AI Summary
5 min readOn June 26, 2014, GoPro CEO Nick Woodman rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange with a Hero 3 Plus camera clenched between his teeth, capturing the moment. His wife Jill, who had been with him in Bali in 2002 when he first imagined a camera that would let surfers photograph themselves, wrapped her arms around him. The stock opened at $24 and was climbing. Woodman was about to become a billionaire and the highest-paid CEO in the country. But even then, he felt uneasy. First-quarter revenue for 2014 was down over 7%. He worried about the ever-improving iPhone camera eating into GoPro sales. He had a plan: transform GoPro from a camera company into a media company before the market figured out the cameras were vulnerable.
The Pivot to Media
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:24) **IPO Euphoria and a Founder's Unease** - GoPro CEO Nick Woodman rings the NYSE bell, celebrating a successful IPO that could make him a billionaire, but feels a nagging worry about the company's future.
- 2 (06:49) **The Media Pivot and a New Hire** - Woodman decides GoPro must become a media company to survive, hiring a Hulu executive to lead a new content division in 2015.
- 3 (10:21) **The Hero 4 Session: A Premium Miscalculation** - Woodman falls in love with the new, simple Hero 4 Session camera, but his decision to price it as a premium product backfires badly.
- 4 (13:46) **Damage Control and a Leadership Crisis** - Woodman takes responsibility for the Session's failure but struggles to rally his team as the company misses revenue targets.
- 5 (19:10) **Doubling Down on Desperate Diversification** - In 2016, with the stock down over 70%, Woodman tries multiple new strategies to recapture growth, including deals with BMW and Fisher-Price.
- 6 (22:19) **An Insider's Doubt About the Media Dream** - Woodman’s creative director warns that the new, polished TV shows are breaking the "virtuous cycle" that made GoPro successful.
- 7 (25:26) **The Karma Drone Launch and a Nightmare Recall** - GoPro launches its Karma drone to great fanfare, but within weeks, videos emerge of the drones falling out of the sky.
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Show Notes
After a successful IPO in 2014, GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman hopes to lead the company into its next act. In his vision, GoPro won’t just be a camera maker anymore; they’ll be a full-scale media empire. Woodman hires a Hollywood executive to lead the charge and staffs the new division with 100 people. But changing a company’s mission is a slow process, and in the meantime GoPro has one disastrous product launch after another. And within just a couple of years, GoPro is struggling to survive.
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