How GoPro cameras have made nothing unfilmable, by the man who invented them

Nick Woodman, the visionary behind GoPro, tells The Telegraph how what started as a means of capturing his surfing exploits on film is now a $3 billion business

Nick Woodman, the founder and CEO of GoPro: 'It helps if you working on something you are immensely passionate about'
Nick Woodman, the founder and CEO of GoPro: 'It helps if you working on something you are immensely passionate about' Credit: Photo: GoPro

Nick Woodman is radiating pride. ‘I wore a GoPro camera on my head for all three of my boys’ births, he says, smiling as only a sunny Californian recollecting the business-end of crowning in the champagne bar of London’s Mandarin Oriental hotel can. ‘Every once in a while my wife and I will open a bottle of wine, sit back and watch the first moments of our children’s lives outside of the womb. And it’s in such stunning detail that it really feels like you’re there.’

He was there, of course, but this is the passion with which Woodman, 39, fuels his business. Woodman created the GoPro digital camera in 2002, inspiring millions of us to record our life experiences through its signature wide-angle lens before sharing them online. Thanks to sites such as YouTube, the resulting footage often goes viral. Examples include a GoPro on a bottle of whiskey passed round at a wedding (2.3 million views); a GoPro on the back of an eagle soaring above the French Alps (9.1 million views), and even an attempted robbery at gunpoint caught on a GoPro (7.7 million views). The best films are curated for GoPro’s own marketing videos on its YouTube channel. Its most popular video – a five-minute clip showing off the Hero 3 camera’s capabilities – has to date 37 million views and counting.

It turns out we are obsessed with sharing this stuff. GoPro’s five YouTube channels have over three million subscribers, and its videos have been watched more than 758 million times. Woodman’s customers are selling the brand for him. ‘It’s a marketer’s dream,’ Woodman says, ‘and they’re happy to do it.’

Born in Atherton, California, a wealthy suburb in Silicon Valley, Nick Woodman has two sisters, Andrea and Pilar, who have worked for GoPro since 2009 and 2011 respectively. Their father, Dean – now in his mid-80s – was born into a Quaker family and served in the United States Naval Air Corps before becoming a wildly successful investment banker. Woodman’s mother, Concepcion Socarras, stayed at home to look after their three children. (His parents divorced and both are now remarried.) Woodman graduated from the independent Menlo School in 1993 – after forming its first surf club – then went to the University of California, San Diego, when he majored in visual arts. Its proximity to the beach was its primary attraction, Woodman once said. After college came what in Cali-speak is best described as an epic fail.

As the dotcom bubble grew in the early millennium, Woodman leapt in with his own online marketing and gaming platform, funbug.com. ‘For the peak three months of it being live it was rated the number seven most addictive website on all the web. And then number two. And then number four. And then we went out of business.’ And $3.9 million of investment went with it. ‘FunBug wasn’t successful as a business because we never became profitable, and,’ he says, ‘that’s a very important aspect of business.

‘It taught me an important lesson: it helps if you’re working on something that you are immensely passionate about. And when I look at where I succeeded as an entrepreneur and failed as an entrepreneur, I succeeded in the areas I was passionate, and I failed in the areas I wasn’t.’

A former college friend, Chris Clark, remembers Woodman ‘routinely’ getting up at 5am between their third and final university years and persuading him to go surfing before heading to summer jobs. Clark told CNBC that even then, Woodman was passionate about technology and would try to capture their sessions in the water with a waterproof camera. After the failure of funBug the 26-year-old Woodman took a five-month sabbatical to indulge his great passion, surfing. ‘It gives you a purpose when you hit the road,’ he says, ‘sort of like you’re a benevolent hunter searching for the perfect wave.’

PHOTO: GoPro

It was during this time out that he had his lightbulb moment, for a camera that he could wear in the water to document his surfing experiences. It was a market that didn’t exist. Woodman Labs was born in 2002, and a wrist-strap-mounted, image-only 35mm camera called the GoPro was its sole product. His father invested $200,000 in the venture.

