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The Mad Billionaire Behind Gopro: the World's Hottest Camera Company - Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45 The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World's Hottest Camera Company - Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45 http://onforb.es/XEDJGn Ryan Mac Forbes Staff I cover technology and billionaires for the rest of the 99.9999999%. FORBES 3/04/2013 @ 6:59AM 433,416 views The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World's Hottest Camera Company This story appears in the March 25, 2013 issue of Forbes. Comment Now GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman poses with his signature camera. (Photo: Eric Millette for Forbes) 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 favorite colleagues and buds into a chartered Gulfstream III en route to Montana’s Yellowstone Club, the most exclusive ski hill in the U.S. Already hopped up on Red Bull, tempered by a liter 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 http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/03/04/the-mad-billionaire-behind-gopro-the-worlds-hottest-camera-company/print/ Page 1 of 8 The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World's Hottest Camera Company - Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45 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 U.S. 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 ten years old, GoPro was responsible for 21.5% 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, Calif. firm at $2.25 billion and shot Woodman, who sources say still owns about 45% of the company, onto the FORBES World Billionaires list with a net worth of $1.3 billion. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/03/04/the-mad-billionaire-behind-gopro-the-worlds-hottest-camera-company/print/ Page 2 of 8 The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World's Hottest Camera Company - Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45 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. World's Billionaires 2013: Nicholas Woodman Forbes The World’s Billionaires The names, numbers and stories behind the 1,426 people who control the global economy. In Pictures: The Richest People on the Planet 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). http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/03/04/the-mad-billionaire-behind-gopro-the-worlds-hottest-camera-company/print/ Page 3 of 8 The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World's Hottest Camera Company - Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45 Woodman focused 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.” That concept came a few years after college after an online gaming service he started, Funbug, went belly-up in the dot-com crash of 2000-01, taking with it $3.9 million of investors’ money. “I’d never failed at anything before except computer science engineering classes,” he says. “So it was like, ‘Holy s–t, maybe I’m not capable of doing this.’” To get his head straight again, Woodman lit out on a surf odyssey through Australia and Indonesia, one last big trip before what he figured would become a life of comfortable middle-class monotony. He brought a contraption he’d made out of a broken surfboard leash and rubber bands that allowed him to dangle a Kodak disposable camera to his wrist for easy operation when the perfect wave hit. Close friend and current GoPro creative director Brad Schmidt met Woodman in Indonesia and became one of the first to toy with the strap. One of his first observations: Woodman needed a camera durable enough to take the wear and tear of the sea. Five months into being a surf bum, a recharged Woodman returned to California with the seed of an idea. Woodman, then 27, holed up in the house he shared in Moss Beach, Calif., just over the hills from Silicon Valley. He “checked out” from his normal life, including friends and family, locking himself in his beachside bedroom to build his first prototypes. Deciding that he had to sell the strap, the camera and the casing, he armed himself with a drill and his mother’s sewing machine and strapped a Camelback filled half with Gatorade and half with water to his back (negating the 30-second walk to the kitchen) for 18-hour work sessions. “I’d have a sliding door to the outside so I could just go take a pee out on the bushes out on the side,” Woodman recalls. He gave himself four years to make it work before he would drop his idea and enter the workforce. “I was so scared that I would fail again that I was totally committed to succeed.”"After he took off, he was like, ‘I think I’m going to start this wrist strap company for surfers,’” says Schmidt, who was skeptical. Says Woodman: “I thought to myself, ‘If I made a few hundred grand a year, I’m, like, in heaven.’” Between sewing together old wetsuit material and drilling holes in raw plastic, Woodman was constantly trolling online and at trade shows for a camera he could modify and license as his own. He settled on a $3.05 35-millimeter model made in China, sending his plastic cases and $5,000 on a prayer to an http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/03/04/the-mad-billionaire-behind-gopro-the-worlds-hottest-camera-company/print/ Page 4 of 8 The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World's Hottest Camera Company - Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45 unknown entity named Hotax.
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