Shark Tank investor and co-founder of RSE Ventures Matt Higgins thinks a change is coming to the DTC playbook.

"I think it's amazing that you can come along and challenge taboo thinking around ED, or you can go ahead and create an entirely new cereal brand, launch it right away and get scale. That's not going away," Higgins said on the Modern Retail Podcast.

What is going away, he added, is the idea that digitally-native companies can stick solely to the online world and survive. "That part is not true, but it's kind of obvious, looking back," Higgins said. "You're going to go where the customer is."

Higgins talked about his prescription for Casper, Harvard Business School's week-long course on the DTC model and how it's time for a brand affinity metric.