, but I went to my parents, saying how I thought I should take a break from school and work on the business because it was growing quickly-

• 14:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  And I was enjoying it. And they shut that idea down immediately, but the compromise we worked out is that they would help me with the business. And so ended up getting my family involved and we, you know, at one point had, you know, I don't remember our peak, but like 20, 30 employees involved.

• 15:11Guy Raz?

  But this is after you graduated college, you had 20 or 30 employees, right? Not while you were still in school?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, in the beginning, it was just me. I was answering phones, taking live chats, taking the orders, working with the vendor, just doing everything. I mean, I think that's one of the ways that I learned just about every part of the business.

• 15:29Guy Raz?

  So you were probably making money from the beginning because you had no expenses?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah. It was profitable from the beginning.

• 15:36Guy Raz?

  And out of all of the things that you tried out, I guess you noticed that mattresses, like selling mattresses or foam mattresses, that was doing better than other things that you were selling?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  That's right. Mattresses, I realized like they had big margins. It's also an industry that was very slow to embrace the internet. They were doing a lot of direct response advertising, you know, Tempur-Pedic, Sleep Number. Back then, we're growing their businesses through direct response advertising. And so I saw that the more these guys advertised on TV and radio, it drove people to search for these brands online. But these guys didn't even have e-commerce capabilities back then.

• 16:14Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  And so we could sell, you know, products that competed, you know, memory foam products, adjustable air mattresses. And we could be early in the industry and it was, it was very profitable because these guys weren't competing there.

• 16:28Guy Raz?

  So, so why, and why was it that the margins on mattresses were so high? What explains it?

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's where I dug into the industry and just started to learn the dynamics, which is that for the last several decades, it's been a very tightly controlled industry. And when, when things are an oligopoly or a duopoly or a monopoly, that's when you're able to really protect pricing, protect margins. And you see it in other industries. You see it in the razor blade business. You see it in the eyeglass business. Very tightly controlled on the manufacturing side. It's a business that private equity had loved to own, loved to protect. It was very predictable from a volume side. And so that's what allowed them to have big margins and, and brands mattered here. And so brands also drove higher margins. Sealy, Serta, Simmons, these brands have been around for 100 plus years.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  And that, that allows you to take margin over time.

• 17:22Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you graduate from college around 2006. And I guess you, at that point, you really jump into this business full time. And, and you call it the Merrick Group, is that right?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  That's right. So I ended up taking five years to graduate from Texas because I was balancing school with running the company. I grew up on Merrick Drive, so decided to start the Merrick Group.

• 17:46Guy Raz?

  It sounds like a private equity group, like an investment firm, like a VC firm. The Merrick Group, it was, this was your, your, your street that you grew up on.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  That's right, from first grade into college.

• 17:57Guy Raz?

  And did you stick with, with a bunch of different things? Blinds and futons and different products? Or did you then focus mainly on, on mattresses, selling mattresses?

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Over time, it got more and more focused on mattresses.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  So yes, we ended up exclusively in the latter part of the business, only focusing on mattresses.

• 18:16Guy Raz?

  And give me a sense of what kind of revenue you guys were doing at the time, like 2008, 2009? Like, what were you guys doing?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  I think we were in the kind of 10 to 15 million dollar per year revenue range.

• 18:27Guy Raz?

  Wow. And were you profitable?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  You know, we had our ups and downs. Towards the end, the business got very tough from a profitability standpoint. And, you know, one of the areas that I always personally focused on was our online marketing and our customer acquisition strategy. And what I saw was just every year, customer acquisition costs went up. I think one of the brilliant parts of the Google invention is just the auction-based model for buying ads. And so you just saw ad rates and unique visitors and cost per clicks go up very steadily. And so over time, it just got harder. We realized we didn't have kind of enough of a moat around the business to have a defensible way to run the business profitably.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  And it's all lessons learned, learned a ton in the early days and all the way through when things got tougher.

• 19:20Guy Raz?

  You stepped down as the CEO of that company in 2009. So you're still really young and you go to work on some other ventures, which we'll talk about in a sec. But I know you eventually sold, that company was sold, the Merrick Group was sold in 2013, right?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  That's right. It wasn't sold in like, you know, a big exit. It was sold to manufacturers.

• 19:41Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  And it was a really way just to kind of maintain continuity when we didn't see a path to kind of continue to operate it profitably.

• 19:47Guy Raz?

  Right. And again, I like to say this on the show is when people hear about exits or I sold my company, most of the time, that doesn't mean that the founder or founders actually got rich off the sale.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  That's right. There's a lot of complexity that goes into when you hear things like exited or sold. And it's not, it's not always the best situation. Like I said, we were kind of forced to that point because we never raised outside capital. It was just funding from myself and my family. And again, I had been around kind of the family entrepreneurial journey and, you know, understood the ups and downs of that. But it's different when you're living it yourself. And so I totally agree with your point, though. Like, stories and headlines are often misleading.

• 20:31Guy Raz?

  I'm assuming in your, in this case, you didn't walk away from this sale with lots of money.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  No, I didn't walk away with any money.

• 20:40Guy Raz?

  Meantime, you have a lot of experience under your belt now. It's 2009, you're just a couple of years out of college, but you've already been a CEO of a company. And you decide to move to New York to launch a new venture, which was about online advertising. Tell me about this.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  That's right. So towards the tail end of when I was running Mayer Group, what I saw and what started to emerge then was really mobile advertising. And so the idea that I wanted to work on was if I could help make the mobile searches and mobile traffic as easy as possible for local businesses, I thought that would be really interesting. And so that led to starting Vocalize Mobile, which was basically click to call search for local businesses.

• 21:26Guy Raz?

  What does click to call search mean?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  So at the time, if you searched like Houston tow truck driver, you could click directly from that search using a Google ad and be connected to a local tow truck company. You could go in and do that yourself and work with Google and set up your ads. But our idea was to make the technology super easy and do it in more of a full service model. So we would set up everything for you. We would record the calls so you could audit them. We would give you a dashboard so you had analytics around the leads that you were getting. And instead of paying per click, which is how Google would charge you, we would just charge you on a per lead or per call basis. And so we tried to make it as easy as possible for a local advertiser to embrace mobile

• 22:13Speaker 01

  advertising, which was still pretty nascent at that point.

• 22:15Guy Raz?

  And are you working on like a WeWork type thing? Or like what are you running your business out of?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  I was a WeWork tenant, ended up kind of bringing on a partner who was based in Atlanta, who was kind of back and forth between Atlanta and New York. And we ultimately set up kind of a call center to sell to local businesses that was based in Atlanta. So I would go down there and that's where we had some employees. But I was the only one in New York working and it was out of a WeWork.

• 22:44Guy Raz?

  I mean, it sounds like a great business, but at the time, I would imagine it was probably hard to convince small businesses to spend significant money on this.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  That's right. There were like two core challenges that were hard to overcome, which is one, explaining to small businesses what click to call was, where you were generating these leads from, et cetera. It's still very nascent. And then, you know, what I saw was just selling to small businesses is really challenging.

• 23:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  These are businesses which I appreciated. Like, every dollar matters. These are businesses, they're family businesses where, you know, if something doesn't work, you know, they're making less money personally. And so, you know, a lot of times the sales would work and they would help build a business and that felt great, but a lot of times they didn't work and it was very contentious. And it just, you know, was difficult and not something I enjoyed.

