Five Startup Lessons From GoPro Founder And

Billionaire Nick Woodman

forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/03/13/five-startup-lessons-from-gopro-founder-and-billionaire-nick-woodman

13 March 2013

Mar 13, 2013,01:21pm EDT

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 Nothing is too big for GoPro founder Nicholas Woodman. (Taylor Soppe/Forbes)

The most recent issue of FORBES features the story of Nicholas Woodman, the surf
fanatic turned entrepreneur who made his debut appearance on the World's Billionaires
List earlier this month. The founder and CEO of digital camcorder company GoPro, 37-
year-old Woodman has turned an initial idea to tether cameras to athletes' wrists into a
social phenomenon valued at $2.25 billion.

A little more than a decade since initiating the company, Woodman is now among the
youngest self-made billionaires of the 1,426 individuals on the Billionaires List this year.
Driven by both a fear of failure and a desire to build a product that simply wasn't
available, GoPro's founder is riding a wave that he largely created himself. While he'll
concede that he's had his fair share of luck along the way, those closest to Woodman
attribute the company's success to its creator's motivation.

"He has a tremendous drive and presence, and when he says we’re going to do something,
I’ve come to believe it," says former Flextronics CEO Michael Marks, who invested in
GoPro through his venture fund at Riverwood Capital. "He completely wills things into
existence."

That trait, which has been used to describe other entrepreneurial giants (see: Steve Jobs),
is not unique to Woodman. But it is one of a few key characteristics that turned a
hyperactive founder of a dot-com failure into one of Silicon Valley's newest success
stories. In dissecting GoPro and its founder's past, there are other entrepreneurial lessons
to be learned. Here are five tips from Nick Woodman's business endeavors so far:

1) Follow your passions.

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Entering his senior year of high school, Woodman was the all-American teenager.
Growing up in the posh Silicon Valley suburb of Atherton, Calif., he was a lanky kid with
boundless energy, playing football and baseball before becoming infatuated with surfing.
That infatuation turned into a full-on fixation, at the expense of his other hobbies and
sports.

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In his last year of high school, he dropped all team sports and kept his academics on
cruise control--Woodman says he was a B+ student--to focus on surfing (Woodman's
other passion at the time was building remote control gliders to appease his "geek side.")
Woodman says he decided to go to college at the University of California, San Diego
because of its proximity to the beach and continued to surf long after finishing college--
which eventually brought him to the idea of GoPro.

"I feel like in a world where we all try to figure out our place and our purpose here, your
passions are one of your most obvious guides," says Woodman. "They lead you along life’s
path and whether that’s [to] your career or to the people that lead you to your career."

GoPro started as an idea for a wrist strap to tether already existing camera models to
surfers' wrists, allowing Woodman to take photos of himself and his friends while surfing.
He later tested the idea on a five-month surf trip to Australia and Indonesia, before
deciding to build out a camera, casing and strap to sell to consumers. "When I think about
dropping team sports and picking up surfing and also then geeking out radio control
planes and gadgetry and all that stuff I love, that’s what really now has led me in big part
to GoPro," he says.

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"I failed and deserved to be on f**ckedcompany," says Woodman. (Eric Millette for Forbes)

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2) Fear failure.

In Silicon Valley where failures are celebrated on C.V.'s as examples of entrepreneurial

experience, Woodman is the outlier. He has internalized a fear of failure. Before starting
GoPro, he had two startups. The first, a website called EmpowerAll.com, attempted to sell
electronic goods for no more than a $2 markup and was quickly shut down after failing to
get off the ground.

It was Woodman's second startup (and failure), however, that had the greatest impact on
his future career. Woodman started Funbug in 1999 as a gaming and marketing platform
that gave users the chance to win cash prizes. Raising capital from investors whom he had
met during his short stint as a private equity firm tech analyst, he had $3.9 million in
funding by the height of the dot-com frenzy. A year later, in April 2001, the company was
face down in the water, unable to gain traction among users. In the annals of Silicon
Valley history, it will be forever memorialized on the now defunct f**ckedcompany.com, a
site that gleefully catalogued the era's biggest busts.

"I failed and deserved to be on f**ckedcompany," says Woodman. "I mean nobody likes to
fail, but the worst thing was I lost my investors' money and these were people that
believed in this young guy that was passionate about this idea... [When you fail,] you start
to question, are my ideas really good?"

Woodman took the company's collapse personally and after returning rejuvenated from
an extended surf trip, put his head down to perfect GoPro. Spending 18 hour days at his
desk, Woodman went from drilling pieces together for prototypes to making 3 AM phone
calls to China to obtain the right parts for his camera. He unveiled his first product--a
35mm film camera--in September 2004.

"I was so afraid that GoPro was going to go away like Funbug that I would work my ass
off," he says, recalling days where he was the company's only employee, acting as its truck
driver, salesman, product designer, customer service support and product model. Says
Woodman of his "constructive fear:" "That’s what the first boom and bust did for me. I
was so scared that I would fail again that I was totally committed to succeed."

