Nick Woodman, the founder and CEO of GoPro, flew into Vail, Colorado, yesterday on his private jet. He is here for the GoPro Mount Games, a weekend-long festival of kayaking, rafting, stone climbing, and just nigh annihilation else yous can do at an off-flavour ski resort while wearing a mounted activeness photographic camera. Woodman, whom college buddy and current GoPro colleague Justin Wilkenfeld describes equally less "a 9-to-5-type guy" than "a hippie surfer," wanders through the tent-covered meadows wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a tank top alongside throngs of activity-sports enthusiasts. Passing a funnel-block vendor, he sniffs something else in the air. Colorado is a popular destination among the GoPro community not but for the adrenaline rush of extreme sports, only likewise considering of plentiful legal weed. When he asks a GoPro events coordinator what he is doing later, the junior staffer avoids middle contact with his dominate, shrugs, and a lilliputian too adamantly insists, "Aught. Why?"

Woodman laughs.

"Information technology'due south 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, in that location 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 domestic dog jumps off a dock.

Woodman has taken up position among a hundred spectators gathered effectually an aboveground pool. Arms folded, wearing Persol sunglasses, he watches a wide range of canines leap in after tossed balls, their jumps scored for meridian, altitude, and form. Many of the dogs are wearing GoPro cameras, and one-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 human being'south best friend. A one-time 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 likewise has the infectious self-confidence of an entrepreneur who built his ain business into a billion-dollar-a-year juggernaut before the historic period 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 on 2000s, he created not just a novel, durable device, but an entirely new market: the action camera. The company grew apace, its devices becoming ubiquitous at ski resorts, surf spots, and other adventure destinations. With a huge assist from 140 sponsored athletes, GoPro videos garnered millions of views on YouTube. By 2012, the visitor v was averaging 100% annual meridian-line growth. Its 2014 IPO was a wild success, with shares leaping 140% in the first 3 months. Silly investors hoped that the upstart tech company could leverage hardware into even more than profitable software spaces: media management, entertainment, social networking. Just a disastrous 2015—including the flubbed launch of a new camera—punctured that enthusiasm. Acquirement for the starting time quarter of 2016 was down year over year, and a much-anticipated drone release was delayed. When Woodman arrives at the GoPro Games, the company's stock is flirting with all-fourth dimension lows, down well-nigh 90% from its peak.

In the hot seat: GoPro has been like an iPod without iTunes, says founder Nick Woodman, who blames himself for all his company'due south failings.[Photos: Justin Kaneps]

It's a ride that could make fifty-fifty the virtually seasoned farthermost-sports enthusiast featherbrained. Woodman takes a seat on an off-duty ski lift, the loftier Rocky Mountain sun behind him. And so he dives into his programme for reviving the company he loves. He says that a trio of new products being released this fall—including that delayed drone, called the Karma—will assist win over a swarm of fresh consumers. New software will make video editing easier and content even more than shareable. He is relentlessly optimistic.

"In a sense, nosotros volition make the GoPro a detachable lens of your telephone," Woodman says. "By enabling a GoPro to auto upload its content to the cloud, your footage moves over to your telephone. We volition blow the doors off this."

Woodman sees GoPro as a sort of mini Apple tree, a hardware company that is evolving into a software platform with social networking features. Its business model volition even include monthly subscription fees alongside steady hardware upgrades. He evinces no worry about naysayers who compare GoPro to the Flip, the superhot handheld digital video recorder that launched in 2007, quickly dominated the camcorder market, was bought by Cisco in 2009, and shut down in 2011, when video-capable smartphones quickly fabricated it obsolete. Today's smartphones are becoming ever more than durable—both Samsung'due south Galaxy S7 and iPhone 7 are water-resistant—while lens quality is chop-chop approaching GoPro's nearly avant-garde offering. (The iPhone seven offers a 12-megapixel sensor, the same every bit GoPro's new Hero5, and a true zoom lens, which GoPro's Hero5 lacks.) "My kids are 16," says Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush. "And I don't call back ever going to a soccer game and seeing people with GoPro cameras. They are taking videos on their phone. I think that limits GoPro's addressable market. Imagine only marketing your shoes to professional person athletes. Nike wouldn't be Nike if they didn't sell shoes to anybody."

Woodman's response to this: The smartphone blast actually works in GoPro'due south favor. "Yous can put a GoPro in places you wouldn't desire to put all your data," he says. "Like, do you really desire your phone, and all your information, fastened to a drone ii,000 feet upwards?" In fact, while nosotros are talking, my iPhone overheats in the dominicus, causing the vocalization recorder to fail, but the GoPro camera trained on us records the entire conversation.

