 We are excited to be here. I am Elizabeth. We're here with Neil Greek He's the Casper one of the Casper co-founders and current COO He is changing the way we all sleep, which I'm sure we could all use a little bit of Today started the company in 2014 and has seen amazing growth Disrupting the sleep industry mattresses and now a bunch of other products that even have a dog mattress, too So we're pretty excited to talk about that Fix fix our sound make sure we can hear Neil So Neil let's talk a bit about Why you decided to be a mattress company? It sounds a little boring. What what was interesting to you about this? Wow That's a bit louder than I expected Okay well, I Always wanted to be a mattress salesman growing up. It was no I'm joking. It was so small vision big vision, right? We saw that How many of you guys have bought a mattress before raise your hand if you've bought a mattress before almost everyone, right? I think universally around the world It is one of the worst experiences possible and I saw this when we launched our business in Germany You'd see Matratzen Concorde out there, right? 50% off always science. There's commission sales people It is it's like worse than buying a used car and so we knew that Disrupting a sleepy industry to use the terrible pun was an interesting problem to solve but more importantly There's people are care more than ever about being healthy. We're drinking green juice. We're going to spin class We care about sleep more than ever, right? We know it's the fundamental Human technology that powers every bit of our lives and yet there's no brand out there Or there was no brand out there that was saying hey Let's make best-in-class products that unify all this stuff so that we can really focus on helping people sleep better to enable a better life And so it wasn't really just about the mattress or the sheets or the pillows It was about how do we solve a more interesting higher-order problem to inspire people to live a better life and your dad Knows a bit about sleep talk about that in your history with with sleep in your family Yeah, it's I never it's kind of funny how things come full circle I never you know thought my parents had always wanted me to be a doctor and so I Went to Brown University. I ended up starting medical school My dad's a physician and he's a sleep doctor and so you know for me in the entrepreneurial journey I never thought I was gonna stray. I always thought you know, I'm gonna go to medical school I'm gonna become a physician, you know probably like the 10th or 20th person in my family over many generations to eventually become a doctor and I guess it was always kind of percolating at the back of my mind right the idea that Making consumer products in the world of the intersection between healthcare technology And making people feel good is really interesting place to be and so when I was in medical school I was always churning through different ideas, right? We're learning about how that the most advanced Technology in the entire world the human body works and yet there aren't a whole lot of things that interact with the human body especially from a consumer products world that have been well-designed and so I Ended up leaving medical school and it moved to New York and I didn't actually immediately start Casper I worked on an e-commerce company in the middle and After some time met some incredible people Philip and Luke and some other co-founders and decided that we wanted to pursue Casper Okay, so let's talk about that because I know people here have ideas, but then you say okay I want to start a mattress company. What do you do you go test them all out and then design your own? How do you actually get that idea? I? Think it's What I always tell people is there is going to be a very circuitous path for you to get wherever you're going right? Throughout my life. I never thought this is the place. I was gonna be at right I had gone to medical school I had done work with nonprofits in clean water I had done some stuff in synthetic biology and so for me it was always about being passionate about learning different things very quickly and so what ended up happening was that When we when my co-founder Philip had been selling mattresses online for quite a long time He'd sold like almost a hundred million dollars worth starting from his dorm room when he told me that I was like Oh my god people would buy a mattress online. What a crazy idea and so and then you know But we had conviction that okay, we can build an interesting brand, but we didn't know how to design a product and so One of my best friends from medical school her fiance was a lead designer IDO I called him up and said hey Jeff Do you know anything about how to design a mattress and it turned out they actually had a lot of experience in designing mattresses? I had a chance so The the point was that it's all about people right it it comes down to can you find the right people that you? want to work with that are going to support you that you're gonna that are gonna inspire you on a day-to-day basis to go and pursue the really big ideas because The reality is the first thing you do is isn't gonna work You know Casper is probably like the third or fourth company that a couple of us have started together And many of the things that you pursue aren't gonna work You have to kind of keep hitting the pavement over and over and over again And if you have people that you want to work with on a routine basis They're gonna teach you things Then it's easy and so to go you know back to your point about how to test an idea I Know many of you out there are probably you know investors have done lots of interesting things before The hard part is most of the great ideas in the world people are gonna think are dumb right we pitched 50 60 70 people and everyone said No one's ever gonna buy a mattress online. That's a dumb idea. Don't do that You know and we had no money We were like $50,000 in credit card debt You know we had like put up everything we had and then finally, you know Ben Lear Lear ventures said hey You know, that's an interesting idea. You know, I'll go in with you guys and so If we had listened to the first 50 people who had all said that's a dumb idea Casper wouldn't exist today. And so I think in many ways. It's just about having conviction Because you're not always gonna get that immediate market validation like once we launched and we brought it out into the world We ended up, you know being very lucky and that we struck a nerve But at the very beginning days there were definitely some hard times and we asked ourselves like Every day I'd wake up and say like this is really a good idea Like if both my parents and all these investors think this is a dumb idea I really be doing this and what what did people think is dumb? I mean so one of the premises behind it is this one size fits all idea that there is actually a mattress that we all Could sleep on and enjoy sleeping on How do you how did you think that people would buy into that and how did you ultimately get so many people to buy into it? The original