Investing Billions - E184: How Casper Hit $100M in Year One: The Untold Startup Playbook

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Philip Krim is best known as the co-founder and former CEO of Casper, one of the fastest-growing direct-to-consumer (DTC) startups in history. Under his leadership, Casper hit $100M in revenue in its first year, went public in early 2020, and was later taken private. Today, Philip is building again—this time through Montauk Climate, a platform innovating in what he calls the “electron economy.” We talked about lessons from hypergrowth, managing through crisis, organizational design, and the future of climate investing.

Walk me through the origin story for Casper. What gap did you see in the market? How did you go about attacking that gap? I'm one of five co-founders with Casper and we started working on the idea in 2013. Back in 2013, direct-to-consumer as a business model was really starting to emerge and we started to see what was happening in some other industries like eyeglasses and what Warby Parker was doing, clothing and what Bonobos was doing, Harry's and Razor's. And we thought to ourselves that the mattress industry was one that was ripe for this type of innovation.

And we started to grow at LearHippo Ventures, exceptional, always a great coach and mentor. And so we were lucky that I was surrounded by great partners, my co-founders, all cared deeply about scaling the business, hiring great people, training great people, making sure that they were set up for success. And so it was a concerted effort at every level of the organization. Brian Chesky, founder and CEO of Airbnb, popularized this entire concept of before

you interview somebody, talk to 10 world-class people or maybe 20, 30 in that category in order to understand what greatness looks like.