Woodman's office in GoPro's San Mateo, California, headquarters is but a few miles from the house on Moss Beach where he crafted the first prototype for the GoPro Hero. He's notoriously prone, once he begins speaking, to going over his scheduled time. As more than of the visitor's projects have moved outside his area of expertise—software, drones, virtual reality—he has learned to defer more to his staff. He'southward married with three children, and his steady enjoyment of his success is evident from how eagerly he shares his experiences, either surf trips to islands off Nicaragua or video clips—some of them shot, he sheepishly admits, on an iPhone—of a lavish altogether with his friends.

His desk is uncluttered. Behind him, a cabinet bursts with souvenirs—motorbike helmets, giant bottles of wine, an Emmy Award (which the company won for the Hero3 in the Engineering science and Applied science category), a model of the VW van that he and his then-wife-to-exist, college sweetheart and beau University of California, San Diego, fine-arts major Jill Woodman, collection up and down the California declension selling dewdrop and shell belts she fabricated to help fund the company's launch.

When Woodman get-go began envisioning what would go GoPro during a surf trip in Republic of indonesia in 2002, prison cell-phone cameras were a novelty rather than a standard feature, and nobody dared take a video photographic camera into the h2o. What Woodman wanted was to capture surfing images from the perspective of the surfer. "I went to a surf shop and bought a bodyboard leash, and I bought all these O-rings and off-the-shelf parts at Habitation Depot, and I borrowed my mom's sewing automobile," Woodman says. His offset endeavor wasn't a camera; information technology was a strap, onto which he mounted a disposable camera and added a few features so that the camera was easier to click while in the water. The strap worked well enough that Woodman decided that his calling was making exclusively those.

It wasn't the first business organization Woodman had attempted. The son of an investment banker who grew up in Atherton, California, Woodman quit his Menlo Park loftier school football squad before his senior season to surf. "Everyone was like, 'Dude, you lot can't quit,' just then I thought, No, I accept something unique going on. And I remember that feeling good. That was my first lesson where I felt that, hey, doing something different from everybody is satisfying." It was during a golf outing with his father when he was 17 that he decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur. "We were on the seventh hole at Burlingame Country Social club in San Mateo, and there was a big erstwhile house existence built on the side of the fairway, and my dad said, 'See that house, that'south my friend'south son. His name is Peter Gotcher and he simply sold his business." (Gotcher was one of the founders of ProTools and now sits on GoPro's board.) Entrepreneurship, his begetter told him, is ane of the most reliable ways to do really well financially. Then Dean Woodman nudged his son and said, "I bet you tin can do that one 24-hour interval, Nicky. You have a lot of ideas."

I of Woodman'due south earliest ventures, which he started upon graduating from higher, was FunBug, an online video-game company that offered users a chance to enter a weekly raffle. Woodman blamed himself when the company didn't go far. "Here's something that I learned with FunBug," he says. "FunBug didn't neglect. I failed. FunBug is but a business. It'due south a product of your ain creation and the team's execution, so businesses don't fail, the people who are running a concern fail. That was a difficult time for me." Woodman gave himself until age 30 to come up up with something successful. "Young enough to get-go a career from scratch, but enough time to brand it as an entrepreneur," he says. "I promised myself that fifty-fifty if I failed repeatedly I would not stop, no thing what."

The wrist strap seemed an unlikely prospect, but Woodman dug in. As he experimented selling them in surf shops for about $xv, he was blunted by the quality of waterproof cameras available on the market, which were often unreliable and tended to crack in rough surf. He tried to license the wrist strap to Kodak so that it could build a ameliorate, more dependable camera on top of information technology. "I thought I could make a couple hundred thousand bucks a year, but they were selling then many disposable cameras anyhow, they didn't come across this as part of the future. Kodak non being interested saved GoPro."

Later on searching in vain for a durable, waterproof photographic camera at merchandise shows around the country, he decided to build his own. He gear up to work on a prototype, in what can just be described equally obsessive fashion. He wore a CamelBak haversack for rehydration and worked eighteen- to twenty-hour days, carving and shaping plastic with a Dremel and using a mucilage gun to affix plastic buttons and lenses. He sent his model to Hotax, a Chinese camera visitor, and it sent him back a digital file that he couldn't open. Information technology took him a few hours to figure out it was in a standard format for 3-D modeling, and when he finally glimpsed and rotated the model, with the water housing and all the fit points that would permit it to stay attached to an athlete at play, "I was so stoked." With around $20,000 left over from FunBug (and his wife'southward shell belts), plus a $200,000 loan from his parents, he made a bargain with Hotax to manufacture each camera for almost $3 and sold them at surf shops for $14. The starting time GoPro Hero was built-in.