• 23:36Guy Raz?

  And this is why so many companies only work with huge businesses, right? It's like that, is it the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule, right? Which is like 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. And when you're dealing with tons and tons of little mom and pop stores, it's just much harder presumably.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  It's harder and there was a lot of churn. And again, you would just see these budgets, they would afford, you know, an advertising campaign this month and not be able to afford it next month. And it's just a grind.

• 24:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So from what I've read, you never got this project vocalized to profitability. But I mean, but you worked at this thing for, I think for about three years, right?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds right.

• 24:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, did you, you're 30, where you were kind of looking around at your friend cohort who maybe traditional jobs or went to law school and were now lawyers, or went to finance and were now on Wall Street and had these sort of well-paying jobs. And I don't know, did you feel like, ooh, maybe, maybe I gotta figure this out? Like, were you getting a little anxious?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say that's fair. It was probably less on the traditional side. Like, I had my friends that were like bankers and saw what they were doing and did not, was not envious of that. More, I was interested in just like the tech scene and what was going on. Facebook was all the rage and you saw these companies getting big and successful and a lot of people making all this money. And it felt like an ecosystem that was totally walled off and unavailable. You know, at one point I tried to apply for a job at Facebook and was told I wasn't what they were looking for. So like, I didn't know what I was gonna do. I had learned a ton, but you know, I never had a traditional job. I never knew what a traditional kind of company gig looked like. But of course, like, still had the entrepreneurial itch and was,

• 25:24Speaker 01

  I was working on Vocalize. But I just knew it was going to be a tough gig. And so maybe, you know, back to your point, started thinking about what I would want to do next.

• 25:34Guy Raz?

  Okay, so at some point, while you were still working on the startup, I guess you were accepted into an accelerator program in New York. And it was at that program where you would eventually meet the guys who you would, who would become your co-founders for Casper, right?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  That's right. It was Gabe, Luke, and Neil. They were working on a business. They were friends from Brown University. Their business had an e-commerce component to it. So I understood, you know, some parts of what they were trying to do and-

• 26:04Guy Raz?

  What were they trying to sell?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  So they were trying to help bloggers and content creators monetize their traffic by selling curated e-commerce goods. So it was kind of like trying to operate a marketplace on bloggers' websites.

• 26:18Guy Raz?

  And meantime, you just kind of get to know these guys. This is Neil Puri, Gabe Flatman, and Luke Sherwin, right?

• 26:24Speaker 01

  That's right. Yep.

• 26:25Guy Raz?

  And, I mean, how did you guys start talking about mattresses, about your background?

• 26:31Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny. I think it started as a conversation around sleep. And Neil's dad is a sleep doctor. He's a pulmonologist. So Neil knew a bunch about sleep. This was also when Jawbones and Fitbits were really first coming into the market. So we started talking about what was it that led the mattress industry to exist the way it existed today? And it was also just based around like business models. And we started talking about what Harry's was doing and-

• 26:58Guy Raz?

  The Razors, yeah, Bonobos.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yep. And we were in a startup accelerator. You know, everyone's reading TechCrunch every day and reading about the, you know, massive amounts of money all these companies were raising.

• 27:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  You know, that goes back to the sense that like, we felt like there was this whole, you know, universe going on that we weren't a part of.

• 27:16Guy Raz?

  So at what point did somebody, one of those three guys, say-

• 27:22Guy Raz?

  Hey, Philip, you know about mattresses, you sold mattresses. Maybe we should, do you want to like join, should we join together and do something around mattresses? How did that conversation even start?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Well, you know, we would sketch out like, how would this business work if we wanted to do direct to consumer and mattresses? And what were the things that would, that would entail? And, you know, so you have to go build a brand, you have to go create the product, you have to create a website, et cetera. And after, it felt like we sketched a lot of this out, we all looked at it and we're like, yeah, this seems like pretty reasonable, like, we're probably missing something. And so we then went and sat down with Jeff Rader, one of the founders of Harry's, the razor company. And Jeff was also a founder of Warby Parker. And we're like, thank you so much for making time. We know you're crazy busy, like, we really appreciate it.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Just five minutes, here's our idea, what are we missing? And he like, you know, he thought about it, and I remember him being very contemplative and asking great questions. And he was like, no, I think this could work. And like, for us, that was like, validation from the highest authority. We were like, okay, this is amazing. And we were still hesitant, because we were still working on our respective businesses. And we're like, okay, now what? And I remember Luke looking at me in the eye and saying, you know that if we don't do this, someone will do that, and won't that just kill you? And that was the question that like, I couldn't get out of my head. And I thought he was right. I was like, this should exist, it will exist. I think it would be really fun to go try to make this exist with this group, and let's

• 29:01Speaker 01

  go give it a shot.

• 29:04Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, why a lot of investors pushed back on Philip's idea, why he and his partners kept going, and how Casper got its name, which is not the way you think. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 29:24Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together.

• 30:06Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 30:51Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called "Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work." And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization. How to position your business to prosper from it.

• 31:36Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Stripe is built for whatever comes next because the pace of change has never been faster than it is right now. New business models, new currencies, and new expectations for speed, reliability, and scale. Stripe builds financial infrastructure that helps businesses start, grow, and operate globally. From payments and billing to fraud protection and cross-border payouts,

• 32:20Guy Raz?

  Stripe is built to support the new pace of commerce. They're trusted by the companies building at the frontier, from 86% of the Forbes AI 50 to global leaders like Salesforce and OpenAI. In fact, more than 1.6% of global GDP flows through Stripe, with Stripe's users processing a combined $1.9 trillion last year. So if you're already thinking about what's next for your business, see what's possible at stripe.com.

• 33:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2013, and Philip and his partners have decided to launch a direct-to-consumer mattress brand. And they're one of the very first companies to experiment with the idea of selling a mattress online and compressing it into a box to send it. I remember buying my first mattress at IKEA, and it was, it came in a tube. I think they still do. And I like, cut it open and then just let it settle for 24 hours. And it was cool to watch it like, spring up, you know? So like, compressed mattresses, you could buy them. And this is, I'm talking about the, you know, early 2000s.

• 33:44Guy Raz?

  What was the problem that you knew existed?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  So you could go do that if you wanted to go spend, you know, a few hundred dollars and get something that would last you generally not very long.

• 33:59Guy Raz?

  Hey, that IKEA mattress was great in my early twenties. Okay, keep going.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  When you're in your early twenties, you could sleep on pretty much anything. And so that's a great solution if you're on a budget and in your early twenties. And then, other than that, you were kind of relegated to going into a store. Like, really mattresses weren't popular online. And when you talk about going into a store, it just was the worst consumer experience in existence. Like, at that point in time, we were living in New York, and so Sleepy's was the predominant retailer back then. And these stores felt like they hadn't been renovated in a long time, and it just was, to us, we said, worse than buying a used car. And at this point in time, like, used cars had been improved thanks to the internet, and you could get information and transparency.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  But this was a marketplace that was specifically very opaque. You had no idea what you should pay for a mattress. You had no idea what MSRP is, or any kind of quality standards of a mattress. The manufacturers changed the names on the mattresses year in and year out.

• 35:01Guy Raz?

