DOUBTS, FEARS, AND TWO VERY BAD YEARS
NICK WOODMAN IS CRYING. Red-tailed hawks wheel around the sky outside the wall of windows of the GoPro founder’s hilltop office in San Mateo, California. A few miles east and far below, the San Francisco Bay twinkles in the late-September light. Mementos of a life spent surfing around the world, driving racecars, and hanging out with his heroes, like surfing legend Kelly Slater, line the credenza behind Woodman’s desk.
A day ago, the 42-year-old Woodman stood center stage in the planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences and introduced his company’s latest cameras and services, along with virtual-reality videos projected onto the room’s domed ceiling to show off all the new tricks the products can pull off. Today, a bit bleary from the festivities that followed, Woodman is opening up about the long, difficult journey that led to this launch—one that saw his publicly traded company’s stock bottom out below $8 a share, down from the high of $98.
After a decade of breakneck growth, GoPro held one of the most successful tech IPOs of 2014, which earned Woodman comparisons to Steve Jobs. But the past two years have been a cautionary tale: botched product rollouts, sweeping layoffs, a giant new initiative shuttered. The company was profitable each year following its bootstrapped launch, but it has lost money every quarter from the end of 2015 until the third quarter of 2017.
The nadir came in late 2016. That September, after a devastating year of setbacks, GoPro announced a long-awaited new product, a drone called the Karma. Within a few weeks of the release, drones were losing power midflight and falling from the sky. The product intended to herald GoPro’s triumphant comeback was, literally, crashing to the ground, and sooner or later one would hit somebody. Maybe a child. That thought, amid a long retelling of company woes, is what makes Woodman break down.
The company that he dreamed up on an extended 2002 trip to Australia and Indonesia because he wanted to film himself surfing, that created an entirely new product category and the world’s best-selling camera, that made him and his best friends who joined the company early on fabulously wealthy—that company was now a punch line, and maybe a threat to safety. As of the autumn of 2017, GoPro has delivered three solid quarters in a row—growing revenue, cutting costs, meeting or beating guidance—and it claims it will return to steady profitability in 2018.
