Casper

We're doing something nobody else is doing and completely disrupting industry norms — Casper was created to re-imagine sleep from the ground up. We saw how horrible the in-store mattress purchasing experience can be, and knew that we could do better. Almost everyone said “no one will ever buy a mattress online,” but we've managed to prove that's not true, especially if you offer amazing service and you have the best product. Our hypothesis was that people would actually try it out, love it, and tell other people — and that's exactly what happened. People love our approach, which allowed us to generate $1 million in sales in our first month, and $30 million in sales in the first 14 months.

We're growing fast and seeing widespread success — We had aggressive early growth in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In that time, we've gone from a lean five-founder start-up to an operation with more than 250 employees in multiple cities around the world and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales. Three years in, we have millions of happy sleepers under our belt and we're only getting better: we recently released a suite of complementary products including sheets, pillows, and even a dog bed.

We're focused on building a user-centric product that people love — We're inspired by design agencies like IDEO that practice human-centered design. In almost everything that we do—as opposed to saying, Let's come up with an idea for a product and hope people like it—everything starts with understanding what the customer wants. When we set out to make sheets, for example, we interviewed tons of people and monitored their sleeping patterns to figure out what goes on in the bedroom. This has allowed us to discover really interesting things, like the fact that sleeping on high thread count sheets don't actually help you sleep better. We also take inspiration from companies like Apple, whose teams focus on being the best in class. We have teams that are just focused on the covers of our products, or just the packaging. We think about every single functional detail of our products.