  It was the same mattress with a different name.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Right. And that was one way that you couldn't price shop it. So it very well could be that Macy's is selling ABC mattress, and Sleepy's is selling XYZ mattress. Those could be the same mattress, for all intents and purposes, but you would never know that, because you couldn't compare them. You know, even at this point in time, you asked most people, and we did this survey work before we started Casper, was, what kind of bed do you sleep on? Almost no one could recall it. And if you could recall it, it was usually either IKEA or Tempur-Pedic. But at that point in time, there was nothing that we, as consumers, you know, in our twenties and early thirties, that, you know, were still on a budget and wanted to buy something that we felt proud of. There was nothing that existed in that kind of category.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  And so that was the problem we wanted to solve.

• 35:49Guy Raz?

  All right. All four of you decide you're gonna go for it. You have the meeting with this guy who co-founded or founded Harry's Razors, and you're thinking, okay, we've got his blessing, we're gonna start this thing. Presumably, you have to start doing some research about the direct-to-consumer opportunity and what people want. And so how do you start doing that research?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Well, we quickly honed in on kind of three themes. There were a lot of sub ideas under this, but the three themes were we have to build a brand that's interesting, right? Like it has to stand for something. It has to be something that people remember that they want to connect with. That's one. Two is that however we sell that brand, so kind of our go-to-market strategy, in this case, like our website, has to be really easy to use, interesting, frictionless, and make the whole experience as easy as possible. And the third, and this is the one where we saw that we had a gap with the four of us, was that we needed to build a product that really was the best. And so that's when we brought on our fifth co-founder, Jeff Chapin.

• 36:50Guy Raz?

  He was like an industrial designer?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  That's right. So this is definitely an example of just being very fortuitous. So we said, okay, we need a product designer. Who among us know a product designer? And one of us, Neil, knew one product designer. So we said, let's just call Jeff. We knew he was ex-IDO.

• 37:09Guy Raz?

  Which is obviously one of the great design companies in the world.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  That's right. So we called up Jeff and we said, you know, here's our idea. Do you know anything about building mattresses? And it turns out, yes, IDEO had clients that were in the space. And he thought our idea on kind of direct-to-consumer and going to circumvent the traditional retail experience was interesting. So Jeff had a design studio in Providence, Rhode Island. Actually, most people don't realize, we actually incorporated the business as Providence Mattress Company.

• 37:38Guy Raz?

  In Providence, because those guys went to Brown and then Jeff...

• 37:41Speaker 01

  They went to Brown and Jeff's design studio was in Providence. So we brought Jeff on to go build a better mattress and start to iterate and test that. And we hired kind of our first agency partner, which was a group out of Brooklyn called Red Antler, to help us with the website and the branding and the experience side of things. And then we went to work on the operations side. So finding a manufacturer who would build the mattress that we designed, finding the packaging suppliers.

• 38:10Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  And so we went to kind of go put all these pieces together.

• 38:13Guy Raz?

  There's a lot of moving parts here. I think there were five, I mean, now you've got five co-founders, right? The three guys who you met at the incubator, you, and now Jeff Chapin. And I guess everybody agreed that you were going to, you'd be the CEO, right?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  That's right. I was the one with CEO experience, so.

• 38:31Guy Raz?

  So you become the CEO. But even with, you know, when you pick a, I mean, five different people, it's a lot of moving parts. How did you guys divide and conquer? How did you decide who did what?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  So it was, it was kind of a natural division. I mean, we, we said, let's divide and conquer. So Gabe was self-taught on coding and, and so he was our CTO. If you met Luke is naturally the, the brand genius and guru. And so he took on kind of the creative lead. Neil is brilliant and a jack of all trades. And so he, he kind of started to wear the operations hat because we really needed someone to go figure that out. And that was confusing and different.

• 39:12Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  I wore the CEO hat and Jeff wore the product hat.

• 39:15Guy Raz?

  And, and so you basically went to go start raising money for this because this is not, this is not a, a, a drop ship company. This is a big idea. You're going to need some money for this. So where did you, I mean, that summer, did you start to look for money?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Uh, I would say that fall, summer and fall. Yeah. We started to look for money, um, summer and fall of 2013.

• 39:36Guy Raz?

  And was it relatively, I mean, was the reception pretty good? Were you going to like VC firms?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  We were going to anyone that we could get a meeting with and the reception was terrible, like icy, icy cold. Um, several common objections were, I don't understand, like, how do you have lifetime value if someone's buying a mattress and you're only going to sell them ever so often?

• 39:58Guy Raz?

  Every six to eight years.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Every six to eight years, but actually, um, the average household's in market every two to three years because the average household has two to three mattresses.

• 40:07Guy Raz?

  All right. But that's a question I would ask you at the time. I'd say, well, you know, I mean, it's like a car.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Totally reasonable.

• 40:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  It's a good question, but I don't, I don't, you can make a lot of money selling mattresses. You don't need frequency.

• 40:19Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  The other one was just, you know, it was hard to visualize something cool in, you know, the mattress space. Like, no one had ever bragged about buying a mattress before. No one posted on Twitter or Facebook, like, check out the mattress I just got. And so the idea of creating a cool brand, I think, just didn't resonate with people. And so we were told no dozens and dozens and dozens of times.

• 40:41Guy Raz?

  Right. Now, normally when you meet with Investors, they don't tell you what they think. They're like, okay, well, we'll be in touch, right?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  That's right. No one ever tells you what they actually think. And this is why fundraising is always so emotional. But we thought these guys loved us. We thought people wanted to invest in us and that the idea, everyone was very polite. Everyone was very-

• 41:03Guy Raz?

  Enthusiastic even?

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, enthusiastic. And then just one after the other was no, you know, not, not interested, not a good time, you know, all the traditional venture and angel excuses.

• 41:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  And so it was tough. And it was demoralizing because you get your hopes up and then not. And then, oh, we're meeting with this person. They would be the best, you know, anchor investor or the best lead investor ever. And then for whatever reason, they don't come in. And there were definitely moments where like, I don't know if this is going to come together. You know, we're maybe we're missing something. And so it just creates a lot of self doubt and a big roller coaster of emotions.

• 41:36Guy Raz?

  And when you went to meet with these, these investors, you said, did you like bring a box and say, this is the box that we're going to compress the mattress in. It's going to come to your home in a box. You'll order it on the internet and it'll come to your home. Were you showing them that?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Well, we would sometimes bring like foam samples with us so you could feel what the bed was going to be made out of and understand the construction a little bit more. But the only person who ended up getting, you know, one of our first demo beds was Ben Lear, who led our seed round. And so eventually we were introduced to Ben.

• 42:09Guy Raz?

  It's the guy who founded Thrillist, I think.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Right. He's a partner at Lear Hippo Ventures. And Ben had invested in Warby Parker and had invested in some other, you know, great consumer companies was running Thrillist. And Ben immediately got it and was very passionate about it and excited. And he did want to see like, I got to try one of these things out. So we delivered, the four of us, Neil, Luke, Gabe and myself, delivered a bed to his apartment in Soho. And, you know, he slept on that for years and ultimately led our seed round. And that's, he's the reason why Casper is in existence today.

• 42:49Guy Raz?

  I think you guys raised like a little over a million dollars for your seed round, right? Is that right?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  It ended up being 1.85 million.

• 42:56Guy Raz?