The company grew with employees pooled from close university friends. His college girlfriend – and now wife – Jill R Scully, an aspiring jewellery designer, was employee number three. ‘She managed all North American direct sales up until she took leave to have our first child,’ Woodman says. ‘So she was responsible for selling to all of the surf and ski shops – thousands of stores across the US.’

Watch: Leopard steals GoPro camera

From that small start-up growth was slow, then went vertical in 2009 with the release of the first digital Hero HD camera – the brand’s signature, Wi-Fi capable product that can be fixed to almost anything – which quadrupled sales to $3.4 million. Part of the success comes from the company’s special camera mounts. These can attach a GoPro to your surfboard, or its fins, or to skis and snowboards, helmets, aeroplane wings, cars doors, poles, chests. The latest addition to the line-up is Fetch, the GoPro harness for your dog. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company almost doubled its revenue in three consecutive years, from $234.2 million in 2011, to $526 million in 2012 and $985.7 million in 2013.

In June last year Woodman took the company public. The initial public offering (IPO) priced the stock at $24 a share and valued GoPro at $2.96 billion. In January this year GoPro endured a 12 per cent share slump after speculation that Apple had patented a wearable camera. And the IPO delivered close scrutiny. A standard ‘lockup’ agreement prevented the Woodmans from selling any shares for six months. But a surprise donation within this period of 5,821,739 shares out of GoPro and into a new entity, the Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation, sent the stock nose-diving and ruffled feathers.

PHOTO: GoPro

‘This is something that’s been really important to my wife and me since the early days,’ Woodman explains. ‘We’re big believers in karma. And we’re big believers that we’d like to live in a world where we can return the favour of the opportunities that have been given to us in life. And we recognised early on that should GoPro be as successful as we hoped it would be, that it would be our responsibility to return that favour in a major way. So there is a pledge that my wife and I made to each other that we would do this, and establishing our foundation is really our first step in realising that promise to each other, and, frankly, the promise to the rest of the world that we would do this. The success of the business creates an opportunity for us to do an incredible amount of good.’

He is talking around it because as yet, he admits, it is still not defined. ‘You have to ask yourself how much does any one person or one family need? And when you start thinking about the universe as an organism, it’s important that we as components of that organism take care of each other and ourselves. So we chose to live in a world where we all work to help to take care of each other and we find ourselves now in the position where we have more than we need. So how could we not give back? How could we not do it? And it’s exciting that we’re finally here. And we’re finally taking our first steps.

PHOTO: GoPro

‘And, you know, I am not an expert on philanthropy, so I want to be careful that I don’t misrepresent what’s already happening. But I think Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and the Giving Pledge [the world’s richest individuals and families pledging more than half their wealth to philanthropic or charitable causes], for example, is a phenomenal movement. It’s raising awareness that these very successful people are also extremely generous and they do have a broader vision that isn’t all just about personal interest.’

Woodman is in London on a spur-of-the-moment trip. ‘I got an email from the Crown Prince of Norway asking me to talk at a summit for young Norwegian entrepreneurs,’ he says. ‘I ran to my wife and was like, “Hey! I got an email from the Prince of Norway!” He had a little story about a surfing trip in Bali with his GoPro that was rather elaborate, plus the email had the family crest… so I said I’d love to come.’ And so London and Berlin get a flying visit to show off the ‘killer’ new product – the GoPro Hero 4 Black Edition, which features an ultra high-resolution display and a processor twice as powerful as any GoPro predecessor.

Watch: GoPro footage of motocross bike scaling bridge

Does Woodman have any spectacular ways of spending his cash? ‘Ha! Let me tell you I’m just extremely excited to explore the planet that we’re living on,’ he says. ‘You know, being a surfer, I’ve had the privilege of having done quite a bit of travel in my youth and been to some amazing places in Indonesia, around Australia… even surfing here in Europe. And I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface, as I feel it relates to exploring our own planet.