Woodman, with each ensuing iteration, showed an uncanny knack for product design, and GoPro speedily became the dominant actor in what has grown into a $vi billion market, selling more than 5 one thousand thousand cameras a yr. Along with the steadily rising sales, Woodman at present admits, came a pretty bad instance of founder'southward hubris. The company was a media darling, with Woodman the subject of glowing profiles and the durable cameras helping to redefine activeness sports. The "GoPro video" became a genre unto itself—jerky, POV shots that provided the viewer with a taste of the feel. The GoPro aqueduct on YouTube attracted more than than 4 meg subscribers and over a billion video views, and the cultural attain of the visitor transformed the sports landscape, with athletes able to pic themselves using smaller, lighter cameras than e'er before. "It's a huge shift," says professional snowboarder Mike Basich. "You don't need a cameraman. In the past, yous always had a crew. At present you tin steer your expression closest to what y'all experience yourself."

For sports similar snowboarding, skateboarding, skiing, and surfing, the arrival of GoPro accelerated the trend toward more and better footage, while the explosion of social media meant there were now numerous outlets for amateur athletes to share that content.

The company had achieved that rarest of parlays: It was both cool and a great business organization, with universal recognition inside its category, bountiful goodwill from a youthful market, and margins on individual cameras of close to fifty%. Wall Street was similarly infatuated, and a few months subsequently the company went public, in June 2014, the company introduced the Hero4 Silver, its acknowledged camera. That October, GoPro'south stock peaked at nearly $94. Almost immediately, Woodman angered investors with a surprise donation of 5.8 million shares of GoPro stock to the Silicon Valley Community Organization, which diluted shareholder equity. Soon, according to Woodman, "the afterglow started to wane a lilliputian chip. We had and then much publicity from the IPO, we didn't recognize the need to ramp up our marketing." Even as demand for cameras began to slacken, GoPro continued to rely on viral videos and word of mouth instead of more strategic advertising.

Analysts and reporters began asking if GoPro had saturated its marketplace. How much more than fifty% of the activity-camera industry could information technology really have over? (Sony, Garmin, Praktika, and a host of other cheaper alternatives had past then carved out single-digit marketplace-share niches.) In the overall video-camera field, GoPro was already selling vi of the top x most popular cameras. Where was growth going to come from?

A slap-up new production might have calmed these concerns. Just instead, in July 2015, the visitor launched the $399 GoPro Hero4 Session, a indicate-and-shoot camera that bore an unfortunate resemblance, in manner if not function, to a competing $99 offering from Polaroid. The visitor and Woodman were widely pilloried for overcharging for an underwhelming product. (It lacked an LCD screen and 4K capability.) GoPro eventually dropped the Session'south price to $199, and Woodman went on QVC himself to endeavour to motility units. Revenue in the third quarter of 2015 missed the lower end of GoPro's guidance, and a lull set in. In the first quarter of 2016, revenue was down 50% yr over twelvemonth. In May, shares hit a depression of $8.eighty.

Sitting in his part reflecting on this history, Woodman leans back in his chrome armchair, puts his hands together in nearly a parody of a man in contemplation, and takes full responsibleness for GoPro's missteps. "I'm the one who made the fault on pricing Session, I'm the ane who fabricated the mistake with pulling back on marketing, I'm the one who fabricated the mistake with releasing too many products at the expense of consumer confusion. These were my calls," Woodman says. He was, he insists, swept up in his own success. Woodman truly believed the Session was a remarkable camera: waterproof in its ain casing, easy to use, essentially a one-push-capture solution. But he says that greed got the better of him: He priced information technology too high. "At the cease of the day, it'due south hard to call it anything else. But we idea it was then good information technology would be worth it."

The Session debut, and the disappointing sales that take haunted the company over the past year, marked what could now be considered the end of the start for GoPro. "The media were hard on us when nosotros stumbled, but we deserved it," he says. "What y'all didn't see from us was lashing out and saying, 'You don't sympathise.' Nosotros acknowledged it. We put downwards our heads, determined what was incorrect, and said we were going to prepare it."

A large office of the set is supposed to exist the Hero5, which launches in October. The most advanced GoPro yet, it will have a faster processor, congenital-in waterproof casing, linear horizon stabilization, and improved audio quality, including automatic microphone aligning when there is noise or hiss from air current or weather.