  So more than, considerably more than that. And so when he kind of signed off on the, decided to invest, that's when you get the waterfall. You get other people who want to join because they think, well, if this guy is doing it, I'll do it too.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  That's right. Ben Was is a big name in seed investing. And so using his initial check into Casper was how we were able to build momentum to fill the round.

• 43:20Guy Raz?

  And what was going to make your mattress different? Because you could buy memory foam, you could buy latex. What were you going to make it out of?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  So ours was an all foam mattress with memory foam on top. But what we had worked on for months was just how do we construct it to be super comfortable? And this goes back to, you know, Jeff is a brilliant industrial designer. It's all about user-tested design. And so we would bring our friends over to an apartment to lay on different prototypes and get feedback. What's the right level of bounciness? And what bed sleeps the coolest throughout the night? And, you know, what bed feels kind of universally the right firmness? Knowing that firmness was very subjective. And so we went through dozens of different prototypes to get to the Casper mattress that we launched with.

• 44:13Guy Raz?

  And it was what? It was a combination of memory foam and latex?

• 44:16Speaker 01

  That's right. It was a combination of memory foam and latex to get the right amount of bounce and sink and heat absorption and the feel that we were going for through user testing.

• 44:25Guy Raz?

  And Jeff, the designer, he was just basically making mattresses in his studio in Providence?

• 44:32Speaker 01

  That's right. We would get foam samples from different manufacturers. There was one manufacturer that ended up being excited to work with us. It was very hard to find a manufacturer at this point in time because we were building something custom. We were doing proprietary foams and layers. But we had all of these different kinds of foams. And foams come in different densities and have different qualities based on the formulation. And so we could build thousands, tens of thousands of different permutations of mattresses. And so- That's what Jeff was spending time doing is getting the feedback, testing different properties, whether it was heat or ergonomics, things like that. And just constantly iterating to try to build the perfect mattress.

• 45:15Guy Raz?

  When did you guys know? When did you, when did you all sort of, did you all agree that you finally got the formula right at a certain point? Or was there like a discussion among the founders where, where you all had different, some of you had different views?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  No, there, there were tons of discussions, tons of debates, a very debate focused group of founders. Ultimately, though, we said, we're going to pick a date and we're going to launch on that date wherever we are, wherever we are on the branding, wherever we are on the website design, wherever we are on the product roadmap, we're going to launch. And so I think it was early 2014, we said, April 22nd, that's going to be our date.

• 45:53Guy Raz?

  Why that date?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  I think it just gave us enough time to feel like we could get it done, but not so much time where we felt like we were wasting time. So, you know, I said, we're not going to let the date slip. We, that's what we told our investors, we're going to do it.

• 46:07Guy Raz?

  So you had this idea to compress a mattress into a box and make it a direct to consumer product, right?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:16Guy Raz?

  And compressed mattresses was not new, you didn't invent that. But from what I understand, you, that was your, that was the, that's it, you branded it. Like that was your, that was the thing that you branded. It was a compressed mattress in a box and apparently nobody was, was doing it that way?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  That's right. To my knowledge, we were the first to ever brand the unboxing experience. And so we, we put the stripes on the box on the exterior and we, we put a tray on the interior. We designed kind of an instruction manual on how to unbox it. We actually included a cutting tool so you could cut open the mattress that was basically shrink wrapped to stay compressed.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  And we actually would include gifts with our early purchases. So we went to the Strand bookstore here in New York City and we would buy old vintage bedtime stories and include that. And so we made it a thing and we did it just because we said, let's try to optimize every step of the customer journey that we could in order to surprise and delight customers. That was kind of the overarching philosophy, if you will, on like why we thought to go do that. But it actually ended up having a huge impact on our business in a way that we didn't anticipate, which was sharing. And when we started looking at sources of traffic to our website, we started seeing a ton of traffic come from YouTube in our early days. And it ended up that the Casper Unboxing Experience was something that people

• 47:40Speaker 01

  loved to film on their phone and love to post online and share. And that, I think, is one of the biggest drivers that just created, you know, was a catalyst to creating Casper in our early days.

• 47:50Guy Raz?

  By the way, is it an engineering challenge to get a mattress into a box? Is it just a matter of sucking all the air out and squeezing it in? Is it that relatively easy?

• 47:59Speaker 01

  It's, I wouldn't say it's easy, because I'm sure whoever invented it wouldn't like that. But it really is just a question of like, pressure per square inch. And if you put enough PSI onto some big steel plates, you can compress a lot of things, including a mattress.

• 48:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  And it turns out foam is actually a lot of air. So you have to get the air out of it.

• 48:20Guy Raz?

  How did you come up with the name? Is it connected to the ghost? Friendly ghost?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  No connection to the ghost. We were all working out of, you know, wherever we could from time to time. And so we would often work at a Luke's apartment in Brooklyn. And Luke had an extra bedroom that he would rent out on Airbnb. And Luke's roommate at this time when we were working on Casper was a six foot six German guy, whose name was Casper with a K. And we would always, for whatever reason, whenever we were over at Luke's, he was there sleeping and he did not fit on his twin mattress at all. And it was always a funny sight to us. And so again, we kind of gave ourselves a deadline on the branding. We had a list of a million names. And when we ended up voting on the name that we all liked the most, Casper won the day. Because I think we all got a good

• 49:08Speaker 01

  laugh out of Casper's, the visualization of Casper sleeping on a twin mattress. And so he was our inspiration for the name. We ended up going with the C instead of the K. We gave him a free Casper mattress when we launched to thank him for the inspiration. So I'd say it worked out well on both ends.

• 49:27Guy Raz?

  All right, so the five of you guys are working to get to launch date. And you get to launch date. And what happens? Like you just, you hit go and your website goes live and you've got mattresses available for sale? Is that more or less what happens?

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Basically, so we actually had convinced a couple of press outlets to cover the launch. And we were all impressed and blown away of it. People woke up that day, read the article and then came to our website and bought that day. I mean, we sold dozens of mattresses. We were only selling one mattress at that time, six sizes. And it turns out the story brought a lot of people into the website and those people wanted to try Casper and support Casper. So they bought from us and they were very vocal about the purchase and we were just off to the races.

• 50:14Guy Raz?

  And that, I think that first day I read that you sold like 40 mattresses or something, which is pretty good, right? And it was for, you know, for a tiny little company.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, 40 mattresses is like $30,000 worth of business. I mean, again, that was like what we were forecasting to do in month six or seven. And we did it in our first day.

• 50:32Guy Raz?

  And where, I mean, did you have the mattresses on hand or were they at the manufacturer? Where were they?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  So at this point, we had moved into our first office. The office was a second story walk up in NoHo in New York City. I think it was 1,600 square feet. And so we had a few in the office that we would ship out that day, put a UPS label on it and ship. And then we had like a U-Haul truck that we had rented that had maybe one or two dozen mattresses that we were keeping out in Brooklyn. We thought we would like pull inventory from there and ship it as they would sell. But within two days, we were out of all of the inventory we had.

• 51:11Guy Raz?

  Wow. And just to be clear, the mattresses were being manufactured to your specifications, but essentially like white labeled by manufacturers somewhere. I think it was in Georgia, right? At the time?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we had found a contract manufacturer who makes beds for other brands. We had convinced them to work with us, Casper. And we said, this is the type of bed we want to build. Here are the four layers that we want to use. And they said, okay, we could build this bed. And so they would build the bed for us. And so they were physically. Built, you know, the foam was poured and they were assembled outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And then eventually we would ship products from that facility directly to consumers.