‘I’m also fascinated by what’s below the surface of the ocean. I mean, some people are fascinated by outer space, and I think it would be phenomenal to travel there, but I’d like to get in a submarine and see the world that exists down there and visit the aliens – the sea creatures – and the mountain ranges, and the incredible world beneath the surface. I’m excited to take my family there,’ he adds. ‘If I’m not working I’m with my family as much as I can be. And you know, surfing is a challenge in that is a bit of a solitary sport where I live in northern California, which means time spent away from the family. So now my passion is to try to take short little trips – three or four days – with the family, where I can start to introduce my boys, and hopefully one day my wife, to the joy of surfing.’

PHOTO: GoPro

Jill once ventured into the ocean with Woodman. ‘I thought the surf was small,’ he says, ‘and… it didn’t go so well. I scared her. So that taught me the lesson with my boys of, you know, introducing them very slowly.’

Woodman’s ambitions lie beyond broadening the minds of his own children. He comes back to the intended work of the Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation. ‘Let’s say you take a kid from the inner city whose world is maybe very small, and they’re maybe not as motivated as they otherwise would be because they think, “What’s the point?”’, he says. ‘But if you take them out of their immediate surroundings and introduce to them to people from other cultures and other experiences, and blow their minds about this world we really live in… I think that you can do them a great service. Because they can go back home with a broader perspective of what it means to be alive, and maybe have the motivation to go out and live a bigger life.’

Thanks to social media, peering into a bigger life is, for any of us, little more than a click away. Search for a GoPro film on YouTube and the results are endless. Woodman believes the platform made the brand. ‘You probably wouldn’t know about us without it,’ he admits. ‘What do most people think about when they think of GoPro? All the incredible videos and interesting photos people are sharing and which are going viral. And that is a phenomenal opportunity for a company like us, because it gives us the ability to be relevant to everybody.’

This is, Woodman explains, because we all think of the content rather than the product. ‘Every single human on earth is a customer for interesting, engaging content. When that GoPro logo hits, you know you’re about to see something interesting, and you pay attention. The majority of the video comes from our customers and it’s wildly authentic. It puts us in the position where our customers are selling our products for us. And it happens while we sleep.’

PHOTO: GoPro

Many have tried to compete. Sony’s snappily-titled Action Cam HDR-AS100V was moderately successful, and Apple is, of course, looming. ‘I think we’re just fortunate that we had the idea first and we’ve done a good job of executing it.’ Woodman says. ‘Most importantly, we’ve been enabling our customers to self-document doing what they love to do, showing them what they look like living their lives and help them look good doing it. And when people see that, they fall in love with the product that enabled them to do so. It’s sort of like we creatively enable the world to capture and share itself. And I don’t think people are ever going to grow tired of watching other people live interesting lives.

‘You could think about GoPro as an iPod-like phenomenon that has yet to launch its iTunes. Apple eliminated the pain points of capturing, managing and enjoying massive amounts of content, and so people started to buy not dozens of songs, but hundreds if not thousands. The experience was so easy that they did it in scale. We’re in the content creation business, so you can think of GoPro’s opportunities as similar to an iPod/iTunes model but inverted, and when we make it that easy for you to share compelling short-form content of anything that you’re interested in, we think that you’ll do it more often.

‘You know, you start a business that’s centred around the things you’re passionate about in life and then the success of the business becomes a bit of a responsibility that keeps you from some of these things you’re so passionate about. And it’s really important that you maintain balance and stay in touch with why you started the business in the first place. Because I still believe that that’s where some of your best ideas come from. When you’re pursuing your passions. You’re turned on. You’re with your friends. Some of our best products were born out on the surf or on the mountain or in the air, not in a boardroom.’

The GoPro Hero 4 range is available now