The mad billionaire behind GoPro was once a failed dot-commer obsessed with surfing — and coming up with a wrist camera to capture his exploits:
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 unknown entity named Hotax. Woodman received his 3-D models and renderings a few months later and sold his first product in September 2004 at an action-sports trade show in San Diego.
That was the first validation for Woodman, whose friends thought their former surfing buddy had held his breath underwater for a little too long. Neil Dana, his roommate and first hire, recalls a work-obsessed guy constantly fixated on success. “We would be at a party,” Dana recalls, “and he would come up the stairs and be like, ‘Dude, check this out, this is how we’re going to become millionaires!’ ” Woodman was only three zeroes off.
GoPro grossed $350,000 in its first full year of sales. Woodman was the all-in-one product engineer, R&D head, salesman and packaging model. He and Dana rang up surf shops across the country hoping to get some of their product out of Woodman’s father’s home in Sausalito and into the market. In 2005 he appeared on QVC three times, running into Spanx founder and fellow future billionaire Sara Blakely while she was building her company as well. (“If she remembers me, I’ll be amazed,” says Woodman. “But I’d love to get word to her to give her a digital high-five on crushing it.”)
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%. 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 investment arm, which allowed him, his family and some early executives to take a good chunk of cash out.