3) Obsess over your product.

Those who know the GoPro founder best say Woodman can become fixated on his
interests. GoPro became more than a fixation. "I’ll let myself obsess over things," says
Woodman. "To get GoPro started I moved back in with my parents and went to work
seven days a week, 20 hours a day. I wrote off my personal life to make headway on it."

Taking dedication to the extreme, Woodman, then 26, gave himself four years to make
something of his idea. He didn't waste a single minute of that time. He recounts many
hours sitting at his desk, switching from a sewing machine for the wrist straps to his drill
to carve out bits and pieces of raw plastic to develop the model he wanted.

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Without the engineering chops to develop a camera from scratch, Woodman outsourced,
searching for an already-developed device at camera trade shows that he could license
and modify to his liking. He settled on a $3.05 film camera from Chinese manufacturer
Hotax, mailing back and forth with the company to ensure that they could develop the
specifications to his liking. "We did the whole deal by Fed-Exing designs back and forth,"
says Woodman. "I sent plastic models with drilled designs because I didn't know how to
use CAD [computer-aided design]."

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Despite his limitations, Woodman knew exactly what he wanted with each product and he
wasn't afraid to pull the plug if the models weren't up to standard. On the transition to
digital cameras, a Chinese manufacturer switched to cheaper parts without telling him,
forcing Woodman to cut the deal altogether. That delayed GoPro's switch to digital
cameras, but Woodman refused to compromise his camera for the sake of being quicker to
market. Today, Woodman is still very much in touch with the product and GoPro now
maintains an in-house group of about 130 engineers, according to its CEO.

4) Learn to sell.

Watch Video At: https://youtu.be/i89qZNFf6_E

Woodman is a salesman at heart. For all his product vision and motivation, the GoPro
founder has learned how to chase and close deals. The kid who sold lemonade on the
street corner and the teenager who sold t-shirts at high school football games to fund his
surfing exploits, Woodman became the master of the quick buck. In funding his first year
of GoPro, he sold imported belts from Indonesia for sometimes 50 times the original
purchase price. He lived out of his 1971 Volkswagen Bus, driving up and down the coast of

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California to approach people on the beach or at concert venues with his product. "I can
sell anything that I totally believe in but I’m a horrible salesman of something I don’t
believe in," he says.

It goes without saying that Woodman was a believer in GoPro, but it took time convincing
people to share his sentiment. To do so, Woodman hit the trade show circuit, starting at
specialty sports exhibitions. He sold his first GoPros in September 2004 at San Diego's
Action Sports Retailer show and spent countless days ringing up surf shops around the
country to convince them to put the original cameras on their shelves. GoPro closed 2004
with $150,000 in revenue. The next year the company checked in with $350,000 in sales,
after Woodman hired college buddy Neil Dana to run sales and appeared on home
shopping network QVC to hawk his cameras (see one of Woodman's appearance on the
channel is in the video clip above).

Moving from trade show to trade show enabled GoPro to develop a following among
action sports enthusiasts. But GoPro's CEO also had bigger plans. At outdoors industry
exhibitions, Woodman would always engage executives at REI, emailing them once a
month to update them on the company and product's progress. Soon enough GoPro found
its way inside that popular outdoor sports retailer, and by 2010 GoPro's product was
available at Best Buy . "It means a lot to a retail buyer to see you year after year,
improving and scaling," says Woodman. "It gives them comfort that you're successful in
business and therefore have a shot at being successful at helping them sell your products."

"Evolve or die,"
says
Woodman.
(Eric Millette
for Forbes)

5) Evolve or die.

It took 10 years from GoPro to shift from selling 35mm film cameras to HD quality,
panoramic digital video camcorders. That decade of change was marked by more than
seven iterations of cameras, with each new version building on the shortcomings of its
immediate predecessor. (You can find a full interactive timeline of GoPro's evolution
here.)

When unveiling his first film camera, Woodman already knew what he wanted next:
digital capability. Woodman remembers Dana pestering him about the change: "He would
say, 'Dude, show me the dig. Dude, we’re selling a film camera in the digital era!'" Less
than two years after GoPro's debut, the company had a digital camera by 2006 with 10-
second video capability. The next version, in 2007, brought sound, unlimited video

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capture and improved video quality. By 2010, the company had its first HD camera.
Today, the company's top-of-the-line $400 Hero3 Black edition has 12-megapixel photo
capability and 1080p video at 60 frames per second.

Those quick transitions are key for a young company that's nimble on its feet. In the last
two years, Woodman has taken a page from Apple 's book, refreshing his whole product
line twice. Woodman says it is necessary for GoPro to function that way in order to avoid
the pitfalls that have befallen past video darlings like the now shuttered Flip camera.
"Evolve or die," he says. "We’re confident in our ability to innovate and have products that
people will be excited about."

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Follow me on Twitter at @RMac18.

Ryan Mac
I'm a San Francisco-based reporter covering the agitators in technology and e-commerce.
I started at Forbes as a member of the wealth team, putting together the…

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