GoPro’s Nick Woodman lived to surf and take photos doing it. A reminder of the most powerful model in business: Doing what you love
Nick Woodman is 37 years old. His constantly tousled sepia hair and permanent, mischievous half-grin make him look 27. And he acts 17, as I learn 30,000 feet above the Rocky Mountains, after Woodman packed me, his wife Jill, and a dozen of his favourite colleagues and buds into a chartered Gulfstream III en route to Montana’s Yellowstone Club, the most exclusive ski hill in the US.
Already hopped up on Red Bull, tempered by a litre of coconut water, Woodman darts about the cabin, occasionally breaking conversation to unleash his trademark excited wail that friends liken to a foghorn. “YEEEEEEEEEEEEEOW.” A flight attendant emerges with breakfast on a silver platter. “You know what the best thing about morning ski trips are?” he asks the cabin rhetorically. “McDonald’s!” And with that he inhales a McGriddle in all of three bites.
The man-teen routine is more than an act: It’s the recipe for how he’s become one of America’s newest and youngest billionaires. A decade ago, Woodman craved a camera he could strap to his wrist so that his buddies could see his surfing exploits. The result is now a consumer phenomenon called GoPro, America’s fastest-growing digital imaging company.
Go anywhere active these days, whether it’s the mountains of Vail or the scuba-diving depths of Honolulu’s Hanauma Bay, and you’re bound to see a GoPro or 20. Kids these days don’t film their wave rides or half-pipe tricks. They GoPro them, strapping the $200 to $400 cameras to helmets, handlebars and surfboards. The cinema-grade, panoramic “point-of-view” footage that comes out of a GoPro transforms mere mortals into human highlight reels, without blowing a huge hole in the budget. Shaun White, who says he used to tape old cameras to his hand, used GoPros on his runs during the Winter X Games. Hollywood directors, including Michael Bay, keep crates of them on set. The NFL has tested them in their end zone pylons to capture touchdown replays. The Rolling Stones deployed them on stage. Police forces and the US military have started to incorporate the cameras into training exercises. Woodman, who calls it a “life” camera, proved the point by wearing one on his chest at the deliveries of his sons. On the plane to Montana, Woodman’s GoPro crew rigged their devices in every cranny in the cabin, including on the pilots’ heads, to document their journey.
GoPro sales have more than doubled every year since the first camera’s debut in 2004. In 2012, the company sold 2.3 million cameras and grossed $521 million, according to Woodman; with $100 million in sales in January alone, that annual figure should again double this year. For the month of December, GoPro was the highest-grossing digital imaging brand at Best Buy, knocking out Sony for the first time in the chain’s history. Just 10 years old, GoPro was responsible for 21.5 percent of digital camcorder shipments nationwide in the first half of 2012, according to IDC data. Among “pocket camcorders” that figure swells to a third.
This type of growth and niche dominance have made for a “rad” business proposition, with Chinese electronics manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, better known as Foxconn, making a $200 million investment in GoPro in December. That valued the San Mateo, California, firm at $2.25 billion and shot Woodman, who sources say still owns about 45 percent of the company, onto the Forbes World Billionaires list with a net worth of $1.3 billion.
It’s a head-spinning turn of events for a 37-year-old Peter Pan running a billion-dollar technology company. As he barrels through Yellowstone’s freshly groomed powder in a pea-green helmet, it’s clear he’s found bliss. “YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOW,” he howls from his bloodied and chapped lips as he GoPros his every turn.
As the youngest of four children, Woodman has always been something of a schemer. Growing up in Silicon Valley’s prosperous Atherton (his father brokered Pepsi’s purchase of Taco Bell), he was, as his teachers recall, a “supremely confident” boy who wasn’t afraid to challenge those in charge. “There was always a smile on his face, either a great big one or a kind of sly, smirky thing,” said Craig Schoof, Woodman’s former baseball coach and history teacher. “There was the, ‘yeah, I’m happy’ or the ‘yeah, I’m happy, and I’m planning something.’ ” He once made a fiver by betting a biology teacher he could run a mile under 6 minutes (he ran it in 5:40).
Woodman focussed more on sports than books, maintaining a B+ average and copping a middling SAT score. He eventually became wave-obsessed, attending the University of California, San Diego, because of its proximity to sunshine and salt water. “I remember my parents not being very supportive of it,” he says. “But if I didn’t follow my passion for surfing ... I would have never come up with the concept to make a wrist camera.”
Woodman eschewed venture capital as he grew—a by-product of his Funbug experience and a desire to work without suits interfering. Says Dana, “He wanted to keep it private for as long as possible so he could get a Lotus for ‘product testing’ and do things and not have to answer to a board about it.” At the outset, Woodman dropped in $30,000 of his own money, as well as $35,000 from his mother and two $100,000 investments from his father. The company made money from that point and today boasts profit margins, Forbes estimates, around 15 percent. It wasn’t until May 2011 that GoPro took on $88 million from five venture firms including Riverwood Capital, led by former Flextronics CEO Michael Marks, and Steamboat Ventures, Disney’s venture invest- ment arm, which allowed him, his family and some early executives to take a good chunk of cash out.
GoPro’s competitors are the first to acknowledge this. Giovanni Tomaselli, founder of action cameramaker iON Worldwide, says Woodman “deserves to be a billionaire” for his innovation and that iON had “taken a leaf out of [GoPro’s] book” when it came to promoting its first products, which launched in 2012. But he remains defiant: “We do not believe this category is one-size-fits-all.”
(This story appears in the 05 April, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)