GoPro

GoPro was worth $11 billion at its peak.

A 99% collapse to $91 million now.

The videos that made it famous, made YouTube rich

Read time: 5 minutes

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THE SETUP

Nothing is wrong with GoPro's cameras. Nobody stopped buying them because the footage got worse. The company that makes them is trading below a dollar, running a formal sale process, with a going concern warning attached.

• GoPro peaked at $11.2 billion in October 2014, trading at eleven times revenue, a multiple normally reserved for software companies

• By 2026 its valued at $91 million, a fall of more than 99%

• GoPro invented the action camera category and once held roughly 84% of global unit sales. By 2025 that had fallen to 18%, behind DJI on 66% and Insta360 on 13%

• Revenue peaked near $1.4 billion in 2014 and fell to $652 million in 2025, then dropped another 31% in the first half of 2026

Nick Woodman built GoPro from a $20 waterproof case sewn together in his garage, into the highest paid CEO job in America in a single year. He founded it after his previous startup lost investors $3.9 million in the dot com crash.

By 2014 he was worth billions and had just paid his college roommate $229 million on a decade old promise made when neither of them had money. In 2026 he is personally lending the company $20 million just to keep it going.

GoPro built one of the best free marketing engines in the history of consumer hardware. Customers filmed their own footage and uploaded it to YouTube for nothing and that footage sold more cameras than any advertising budget could have. Investors priced GoPro like a much bigger company. It spent the next decade trying to become one. A drone business. A television studio. A subscription platform. During this time the camera business continued to shrink.

Smartphones eventually replaced the GoPro and shrank the pool of people who needed a dedicated camera. Why couldn’t GoPro capitalise when had the biggest audience in the category? How did DJI and Insta360 take advantage?

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THE PLAYBOOK

1. Win the category

GoPro avoided being compared to camcorders by being different. It called itself a “wearable sports camera,” a category nobody else was selling into. Customers innovated with the camera. They strapped a GoPro to a helmet or a surfboard, filmed something worth watching and uploaded it to YouTube.

By 2014, GoPro users had uploaded close to four years of cumulative footage to YouTube. Felix Baumgartner's stratospheric jump, filmed on GoPro cameras in 2012, was watched tens of millions of times. Woodman called it “a media movement” in a 2015 interview.

For GoPro, it was a media movement built on someone else's platform. The attention was real. The data behind it, the advertising revenue it generated and the audience relationship, all belonged to YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. GoPro made the camera sale. The platforms got all the revenue afterwards.

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Takeaway: if the platform carrying your content isn't yours, you're building someone else's data and advertising business every time a customer discovers you through it. You get the one-off sale. They get the audience relationship, the algorithm's picture of that customer, and ad revenue.

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2. Price the story

An S-1 is the document a company files before it lists on the stock market. It's meant to lay out what the business does, so investors know what they're buying. GoPro's 2014 S-1 didn't just describe a camera company. It described a media company, one that talked about content, community and a platform still to come.

Investors believed it. GoPro had made around $1 billion in sales the year before. The market valued the whole company at over $11 billion, roughly eleven times what it had earned. That's the kind of price investors pay for a fast-growing software company that keeps making money from the same customer every month, not a hardware company that sells someone a camera and hopes they buy another in three years. Buried in the same filing, GoPro admitted that media business wouldn't generate revenue for years.

The market paid a software price for a camera company, on the strength of a media business that didn't exist.

GoPro started spending like a media company. It hired 200 people for a new Entertainment division, making original shows for Red Bull TV, Roku and ESPN. It launched its own drone, the Karma, to compete with the market leader, DJI.

Both needed cash and both coincided with a slow quarter for camera sales. In the first three months of 2016, GoPro spent $121 million more than it brought in, a net loss six times bigger than the same quarter the year before.

Then the drone failed. In November 2016, GoPro recalled the Karma after units lost power mid-flight, at a cost of around $32 million. The whole drone business was shut within fourteen months of launch. DJI, the company GoPro was trying to compete with, already controlled around 70% of the consumer drone market by that point.

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Takeaway: if the market prices you for a business you haven't built yet, you end up building it under pressure instead of on your own timeline. Fund the story before you sell the story.

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3. Build the lock-in

The drone division closed in January 2018. Entertainment had shut a year earlier. Both had burned cash and attention for two years. A subscription covering cloud storage, camera replacement and editing tools, didn't launch until 2019.

By 2025, subscription and service revenue made up roughly 16% of total revenue, even after peaking near 2.5 million subscribers in 2023. In the same years DJI's action camera share rose from 8% to 66%, and Insta360 overtook GoPro in unit sales for the first time in 2024.

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Takeaway: a good idea five years late, is no longer a good idea.

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ONE MORE THING

GoPro cameras had already flown on NASA's Artemis II spacecraft. Within weeks, GoPro had unsolicited approaches from defence contractors, drone makers, private equity firms and consumer electronics companies. None of them wanted the camera brand. They wanted the sensors, the miniaturised optics and the manufacturing line behind them. Technology built for helmets and surfboards works just as well on a spacecraft or a military drone.

On 11 May, the board hired Houlihan Lokey and opened a formal review of strategic alternatives, including a sale of the company. By mid-June, GoPro's auditor had attached a going concern warning to the accounts. By August, cash had fallen to $27 million and Woodman was telling investors the sale process was in its "later stages."

In September, GoPro found its buyer. Starman Optical, a company incorporated in Delaware on 31 August, agreed to merge with GoPro in a deal worth $285 million. GoPro shareholders get $1.14 a share and are left holding roughly 10% of the combined business. The deal clears GoPro's $92 million of debt.

Starman Optical didn't exist a month before the deal was announced. Its sister business makes optical transceivers and is building a manufacturing plant in New Jersey. Its parent company owns Incase, Incipio and Griffin, consumer accessory brands, not camera makers.

Woodman built a company that spent a decade unable to turn a huge audience into a lasting business. He sold it to a photonics business nobody had heard of, for the hardware and the patents, not the audience. Even Markiplier, who built an 8.5% stake in GoPro days before the deal, was betting on the same thing everyone else now is: whatever GoPro becomes next, it won't be a camera brand chasing an audience it never owned.

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THE PAPER TRAIL

Business Insider, GoPro CEO Nick Woodman Returned $229 Million, 2015

3 minute read

The story of the deal Woodman made in his college dorm. A handshake promise to give his roommate 10% of anything he ever made off GoPro shares, honoured a decade later.

https://www.businessinsider.com/gopro-ceo-nick-woodman-returned-229-million-2015-5

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Maxim, How GoPro Founder Nick Woodman Built a Billion Dollar Business

7 minute read

Opens with Woodman making a pilgrimage to QVC's headquarters to beg them to sell his wrist-strap cameras.

https://www.maxim.com/gear/gopro-founder-nick-woodman-profile-2017-2/

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USA Today, GoPro's Nick Woodman on drones, virtual worlds and money, 2015

5 minute read

Woodman talking about "sky-high" ambitions right as he became the highest-paid CEO in America. The interview that captures the mood before it all unwound.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/06/go-pro-nick-woodman/29564175/

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Wired, GoPro recalls its Karma drone just days after it went on sale, 2016

2 minute read

A brand-new product, pulled from shelves within weeks of launch.

https://www.wired.com/story/gopro-recall-karma-drone/

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