• 51:53Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  And then we would also take inventory to our office where we could do our own fulfillment if need be.

• 51:58Guy Raz?

  So apparently your, your first year target was to, to, to reach about 1.8 million dollars worth of mattress sales and, and apparently you hit that in two months, which is a, a great milestone, but also a huge problem because you were, you were not shipping mattresses out fast enough. There was huge delays, right?

• 52:17Speaker 01

  There, there were huge delays, like to the point where we thought, we thought this was like an existential risk to the business.

• 52:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I mean, people were just super upset with us posting online about our delays. We had promised them to ship in two weeks and it was taking six or eight weeks. And we, we felt like the whole business could implode at this point. So we, we were trying to brainstorm everything we could to, you know, keep these customers just having faith in us and, and giving us the benefit of the doubt, not canceling the order. My co-founder Neil had a brilliant idea at one point to send customers who were delayed on their products, uh, aero beds that we would buy on Amazon and ship to our customers via our Amazon account.

• 52:58Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Just as a way to say like, sorry, if you need something to sleep on, hopefully this helps.

• 53:02Guy Raz?

  You just, you just go to Amazon and send people air mattresses while they were waiting?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Up until Amazon canceled our account because they thought we were reselling them, which we weren't, but we, we were buying hundreds of these aero beds just to help people sleep. And, you know, again, at this time, there were only, I think, seven people in the business, including the five co-founders. So we were all living and breathing the customer frustration. We were, you know, I was on live chat until I went to bed and was on live chat. The first thing I would wake up and trying to keep up with emails and answer phone calls and trying to, you know, fly to Atlanta to get our, our manufacturer to produce more. But, you know, a big, a big manufacturer, they want to go make a run of 500 beds, a thousand beds. And we're like, no, we just need to ship out, you know, dozen beds today,

• 53:49Speaker 01

  a dozen beds tomorrow, whatever it is to try to catch up. And, uh, it was just, it was really tough to build our way out of that hole.

• 53:56Guy Raz?

  Why? Was it, was it, was the bottleneck the, the manufacturer? I'm presumably they're making beds for lots of other people and you guys are like, come on, make more of ours. But, but presumably they, they just couldn't make enough quickly enough?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  That's right. It was the manufacturer and it was really, um, One, it was tough to find a manufacturer to work with us in the first place. And then, two, we're still a tiny customer in the grand scheme of things. And so, we would have to, we had a forecast. We shared that forecast with the manufacturer. They said, okay, we can live up to this. And then overnight said, oh, wait, you know, that those beds that we thought we needed in two months, we need them tomorrow or in two weeks. And so, they're like, sorry, that's not how this works. You can't just kind of flip a switch.

• 54:38Guy Raz?

  I imagine that with that rapid success, it started, you started to attract more potential interest from investors that year in 2014. Because I think you did, would go on to raise, you did a Series A in 2014. You raised like $13 million or more than that, a little more than that. Was it now, with the initial success you had, was it easier to raise that money?

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Very much so. So, one of the common objections we heard from investors was, you know, just too early. Come see us when, when you're live and, and we'll check back in. And I think at that point, you know, most, I think that's just what investors say to push you off. And when we were able to come back and be like, oh, yeah, we, you know, we did a million dollars in our first 28 days, you know, I think that was fairly unprecedented. And so, that, that caused a lot of interest into the business. You know, we, we went from, you know, the, the ugly stepchild to the belle of the ball very quickly. And it was all new to us. And so, you know, we were, we were trying to be deliberate, trying to take it all in, trying to be thoughtful, because you're picking, you know, a lifelong partner.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  And the joke we heard from a lot of founders was, it's kind of like marriage, but without the divorce option for your, your Series A investors. So, we wanted to pick the best partner we could. And that also just meant thinking about like, what do we want to go do with this business? Do we really want to swing for the fences? Do we want to run it as more of a lifestyle business? And it was a crazy time that was awesome and, you know, different and overwhelming. But we ended up with a great partner.

• 56:12Guy Raz?

  And, and that partner, by the way, was, I think was NEA, which is a huge venture firm.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Huge venture firm, the largest venture firm by, by kind of assets under management. And we said, Let's go try to build the biggest business we can. And if we're going to fail, let's fail because we're too ambitious and aiming too big.

• 56:30Guy Raz?

  And so So what does that mean to be, to go big?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the way we talked about and continue to talk about is we want to build the world's first sleep brand. We want people to think of Casper when they think about getting a better night of sleep. That could mean buying a mattress, but it could mean any other number of products or services or experiences when it just comes to getting the best night of sleep possible. And just like you think of Nike, when I say, you know, going out for a great run, or Whole Foods, when I say, you know, go buy organic foods. We want people to think Casper when it comes to getting a better night of sleep. And so it was just taking the money and start to build a product pipeline, start to build a distribution pipeline. We knew we weren't going to be just digital, so we started doing pop-ups. We wanted to build a global brand and business, so eventually we launched in Europe.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  And so that's where we just started to think about what does this business look like down the road? And let's see how fast we can get there.

• 57:24Guy Raz?

  Your, your value proposition was it was going to be easy to get direct to consumer, a good quality mattress, and it was going to be cheaper. So I'm assuming your margins were going to be lower than what they were for the traditional mattress industry.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  So we had always said, we're not, we're not building a value play. You're not going to buy from us because it's the least expensive option. And it's the lowest price, best value, lowest margin option. What we said is, we're not going to play games with how we price everything. We're going to price it fairly. And so no matter where you buy a Casper product, you pay the same price.

• 58:01Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  And from a margin standpoint, there were just less hands in the cookie jar, if you will, on our products. So we didn't need as high of margins.

• 58:11Guy Raz?

  Because you don't have brick and mortar stores, and you don't have retailers, you're direct to consumer, you're not, right?

• 58:16Speaker 01

  That's right. So we were more efficient. So we just didn't need as high of margin dollars. We still, we still have a high margin business and it's a high margin category. So, you know, you look today, we're north of a 50% gross profit margin business, which is, is good and strong. And that's enough to build a defensible business. And To your question on like just, you know, how many people are buying mattresses? It turns out that every year about 20 million mattresses in the US are sold. And those 20 million mattresses mean that 16, 17, 18 billion dollars in the US is spent on mattresses.

• 58:55Guy Raz?

  All right. So one of the things that was part of your ambition to create a brand rather than just a mattress company, right? Because it was going to be all kinds of sleep products. It was going to be sheets and pillows and different kinds of mattresses was, I think, a year after you launched, you guys basically built a media company called Van Winkle. And from what I understand, this was a media company that was going to write, it wasn't going to promote Casper mattresses or sell them. It was just going to write about, about sleep and about things related to sleep. Is that right?

• 59:35Speaker 01

  It's right. I think media company is a generous moniker, but the idea was that buying a mattress is an infrequent purchase with consumers. So what is a way that we can, as Casper, stay in more frequent conversation and build more frequency of a relationship with customers? And we said content could be a way to do that. And so we went out and we started Van Winkle's. We hired an editor to help us create content around sleep. And it wasn't about selling mattresses. It was just, let's put it out into the world, to our customers and have people sign up for it. And if it's good quality content, people will read it and that will just help build the brand over time.