But it'south a new software package, internally code-named Yellowstone, that is potentially the biggest advance. Even GoPro's nearly devoted users take long bemoaned that, as like shooting fish in a barrel as it is to capture footage with a GoPro, moving that footage from camera to computer or phone, editing it into a compelling video, and so sharing information technology to a social media platform is besides hard. Every step of the process, from turning on the camera's congenital-in Wi-Fi to transferring the footage to editing those images into a punchy, short clip, has been slowed downwards past what Woodman himself describes as "pain points."

I happened to ride back from the GoPro Games in Vail to Denver International Airdrome with C.J. Prober, the senior vice president of software and services for GoPro, and the whole ride back both of us were editing footage of our day spent whitewater kayaking. The drive was approximately two hours, and all that fourth dimension we had our heads downwardly, clipping and transferring footage. Occasionally, I had questions about moving information from the two GoPros I was using to my phone in social club to do an edit. Prober, an Electronic Arts veteran, knows GoPro software literally better than anyone, and twice, he was stumped past my technical issues.

While avid athletes may be willing to spend a few hours editing down that day'due south session to a absurd three-minute video, most of us don't have the patience. "In that location is a lot of unwatched and unedited GoPro footage out there," says Brad Erickson, an annotator with Pacific Crest Securities. "It's daunting to capture video and bargain with editing information technology. If y'all ask a lot of people who bought GoPros ii years agone how much they really use them and ultimately what the utility was for that device, you find a broad range of answers, including: 'Nosotros've used information technology twice and haven't taken it out of the box since.' "

Woodman once more blames himself for how dull GoPro has been to address these limitations. "I underestimated the size of the team and experience needed in leadership to develop the software feel that we needed," he says. "It'southward an entirely unlike skill set up and approach than hardware." Woodman, who dropped his one programming class in college—"I take never tried then difficult to be so sub-mediocre at anything in my life"—in 2014 hired Prober, along with veteran tech company executive and network and infrastructure pro Tony Bates, who became president. When nosotros all assemble in Woodman's role a few weeks later, Woodman eagerly points to both hires, and several more than in software and new products, as examples of his taking ownership of his own mistakes, citing 1 of GoPro'southward six cadre values, Integrity Always, as the source of inspiration.

"Make Friends. Haul Ass. No Half-Assery. Then, um," Woodman says, pausing to endeavor to call up GoPro's core values. "The last i is Be a Hero, and and then, to a higher place that is Integrity Always. Perhaps it's simply five core values? How many core values exercise nosotros have? Oh, Maintain Balance is the one I forgot. How many is that? Anyway, you have to take ownership of your mistakes. People respect that."

"You tin put a GoPro in places you wouldn't want to put all your data," says Nick Woodman, explaining the visitor's relevance in a smartphone era.[Photos: Justin Kaneps]

The company also caused two mobile-based video-editing platforms, Replay (which evolved into Quik) and Splice, for a combined $105 one thousand thousand in 2016, integrating both into a broader vision that Prober describes as a "seamless experience, from capture to share—intelligent systems that recognize the highlight moments of your life and automatically uploads that to the cloud so that it is waiting for yous on your computer at dwelling house when y'all open the app."

In demonstrations, the new software package allowed me to offload, pluck clips, edit, play, and share videos rapidly and easily. But will the upgrade fundamentally shift GoPro's concern model? "The easiest manner of agreement where we are and where nosotros want to exist is, up until the launch of Hero5 and Yellowstone, GoPro has arguably been an iPod-like success, but without its iTunes," Woodman says. "Imagine if Apple hadn't launched iTunes? The iPod would be only another MP3 histrion. Apple [made] information technology easy for people to consume and manage massive amounts of content." But dissimilar iTunes, this software comes with a price: $5 a month. Whether charging that fee is some other example of greed or rather a smart, strategic expansion of acquirement streams remains to be seen.

GoPro is also developing a variety of short-form narrative shows on its YouTube channel, some of them only bachelor on a subscription basis. Sitting at the nexus of social media and loftier-resolution video has meant that GoPro was, from the start, an entertainment make equally well equally a consumer electronics manufacturer, and the visitor continues to utilize this to its advantage. (Perhaps only Red Bull has been as successful at marketing itself through creating and distributing action-sports footage.) The GoPro Awards program, which flows free production and massive publicity to amateur GoPro users, has been a successful offshoot to sponsoring athletes, who typically create the best and most-watched videos. Now the company is looking to practice even more, past partnering with the likes of soccer squad Real Madrid and Moto GP superstar Valentino Rossi and developing original programming prepare to debut the stop of 2017. "We drive revenue in a number of ways," says Sea MacAdams, vice president of GoPro Entertainment. "From YouTube, from our audience sending us stuff that we tin can license to other users, and [from] working with [other companies] to create revenue around their brands," such equally a recent series produced with Ford around the launch of a new truck. "We'd love people to buy the cameras," he says, "but we also know there are people who relish our entertainment program who don't own a camera. GoPro programming is i more mode to become them into the ecosystem, and then eventually make a photographic camera sale."

