At a certain point, the services that you build around the hardware become more important than the hardware itself.
— Nick Woodman
Somebody captures an incredible video, shares it online, and inspires millions of other people to go and do the same with their GoPros, and then it happens again and again - and what you've got is this incredible snowball of stoked customers capturing and creating rad content with their GoPros.
You must, as an entrepreneur - if that's your position - be doing things that really move the needle.
In the early years, I would say GoPro's products were not that impressive.
I come from surfing, and surfing is the worst cool-guy industry of all. I decided long ago to try and kill the cool guy.
My twenties were my practice. My thirties were when I really hit my stride with GoPro and did all the heavy lifting to build the business.
I got an email from the Crown Prince of Norway asking me to talk at a summit for young Norwegian entrepreneurs. I ran to my wife and was like, 'Hey! I got an email from the Prince of Norway!'
I learned that most people buy based on emotion, not on a rational breakdown of the product or service.
GoPro lets people take other people along for the ride with them.
I have a GoPro in the trunk of my streetcar.
The worst way to fire somebody is to let it drag out. It's not good for that person because they're not succeeding in their role. And it's not good for the organization because it's just not working.
As long as you can bootstrap, not at the sacrifice of competitive advantage, bootstrapping is a really powerful thing because it allows you to be totally devoted to your vision.
I feel like I've done a pretty good job of scaling because I got some great mentors along the way that helped me realize I just have to build a phenomenal team around me that makes my job a lot easier.
I think that that's something that's pretty interesting about a GoPro - it's the one camera that we know of that you can combine with like cameras to form new cameras. So it's a bit of a modular system.
Now I'm the father of three young boys, I find myself using GoPro to film them more than anything - trips to the amusement park, the beach, the pool - just chasing them around as they grow.
As long as we continue to execute, everything will work out for everybody at GoPro.
The smartphone killed the traditional camera industry because it subsumed all the functions of a traditional camera.
I feel like I went through the Great Depression. All these companies are being successful around you, you're on that track, and then the market collapses, and you're out of a job. You're trying to save your investors' investment, and it doesn't work, and you sell the company for nothing. It was brutal.
YouTube didn't really start to hit its stride until 2006.
A really important thing when you come up with a concept is that you solve a pervasive problem for people, and you don't try to create a new way to do something that isn't necessarily broken.
I enrolled in a race car driving school, where you go for three days, and they wanted to rent me a video camera and charge me $100 for every half-hour.
One of my mentors early on was Eli Harari, the founder of SanDisk, who happened to be a friend of my dad's.
Surfing is such an incredible experience with a huge ego element.
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.
If I walk up to a can of Red Bull, I'm thinking about Formula One; I'm thinking about incredible athletic performances. And it helps me choose that can over something else to either side of it.
I grew up with stories of people who start their own businesses and do really well. So I thought, 'OK, that's what you do.' I can thank my dad for that.
The magic of GoPro is that we are enabling the world to communicate in this new way, to express themselves in a new way, and it's snowballing.
The best way to fire somebody is to compassionately fire them.
I lost $4 million of other people's money between the ages of 24 and 26.
I'm half Puerto Rican.
When I was 22, I realised I wanted to be an inventor.
You don't have to raise millions of dollars to be successful, you just have to work on something you are passionate about.
A smartphone is a mobile computer in your pocket.
Things that burn very brightly, we wonder how long they can keep burning.
No surfer wants to be the photographer, especially when the waves are good.
I decided that I want to live in a big world. And since then, any time I'm confronted with a challenging situation, I go for it.
Your passions are a bit like your fingerprints: Everybody has them; everybody's are different. One's passions may just be a guidebook to one's life.
What makes 4K so interesting is it captures lifelike cinema-quality video.
I still drink a couple of Red Bulls every day.
I'm just extremely excited to explore the planet that we're living on.
I wore a GoPro camera on my head for all three of my boys.
I was inspired by how Red Bull isn't about the drink; it isn't about the product or the can. Red Bull is a platform to celebrate all that humans are capable of accomplishing. They built a lifestyle movement, a brand that sold this product.
Losing other people's money was terrible.
GoPro's capture devices and Kolor's software will combine to deliver exciting and highly accessible solutions for capturing, creating, and sharing spherical content.
Viral word-of-mouth marketing for GoPro is massive. Video is really the conduit.
Dedicating myself to actually following through was my single biggest achievement.
Automobiles are dangerous as all get-out.
In France, a hip replacement was captured using two GoPros in a stereoscopic 3D arrangement. Students can watch the surgery using a virtual reality headset.
People don't go buy GoPro for the thing; they buy it for what the thing does.
A smartphone is great for when one person is documenting another thing or another person doing something.