• 1:00:17Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's a really interesting idea, right? Because you've got a consumer products company and you decide that maybe you could also expand by becoming a media company. This is a model. A lot of people do this, a lot of, I mean, investment firms, Andreessen Horowitz is essentially doing a version of this. And it seems to me that you actually, that one of the things you thought was that this media arm could become self-sustainable, it could self-sustaining, it could become profitable through ads.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  It was a thought on like where the business could go, which is either that it becomes so interesting and so widely distributed that people do tie it to Casper and so it leads to people buying more frequently from Casper, or that it's a standalone editorial venture where we bring in ads and other advertising partners in addition to Casper and we think of it as just like any other editorial venture. And so we definitely thought that was one place it could go over time.

• 1:01:11Guy Raz?

  I know that you had Van Winkle going for a few years before you shuttered it and shut it down. And I wonder whether you ever think about going back to something like that, like going back to building content around sleep?

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  I think that one of the biggest misses that we had early days was kind of missing the ability that content could have on sleep. And when we were starting Van Winkle's, we saw some of the meditation apps coming to market and people were using them for sleep. And we talked about like, how do people use content as part of their sleep routine? And we missed that opportunity. And I think, you know, the folks like Calm and Headspace have gone on to build great businesses. And I think the killer application for those businesses is not meditation. I think it's sleep. And so I think that area is super fascinating. I think there's going to be a lot of innovation when it comes to people

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  evolving their sleep routine, including content, and we would love to play in that.

• 1:02:14Guy Raz?

  Philip, did you assume that Casper would be like a millennial brand? You know, that it would? And was that how you kind of pitched it? And did it? Was it? Was that? Did that come to fruition?

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  You know, I would say we were worried about it becoming too much of a millennial brand. Like, we knew we were trying to resonate with New York City and San Francisco millennials because that's who we were and that's who our early customers were. But we, and I think this was just listening to investors, really, like, we were acutely aware of the risk of becoming too much of a millennial brand. And I think- We heard that with how people were thinking about Warby Parker at a point in time, and we just knew that that was something we were going to have to overcome.

• 1:02:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  You know, when we started to think about, you know, non-millennial opportunities, we would go try different advertising campaigns. We would try different pop-up destinations. We would just try to build the business by going kind of community to community and thinking about the groups that we wanted to resonate with.

• 1:03:16Guy Raz?

  As you started to really take off, something happened fairly quickly in the story of Casper, which is competitors. You've got a great business, direct-to-consumer, compressed mattresses, comparatively low overhead because you're selling direct. And then you've got brands coming up, Purple, Lisa, and others. That happened fairly quickly after you guys launched.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  It did, and it was way bigger of an onslaught of competition than I think certainly I could have ever imagined. And I think this is one of the things, looking back, that, you know, was a mistake on my part. I was kind of dismissive of competition in the early days. I never expected to see so many competitors come at us from so many different angles, and that so many of them would just try to copy what we were doing and be fast followers and, you know, really just take everything we were trying to be innovative with. And, you know, we ended up saying, like, we started Casper because buying a mattress offline in a store was really confusing. You had all these options. You didn't know who to

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  trust. You didn't know what the different options meant. You know, I think the proliferation of mattress startups certainly got very competitive very quickly. And immediately, buying a mattress online became even more overwhelming and confusing than buying a mattress offline.

• 1:04:43Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Casper dealt with its competitors, did a deal with Target, and later navigated a very rocky IPO. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Football is back and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. That's right, if you win your first $5 lineup, you'll get $150 in lineups. On PrizePix, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stat projections, and submit your lineup. Then sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want this football season, all in the same app. And now, PrizePix is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you on?

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  Download the PrizePix app today and use code WONDERY, that's code WONDERY, to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  Must be present in certain states. Visit PrizePix.com for restrictions and details. Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

• 1:06:39Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2015, and after a very successful launch of its first mattress, Casper is having to play defense because competitor mattress companies are springing up all over the place.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  It does become, I think, an arms race of trying to think about how you're going to have a defensible business. And so, part of it is advertising, but part of what we saw is also that distribution matters. And having a place for customers to try the product is an advantage in this industry, in this ecosystem. So that's why we started opening up stores. Today, we have 70 retail stores opened and operating. And that's because combining that online experience with the ability to offer a trial experience with our customers is an advantage. And we started thinking about other ways to build advantages. How do we have a one-stop shopping destination for all things sleep? And so, how do we expand our product portfolio?

• 1:07:39Guy Raz?

  I think you guys did a partnership with West Elm, too, for example.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  That's right. Our first-ever partnership was with West Elm on getting our products into their stores and their showrooms and having them promote us as a way for you to buy a mattress as part of your overall bedroom set. So, we were always thinking about ways to extend distribution.

• 1:07:59Guy Raz?

  So, one thing that I am curious about is that mattresses, like cosmetics and some other categories, tend to be made in central facilities, where factories that make products for many different companies, right? According to their specifications. And I'm assuming that as more competitors came into the space, they were also making mattresses in the same, you know, using the same manufacturers you were using.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  That's right. So, in the mattress industry, a lot of manufacturing is done at contract manufacturers who will make foam or products for anyone in the industry. So, it's not abnormal to see multiple brands being produced on the floor of any mattress factory.

• 1:08:48Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, I'm thinking if I'm running the company, I would get a little anxious or nervous about people who were making mattresses in the same factories where ours were being made and that IP not being carefully protected.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say I got anxious about like other people creating mattresses in the same facilities because I think there's enough secret sauce in our products that really do make them stand out. If you buy our Wave mattress today, it has this gel pod system that we invented, we've patented. Now, where I give myself maybe lower marks on kind of my personal scorecard is I don't know that we've done the best job of articulating those product benefits to consumers. And it does get in the weeds, to your point. It doesn't stand out as much because, you know, at the end of the day, a mattress sits under your covers and you're not looking at it every day. You're not, it's not an aesthetic product. It just has to work well. And I think about it with like, you know, razor blades. Like,

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  you would know very specifically if you're using a razor blade that's high quality and probably expensive and, you know, recent versus a low quality, inexpensive razor blade. And you wouldn't be able to articulate exactly why, but it has to do with the engineering and the manufacturing processes and the quality standards and the specification and the input ingredients and all of the things that go into it. And I think we got away from that for a little bit and focused more on the brand and less on the product. But I think we're really focused on the product story at this point.

• 1:10:21Guy Raz?

  Philip, let me ask you about review sites because mattress review sites or websites that claim to have honest reviews, they're hugely influential in what mattresses people buy. Like, before I started researching for this interview, I had no idea how important they are to sales. And some of these review sites have not been charitable to you, to Casper. And you guys actually sued some of these sites saying that they were being unfair. But I wonder, why did you sue them?

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  So it has nothing to do with the content of what they were writing and it has everything to do with the way that they were representing themselves to consumers. And what we quickly saw happen in this industry was that people were creating content. They were highly, highly compensated by certain companies for that content to be very favorable. And that's fine, as you said, it can be the opinion of someone. But where we draw the line is if they misrepresent what they're doing to consumers, which has to do with disclosure. There are some companies and some sites out there, especially at the time when we were litigating against this, that did not represent themselves as being paid by these advertisers.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  And they represented themselves as independent and unbiased, and that just wasn't reality. And so not having proper disclosures is what we litigated about. And I think today we have a better ecosystem for consumers in the industry because you see more disclosures.