idea for Casper started when we so when you go to a mattress store They kind of parade you around and they say they ask you, you know, what's your budget? What does your budget have to do with how well you're gonna sleep right or what firmness you want? It's all kind of a game that they play to get you to slot you into different places And so one of the key insights we had is when you go to a great hotel you usually end up sleeping well, right? Why so this whole idea that you have to try 15 different firmnesses today makes absolutely no sense You know when we ended up doing so everything we do is really focused on human-centered design And so at the very beginning we interviewed, you know hundreds of people we watched how they were sleeping We'd build different variants of mattresses have people test them and the the very very beginning We weren't even sure that we were gonna make just one and what ended up happening was that like 95 percent of people Gravitate gravitated towards liking the same model. So we realized like wow If you take a step back the conventional thinking was always there have to be so many different options out there, right? We live in a world in which there's 50 options for everything. There's colors sizes this that and so We realize is if we actually just like Minimize the amount of choice that you have if we make an amazing product and back it with amazing surface Actually, most people are gonna like it And so we made a really big bet and the way we solved for it was we said we're the first people ever to say You know what? Why don't you try sleeping on it to decide if you like it, right? And so you'd have at the time 40 days now 100 days to try it if you don't like it we'll give you all your money back and It was a radical concept because before that it was always even the business model, right? It was always Pick something you're gonna try it in the showroom You know whether or not you end up liking it that almost doesn't matter because you can't really send it back And what we said is We don't even want you to try it in a showroom to start with right? You're just gonna buy it site unseen because other people have bought it before because you like the brand or you've heard It's good quality try it in your own home And then if you don't like it send it back and so we just tried to flip the whole business model It's on its head and get people thinking in a very different way Has that did that cost you in the beginning? I mean how many people slept on it for a hundred days and then now say actually I've changed my mind Does it happen a lot? Very few people luckily yeah I mean the thing is that that we think about the psychology of buying an expensive purchase like that right Most of the time when you get angst and you've shopped at a mattress store at least specifically with mattresses It's not that you don't like the product. It's always you're thinking to yourself It's this FOMO right like should I've gotten the firmer one of the softer one Should I gotten the more expensive one of the less expensive one should I've got you know And you think to yourself and then all of a sudden now you have this inner narrative that keeps circling right and you're thinking This could be better. How come it's not right? This could be better How come it's not and so I think just like removing that amount of choice makes it so much easier for people And then we actually back it with amazing products We're the only people that have you know, we have a 50% R&D team in San Francisco and we do everything We're checking firmness humidity to point ergonomic support. We're test every different factor out there So much so the consumer reports just said we're one of the best mattresses in the foam category They've ever tested, you know, we wanted to shift and bar and test in Germany Because we're like obsessively focused on delivering, you know the best products related to sleep out there So you guys have seen crazy growth 300 million in three years How did you get there? What's your advice to people out there who have that germ of an idea and now? You don't want to be up on stage here like you. I Wish there were good easy things I you know, I think it comes down to you just have to make amazing products that people love Like there's there's I wish that there were some magic sauce to it But the reality is if you keep yourself honest and you and you have obsessive focus on the details and the little details really matter right the first and and I think it starts with the founding DNA to some extent right like we for a Casper are Super obsessive about our customers, right? The first two thousand or a couple thousand phone calls chats emails We were doing them ourselves like until we hired the first, you know A couple people we had a round robin on a Google voice number for our phone support And so if someone called us at two o'clock in the morning It would just go to my cell phone And so a lot of our first customers are even friends with us today because when they needed something We were there for them But what it taught us was that if you have that obsessive focus you're gonna have Customers that are obsessive about your brand that are going to go and tell lots of other people about it and then you all of a sudden have the scaling effect where you know one person tells ten people tell a hundred people Tell a thousand people tell a million people and you can end up growing pretty quickly like that And so when people say like, you know, we've built a brand I we're very proud of the fact that I think in terms of our visual identity. We're quirky. We're fun We're trying to create a brand that's really focused on sleep and then inspires people that sleep is the third pillar really, right? It's going to be what motivates people But it's not just about the way we look right if we didn't act that way if you didn't believe that Casper is a good company and I trust them and they have amazing service and amazing products Then it would feel hollow, right? You would see this like veneer of an identity But then when you actually shop with them you're like, oh, but they make crappy stuff, right? And I think part of the reason that what comes with growth is when two plus two can equal four five six Because you've actually locked in those pieces together You can end up scaling a lot faster than you could ever possibly imagine So you decided to then differentiate a bit and I have betting products and you have a dog mattress You know, how far do you take that when you have that core product that really made your business? When do you say enough? This is this is where we're gonna end our expansion of the brand This is not true to the brand anymore. I Think for us the mattress is just a starting point, you know We never were originally like we talked about in small vision the mattress market is enormous, right? $14 billion in the United States 20 30 billion dollars globally There's the potential to build an enormous business here, right in just that category but the reality is that Mattresses are just the entry point the starting