Karma, GoPro'southward new drone—or, excuse me, as GoPro calls information technology, "aerial capture device"—is another example of how the company is hoping to lure new user groups. The drone market place, according to several analysts who follow the company, is potentially as big as the action-camera market, and faster growing, but information technology is already dominated by a big player, Chinese company DJI and its flagship production, the Phantom iv. "If [GoPro's] drone is successful, that is 1 quick route to doubling the size of the visitor," says Dougherty & Visitor analyst Charles Anderson. Speculation about the GoPro drone production had been fevered for the first half of 2016, and the company's announcement in April that it would be delayed further hammered the stock. At present, Woodman believes, GoPro has nailed it, unveiling a package that includes a iv-propeller drone, a GoPro Hero5 photographic camera, a handheld remote, and a detachable, 3-centrality gimbal—or stabilization device—which makes the Karma a i-stop solution for epitome capture, be it terrestrial or aerial. The product is intended to go from its sleek backpack to taking flight within 2 minutes, the wings and landing gear folding out easily. (Setup and assembly for nearly college-finish drones, including a Phantom iv, can ruin a Christmas morning time.) Pablo Lema, GoPro's senior manager of aerial products, insists that Karma is the logical extension of the visitor's mission of capturing cool footage. "If you think about it, a drone is nothing more than a really, really complicated selfie stick that lets y'all position it anywhere in the earth." From an epitome-capture standpoint, Karma is a killer camera, due to the combination of the Hero5, that superior gimbal, and the front-mounting of both, a thorny engineering problem that Lema'south squad cracked. (Consumer drone footage has long been plagued by the visibility of rotors in the corners and sides of the images. Karma's camera placement solves that.) "Nosotros're making it easy to get previously unimaginable footage of your life," says Woodman.

But Karma isn't going to win whatsoever drone races. It's slower than the Phantom four–and the foldable Mavic Pro, which DJI launched in tardily September–and lacks its competitors' Follow feature, which enables the drone to trail the user to capture footage, along with its obstacle-avoidance capabilities and range. GoPro is wagering that the Karma package volition entice both the first-time heir-apparent and its preexisting user base, who instead of plunking downwards $400 for a Hero5 may figure that $1,100 for the whole lot is as well good a deal to refuse. (The list cost for the Phantom iv is $ane,400.)

"It's as though nosotros've put Hollywood in a backpack," says Woodman. "All of information technology is super-piece of cake to use. It'due south and so comfy y'all volition forget yous even have it on." The goal, Woodman says, "is to make the drone a part of your experience, rather than making the experience all nigh the drone." (The dream of many snowboarders and surfers—to accept their GoPro hover overhead and nab aeriform footage of them during a session—is still a couple of software iterations away, Lema says. "That's a desired utilize example. Nosotros have to brand information technology piece of work really well. Nosotros are confident we will get there, and more.")

To become all its new products out, GoPro has been burning through money at a faster rate than at any time since 2010, and finds itself in the third quarter of 2016 with less cash on hand than whatsoever other signal since going public. Information technology has other brand-new offerings on the market, including a potentially game-changing, $5,000 virtual-reality camera rig, the Omni (made of half dozen Hero4 cameras shooting 360 degrees), along with a VR software-management bundle. But Woodman will need to demonstrate more attention to deadlines—no more delayed launches—if he wants to prove that the lessons of the past twelvemonth accept really been learned.

Possibly he'll succeed in creating a "mini Apple," expanding the action-camera enterprise into a digital subscription ecosystem and building a drone business that further integrates the visitor into its users' lives—and wins over new users outside the action-sports community. But even if the bets on software and flight machines don't pay off, that doesn't mean GoPro will go the way of the Flip. As a uncomplicated camera company, GoPro remains hugely successful, pulling in $1.six billion in 2015. "They don't need to be like Apple," says analyst Anderson. "They just need cameras that are functional, and editing software that is functional. They can be a great company at right around a billion in acquirement and pay a salubrious dividend and life's fine. Just it doesn't seem like that's where they desire to become."

"No," Woodman says, adamantly. "We make the best cameras in the globe, and volumes are large. But we can be fifty-fifty more than."