Guts, Glory, and Megapixels: The Story of GoPro

It's a foggy morning in half moon bay , about 2 miles from the legendary Mavericks surf break just south of San Francisco. The parking lot is packed with 4x4 pickups and other mud-splattered vehicles outfitted with surfboard and bike racks. I'm led inside the GoPro headquarters by Rick Loughery, the company's steel-jawed director of communications, who's wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "manufacturing stoke."

We thread past a cube warren populated by twentysomethings dressed in the wrinkled cotton of passengers who just landed on the red-eye from Reykjav?k (which some of the staffers very likely did). Duffel bags stuffed with outdoor gear crowd vacant desks while videographers stare into 27-inch monitors, editing footage captured at the most recent Winter X Games.

We weave our way to an office, where Nick Woodman, the 36-year-old founder and CEO of the upstart camera company, is double-fisting cans of Red Bull?his rocket fuel of choice?and watching a high-definition cavalcade of GoPro-sponsored athletes leaping out of airplanes, tumbling off mountains, plummeting over waterfalls, and diving into hot tubs on every continent. The frenetic action has been stitched into a promotional video for the company's latest creation, the $300 HD Hero2, the culmination of a decade's worth of tiny, armored cameras designed to be mounted on bike handlebars, snowboard helmets, and car hoods.

Woodman's distillation of the essence of the GoPro mission is equal parts corporate messaging and surferspeak: "Our goal was to create a celebration of inspired humans doing rad stuff around the world." In fact, Woodman is, to an extent, underselling the GoPro effect. The 8-year-old company not only has celebrated the antics of those inspired humans, it has also created a virtuous circle of video reinforcement that defines and motivates the culture of extreme sports. Woodman?a wave rider, race-car driver, mountain biker, and snowboarder?lives the lifestyle his indestructible cameras capture. He is proud that those cameras and accessories such as the new Wi-Fi BacPac, which adds remote capture and sharing features, form their own feedback loop that continuously adds functionality without stranding older equipment. The backward compatibility with cameras dating to the original HD Hero from 2009 keeps customers happy?and the Lego-like upgrades encourage people to buy deeper into the GoPro system. That resulting combination of customer enthusiasm and loyalty sold more than 800,000 cameras last year to users who then upload videos to YouTube once every 2 ? minutes.

Woodman didn't set out to redefine the market for digital imaging. He just wanted to shoot decent surfing photos. In early 2002, after his games promotion company, Fun Bug, flamed out in the wake of the dot-com bust, he took off with his girlfriend (now wife), Jill, to surf-bum in Southeast Asia. The waves were world-class, and the art major from the University of California, San Diego, wanted to take high-quality action shots of his buddies on their boards. "Surfing is such an incredible experience with a huge ego element," he says. "'Did you see that wave? I got so barrelled! No? You didn't!'"

But unless you dragged a cameraman with a wide-angle lens into the tube with you, the best you could do was lash a disposable camera in waterproof housing to your arm with a rubber band. Woodman started thinking, what if I make a wrist strap with a mechanism that pivots the camera out of the way while I'm surfing, pop it up for the money shot, and then fold it down again? Between paddling out for sets in Sumatra and Java, he spent his time creating prototypes from old surf leashes.

When he and Jill returned to California in August 2002, they spent three months traveling the coast, living out of Woodman's 1974 VW bus and selling bead-and-shell belts they had picked up for $1.90 apiece in Indonesia as $60 fashion accessories at concerts and flea markets. With the profits and a $35,000 family loan, Woodman continued refining his prototypes on his mother's sewing machine, moving back home to save money.

There was just one problem: The straps worked fine but the technology didn't. "Every camera I used would flood or break after a big wipeout," he says. "I realized I shouldn't be a strap company, but a camera company."

Woodman didn't seem to understand that switching from the sports-accessory industry to the consumer-electronics business (which is dominated by huge companies such as Sony, Canon, Nikon, and Panasonic) is akin to going from intramural hoops to an NBA tryout. "Most businesses that enter categories like this don't bootstrap with one dude going to Starbucks every morning to, like, get himself pumped up for the day, saying, 'I am doing this!'" Woodman says, laughing at his lack of a strategic plan, team, or money. "Looking back on it, it's crazy that we've gotten to where we are now."

Maybe not. It's unlikely that the HD Hero would have emerged from a digital-imaging company. The industry's leaders were busy trying to stuff more bells, whistles, and megapixels into shiny cameras for the masses. No matter how obsessively he looked, Woodman could not find a camera he could transform into a tough-as-nails rig that would work in any kind of action. "I went to all the major camera shows, walking every aisle, and I'm maniacal," he says, "When I say I looked at every booth, I looked at every booth twice."

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