• 1:11:53Guy Raz?

  And, and look, you're in a high stakes business, right? I mean, you are in a competitive, high stakes business environment. So there is going to be a war footing in some sense. I mean, it's not, it's, it's, that's just the reality. There's a story out there that one of these companies you settled with called Sleepopolis was eventually acquired by another company called Jack Media that Casper provided a loan to, to acquire Sleepopolis. And then the story is that the review of a Casper mattress on Sleepopolis turned from a negative review to a positive review after that happened. I'm not saying that it's not illegal, it's not, I'm just saying that that's a story and you got some flack for that from some, some media outlets for doing that.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  That's right. I think the narrative that, that media outlet took was not

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Fair or accurate, I mean.

• 1:12:47Guy Raz?

  So the story I just said is not true?

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  No, so the narrative that was behind the story, again, so there are good operators in this ecosystem and there are bad operators in this ecosystem. And in our view, Jack Media was a good operator. They wanted to buy this site and we talked to them about financing that acquisition so that they could operate it and they had complete independent editorial control and they ran their business. We were just a financing partner for them. And today, we're fortunate, there are a lot of very good actors providing content around mattresses, providing content around sleep, and the ecosystem is much better than it was back when we were forced to litigate. I mean, litigation's always the last resort.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  But if the NAD, if the advertising standards that the law says and that the independent advertising bureaus are saying are not being upheld and that's misrepresented to consumers, we, again, just felt it was an obligation upon us to take action to let the good actors build their business. And there's a great business to be built on the content side and on the editorial side of the mattress industry and of the sleep category, so long as you do it with proper disclosures, which is what's going on. And so, again, it's the narrative behind it, I think, that was a little off.

• 1:14:08Guy Raz?

  I know that around 2017, you started to enter into conversations with Target. Target, from what I understand, started to look at you as a potential acquisition. And you guys started to talk pretty deeply. And now, knowing what I know about acquisition talks, they're very intense. You've got to open up all your books. You've got to stay totally secret. You can't talk about it with anybody. I mean, you sort of entered this process with Target?

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  So I wouldn't say we got as far as you're alluding to in the process. Target had taken a keen observation to what Casper was doing. They saw what our partnership was at West Elm and Target wanted to push more into the wellness side of things. They wanted to make a bigger push into sleep, into the mattress side of things. They had a big bedding business. They wanted to do more in their pillow business. Brian Cornell, the CEO, who I was introduced to, and he said, like, the commercial opportunities are huge. I think we can build a big business together.

• 1:15:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  And that's where we sat down. You know, we talked amongst our board and, you know, the founders and the management team. And we said, what's the best way to work with Target today? And we said, if they want to make an investment and take a minority position in Casper, and if they want to help us, more importantly than the investment, if they want to help us commercially, and the investment will help catalyze that, then great, that's the win-win.

• 1:15:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  And that's what we ended up doing.

• 1:15:47Guy Raz?

  So now with Target as a strategic kind of investor, you are, your mattresses are in Target stores still today, right?

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:15:55Guy Raz?

  All right. So Casper, you hit a huge milestone in March of 2019. You raised around, you brought in another $100 million, and I think you had a $1.1 billion valuation. And I mean, that's huge. But it also, I imagine, increases pressure, right? Because you've got to now show that you're really worth that, that money. What did you, did you already in March of 2019, believe that you were going to take the company public within a year?

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  March of 2019, we definitely started focusing on

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  What does it mean to be public-ready, IPO-ready? What does the IPO process look like? And what do we need to do to be prepared to be a public company? So we were definitely working on that in early 2019.

• 1:16:52Guy Raz?

  I mean, this is what happens, right? When an investor makes an investment in a company, they are expecting that there's going to be some kind of exit. Either it's going to be acquired or it's going to go public because the investor needs a return. And you guys first went to investors in 2013. So you're now looking at seven years later, and the clock is ticking. And is that why you decided that going public was the right decision?

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  You know, we actually really didn't feel pressure from investors. Since we started the company, since the five of us got together, it was always like, what's the next milestone for the business? What's the next milestone for what we want to build? And then let's get there as quickly as we can. Okay, we raised, as you said, another $100 million in March of 2019. What's next? Okay, let's get ready to be a public company. What is that like? So it was really, I think, more self-imposed pressure to kind of get public than anything.

• 1:17:50Guy Raz?

  But going public means that you have to reveal everything. Going public means all your financial statements, your documents are now public documents because that's what it means to be a public company. And so a month before your IPO, you had to, all your documents are out in the open, and it showed that you were not profitable, that actually you had lost money in the previous quarter and that the company wasn't yet profitable. That's fine. That happens all the time with many companies. And when people buy a stock, it's often on the belief that eventually they'll reach profitability. But all of a sudden, you kind of lay it out there, right? I mean, you're not, it's all out in the open.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  That's right. It's all out in the open, but we weren't afraid of that. Like, we had, we have a good story and we have a very bright future. And we're a business that even to this point in time, I think in my judgment, it's been the right point in our business lifecycle to invest capital to help us grow our foundation, to help us ultimately become a very large and profitable business. And that's very common for companies early in their lifecycle. And if you look at other companies that went public in 2019, that was a very common narrative. You had Uber and Lyft, who were going public and not profitable. You had Smile Direct and Peloton that were going public and not profitable.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  And Casper continues to have a story that I think will ultimately prove to resonate in the public markets. We've had a choppy time since we've been public, but you know, I think that's as much timing as it is anything else.

• 1:19:30Guy Raz?

  This is a little bit of a sensitive topic because I don't want it to come across as sounding like I'm, you know, going after you or criticizing you. I don't want to make you feel, I'm not trying to make you feel bad. I'm just, this is an exercise in running a business and the ups and downs of a business. I'm just really curious about where your mind goes, which is you had raised money on a billion dollar valuation in 2019. You go public in 2020 and investors essentially value the company at the end of that IPO at $500 million, half, less than half of what your valuation was when you raised money. And you know, today, it's about a little over $300 million

• 1:20:14Guy Raz?

  and it's the market cap valuation. And so what is the story you tell yourself about that? How do you process that?

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  That is the reality. And I would say, you know, I'm comfortable saying it's not good. You know, the last thing I personally would ever want to do is lose an investor who, you know, I think of it as investing in me as as much as it is investing in the company. The last thing I would ever want to do is lose an investor money. And so it doesn't feel good at all. And it's not good. And so it is a very motivating factor to me to get our stock price up and to have our investors make money. That said, I do truly believe it's a moment in time. I think we did have unfortunate timing when it came

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  time to tapping the public markets. We were the first, I think, visible, high-profile company to go public post WeWork, which meant there was a ton of negative sentiment around companies that were investing capital into their business and around, you know, the startup side of things. And we were really one of the last visible companies to go public pre-pandemic, which just means that people immediately started to focus elsewhere, as they should. But, you know, you live with the timing that you have in life. And so, you know, it's going to take time to work our way out of where we are. But it's definitely a reality that we're dealing with and that I feel a lot of responsibility for.

• 1:21:49Guy Raz?

