CAN GOPRO RISE AGAIN?
Nick Woodman, the founder and CEO of GoPro, flew into Vail, Colorado, an hour ago on his private jet. He is two days late for the start of the GoPro Mountain Games, a weeklong festival of kayaking, rafting, rock climbing, and just about anything else you can do at an off-season ski resort while wearing a mounted action camera. But then, Woodman—whom college buddy and current GoPro colleague Justin Wilkenfeld describes as less “a 9-to-5-type guy” than “a hippie surfer”—is often late.
Wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a tank top, Woodman wanders through the tent-covered meadows alongside throngs of action-sports enthusiasts. Passing a funnel-cake vendor, he sniffs something else in the air. Colorado is a popular destination among the GoPro community not just for the adrenaline rush of extreme sports, but also because of plentiful legal weed. When he asks a GoPro events coordinator what he is doing later, the junior staffer avoids eye contact with his boss, shrugs, and a little too adamantly insists, “Nothing. Why?”
Woodman laughs.
“It’s like, dude, I don’t care if you’re going to enjoy some extracurriculars,” he says.
The whole week is one big GoPro-palooza. Everywhere you look, alongside the occasional toker, there is someone doing something worth capturing on video. A woman paddleboards down a brisk stream. A slack-line walker tiptoes over some rapids. A mountain biker bombs down a ski run. A dog jumps off a dock.
Woodman has taken up position among a hundred spectators gathered around an aboveground pool. Arms folded, wearing Persol sunglasses, he watches a wide range of canines leap in after tossed balls, their jumps scored for height, distance, and form. Many of the dogs are wearing GoPro cameras, and half the crowd is holding up GoPros. Woodman does imitations of each canine’s posture in the air, hunching his shoulders, lowering his neck, recessing his jaw, or forming an overbite in his best impression of man’s best friend. A former high school linebacker and avid surfer, Woodman has an easy physicality that he uses in conversations to illustrate a point or reenact an experience. He also has the infectious self-confidence of an entrepreneur who built his own business into a billion-dollar-a-year juggernaut before the age of 40. The GoPro Games are like an annual victory lap for Woodman, a reminder that no matter how battered his company’s stock price—and over the past year or so it has taken a wallop—the brand is still thriving.
When Woodman assembled the first GoPro camera in the early 2000s, he created not just a novel, durable device, but an entirely new market: the action camera. The company grew rapidly, its devices becoming ubiquitous at ski resorts, surf spots, and other adventure
