Doubts, Fears, And Two Very Bad Years

The untold story of how massive success made GoPro’s Nick Woodman lose his way—and how he plans to bring his company back from the brink

- Tom Foster

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.