point, right? Like none of you wake up every day here and think to yourself. Wow, like I Wake up every day just because of some small vision that I'm doing some micro thing, right? Like what motivates us on a day-to-day basis is really thinking about how can we create an entire ecosystem that's gonna dramatically change your life? And it I'll tell you a story. I remember Early on in the days of Casper. I ended up and this kind of inspired our service philosophy as well Talking to so in our in our we ordered like something like 40 mattresses when we first launched because we thought okay These are gonna take us a couple months to sell, you know, we didn't have a lot of inventory everything was made by hand and so In the first day we sold something like over a hundred thousand dollars with the product in the first month over a million dollars worth and We were very very humbled but one of the things we did is We didn't quite realize how long it was gonna take us to deliver these beds, right? Because we we ended up having to scale the supply chain. It took a long time And so we accidentally promised some people that we were gonna send the mattresses within a couple days And we didn't fulfill that promise, right? So I remember hearing getting a phone call from a husband of a This woman who is about to give birth And they didn't have a mattress to come home to and sleep on and he was so angry and I remember just having this moment Where I was like, holy crap We have completely screwed up this situation for someone for whom sleep is the most important thing these people are new parents they're coming home they're gonna bring a child into the world and You know the precious minutes that they have are super super important and so connecting to that higher-order purpose is really what matters, right? It's not about just Shipping a block of foam to someone's home. And so that's what kind of like has continued to motivate us on a day-to-day basis is thinking about If we can optimize your sleep environment 5% 10% 15% on an ongoing basis There aren't many things that you can do besides exercising and eating healthier that will fundamentally completely change your life You know and even the compounding effects if you slept 10% better every day think about like what would happen, right? You would be more creative you'd be more interesting You could do so many more fun things in the world if you could sleep better and so when it comes to products We've been super obsessive about always finding a key insight, you know when it comes to sheets for example We thought how interesting could the textiles business be right like sheets? They've been around for hundreds of years people sleep on them whatever, but it turns out that There's always a key insight that's super interesting at any given market So when it comes to sheets we've been told forever that thousand thread count hotel collection Egyptian cotton you have to have these like super expensive sheets, but when you actually study What ends up happening when people use like thousand thread count sheets? What the weave right which is super tight on a high thread count sheets makes it really really difficult to to breathe underneath them And so during the course of the night if you end up having high thread count sheets people oftentimes are kicking out their feet underneath their sheets You're getting sweaty. It's you're getting humid realize like wait. There's something really interesting here, right? We've been told forever. We have to sleep on a high thread count But when you put sensors on people we find that the dew point is peaking humidity is peaking temperatures peaking There's got to be something interesting here And so we ended up inventing a whole new kind of weave that's just as soft but But actually is way way more breathable so you can sleep better And so I think there's the when you when you have a really interesting problem in mind, right? How to help people sleep better so they can live a better life? You can actually take really mundane things like sheets or mattresses or whatever it may be but completely change the way people think about them So they invest in them and can live a much better life And you've now sell in stores So I see you started online and you've gone to stores sort of the opposite of what a lot of major retail companies are trying to do now How'd you do that? And how scared of you are you of the current retail environment? I love retail stores I people always say retail is gonna like raise your hand if you shopped in a store in the last week Right almost everyone here has shopped at a store, right? I mean look I love Amazon. I buy a lot of things on Amazon But the reality is going into a good like why does everyone love going to the Apple store because it's fun You go inside you get to guys can you imagine like going to a place where you love giving them your credit card? You're like, please no give me the iPhone X. I want it Like that's the kind of retail experiences we should be creating where people are having fun inside and you're you're social and like We learn this because our very first office was on Bond Street in New York It was the second floor loft and we had a bedroom in the back I guess now it seems kind of creepy But you know people could just walk inside and there was a bedroom and like you'd walk past our desks and you could you know try out the mattress and so You know the first couple thousand customers would just walk into our office and try it out if they wanted to But on Saturdays something crazy would happen, right? We'd open up champagne. We'd have cookies We'd have like you know dog treats out and the normal mattress store has like one or two people a day come by right? We'd have hundreds of people walking into a second-story loft and like it became a party and I had this one moment Where I remember I walked outside and someone was like holy crap This is like the coolest party in town right now and everything to myself like we're selling mattresses And someone just said this is the coolest party in town You're doing something right there if you really care about making amazing experiences and you can make them social and you get people talking about Their lives and and and what they care about and you can turn to an experience where it's fun Then we tell can be amazing and we'll continue to do that You know we just opened up 15 pop-up stores throughout the US. We have an amazing relationship with Target where We'll be doing a lot of interesting things with them and so I think that you know We're obsessed about creating You know on amazing omni-channel experiences and it'll start with digital, but of course it'll involve Interpersonal things like retail when they get one quick one in our last second any plans for you guys to take the company public and What would it take for that? TBD, all right figured that was tight for the last one. Thanks so much. Think that's our time's up But thanks for everyone for tuning in and Thanks for having us. We'll hopefully can get all the good night sleep on a cast of mattress. Thank you You