  How do you handle it as a leader? Because you are the CEOs, all the firepower, right, is aimed towards you. That's just how it happens. You choose to be the leader, you've got to absorb the firepower, but you also have to diffuse it, diffuse it somehow and deal with it. How do you deal with, you know, articles like in courts or an article about your IPO and it was critical? And I think Forbes had an article that said, "Don't buy Casper." And there have been other critical articles, I'm sure you read them. You have to be aware of them because that's part of your job. How do you internalize that kind of criticism? Do you just think to yourself, "They're wrong, and I'm going to prove them right"?

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not one of these people that uses it as... A way to get super fired up and like that's not what motivates me like let's go prove these guys wrong and that's not what you would hear at Casper either like you know I don't use it to to rile up the troops if you will um and largely I also I don't dismiss it so I'm not like just head in my head in the sand and like not understand what's going on but I don't sit there and read these I don't get overly focused on it um I don't internalize it like I won't lose sleep if if someone were to write something like that about the company or whatever it may be.

• 1:23:10Guy Raz?

  I mean do you like meditate or do you are there things you do to cope with it or are you just wired that way?

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  I think I'm just wired that way I don't meditate um I you know I don't take like my aggression out in a workout class or anything like that um I try not to let the highs get to me and I try not to let the lows get to me and I just try to stay pretty balanced and I think that is felt at Casper so you know I try to keep the company focused on that let's remember that we're going towards a point on the horizon we're not living in the today and you know over time these things take care of themselves.

• 1:23:49Guy Raz?

  I want to ask you about something that you guys were actually really pioneered in the mattress industry because initially when you when you sold them I think it was like 40 days you get it was a 40 day trial period but you upped it to 100 days now pretty much every mattress company 100 days you can try it out and if you don't like it send it back to us that still to me seems crazy because I think you don't even require people to use a mattress cover but if someone is using it for 90 days and sends it back for the money back guarantee I have to assume that that mattress is dead you can't reuse it.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  That's right so you don't you don't actually send it back we'll recycle it locally and give you a credit.

• 1:24:28Guy Raz?

  Oh okay they get you get a credit to buy another product.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  No no you get a full refund.

• 1:24:33Guy Raz?

  Full refund.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Take your cash and do whatever you want with it.

• 1:24:37Guy Raz?

  So you just eat that?

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Yep just cost of doing business.

• 1:24:39Guy Raz?

  Because you can't right a mattress like you sleep on it and we know how much skin and sweat is inside of a mattress just look at a science website you'll find out if you're curious.

• 1:24:49Guy Raz?

  You can't, the secondary market for mattresses, I can't imagine is that hot. It just seems like a crazy thing to offer people, 100 days.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  You know, it started with the idea of let's put ourselves in the customer seat and work backwards. And the idea of laying on a mattress for 30 seconds in a store and then saying, okay, I want to spend a third of my life on this for the next 10 years was equally crazy to us.

• 1:25:16Guy Raz?

  Totally crazy, yeah.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  And so, you know, if that is one end of the crazy spectrum, the other is what would be the most crazy way to sell a product that when Casper launched was sight unseen? And we said like, just no questions asked return policy. If you don't love it, we'll, we'll take it back. And fortunately, you know, few customers do, but we just want you to find something that you sleep great on.

• 1:25:41Guy Raz?

  You have about 420 employees now, something like that?

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  Um, it's about 350 kind of HQ employees and then we have several hundred retail employees as well.

• 1:25:52Guy Raz?

  And you are the last one standing, right? All the other founders, co-founders have, have moved on in some way. I mean, they may be involved, but they, they're not involved in the day to day of Casper, right?

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:26:02Guy Raz?

  So do you sort of feel like, you know, hey, guys, where, where'd you go? I mean, I know you, you earlier mentioned you're good friends with everybody, but do you sort of wonder like, hey, wait, why, why, what's, what's going on here?

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  No, I don't. I think these things like just take their, their natural progression and some of my co-founders are younger than me and, and earlier in their careers and, you know, wanted to move on to new challenges and, you know, totally accepting of that. And I, I think early on, we said, um, let's be mindful that like, you know, none of us signed up for this to be our forever job until we retire, but let's always make sure we put Casper first in our decision-making, but also just be realistic that, you know, if, if one of the founders wants to go on to do something else, like let's just prepare for it and talk about it and, and do right by, you know, the rest of the team. And that's kind of how it played out.

• 1:26:57Guy Raz?

  When you started selling mattresses in your dorm room at UT in 2002, three, could you have imagined running a public mattress company in, I mean, more than a mattress company, but could you have imagined running a public company that is centered around mattresses, direct to consumer mattresses?

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  No would be the short answer. Certainly not anything that specific, but I will say I like, growing up, like business was what I was fascinated by and my sister would tell you, like I would force her when we were little, like, let's play business and I would use my briefcase and, you know, before I could write, like scribble out, you know, fake letters and, and checks and things like that. Like, um, business has always been what I've been like really passionate and curious about. And so I do think I always dreamed of like, what would it be like to run a public company, be a public company CEO? And so this was definitely on, on my bucket list. Like, did, did I think I would get here this way and at this age and with

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  this kind of company? No, but, uh, you know, definitely something I aspired to since I was little.

• 1:28:06Guy Raz?

  When you think about where you've got, you've gotten to as a founder and a CEO, how much of that do you, do you think is because of how hard you worked and how much of it do you think it's due to just being lucky and, and meeting the right people at the right time and the right kind of things breaking your way?

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  Uh, it's a tough question. I, I definitely am someone that puts a lot, the majority of the way life happens into luck. You hear the references of like running a, a company, running a startup. It's like, you know, being in a boxing match and you're just constantly hitting the face. And, and I think that's a hundred percent true. And, and having traits that were ingrained to me since I was little, like perseverance and persistence and to, to be able to absorb that and work through it and, and absorb the ups and downs. Like, I'm lucky that, that I'm in the position to, to have that chance and to be where we are at this point in the journey. So, um, definitely I think biased towards the luck

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  side of things, but know that there's a lot of factors that go into the journey that people end up on.

• 1:29:16Guy Raz?

  That's Philip Krim, co-founder and CEO of Casper. Just one more question for you. You've got a two-year-old at home, right?

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  I do.

• 1:29:26Guy Raz?

  Do you let him jump on your bed?

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  I'm a bit more encouraging of it than my wife is.

• 1:29:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, the only thing is, there's no springs in mattresses anymore. No one's making-- I mean, they are, but when I was a kid, you'd jump on the springs and you'd destroy the springs.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  Well, so the newer models of Casper are actually hybrids. And so they do have springs in it.

• 1:29:44Guy Raz?

  Springs, oh, good.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  So they're bouncy.

• 1:29:45Guy Raz?

  I think the advantage is that if he destroys your mattress, you can easily replace it with one from your--

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  He's got a guy.

• 1:29:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah, he's got a guy. He knows a guy.

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  He's got a guy.

• 1:29:55Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you're not a subscriber to the podcast, please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to write to us, our email address is [email protected]. If you want to follow us on Twitter, we're at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. Our Instagram is at How I Built This NPR, and mine is at Guy.Raz. This episode was produced by James Delahoussaye with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Dereth Gales. Our production staff includes Casey Herman, Rachel Faulkner, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Farah Safari, Liz Metzger, Janet Wu-Jung Lee, and Annalise Ober.

• 1:30:38Guy Raz?

  Our intern is Harrison Vijay Choi. And Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.