GoPro’s Nick Woodman on Early Signs of Success

October 11, 2013 Leave a comment

GoPro’s Nick Woodman on Early Signs of Success

October 10, 2013

Nick Woodman

Chief executive officer, GoPro
Net worth: $1.73 billion

Was there a moment early on when you thought, “OK, this is going to work”?
—@bubbaandroski

I was still a one-person company, and we’d just launched our first camera, the Hero. It was a big, bulky film camera to wear on your wrist. We sold them for $19.99 in surf shops, and I used to wear one everywhere—to the supermarket, to go get coffee—as a way of promoting it. One morning I went to Santa Cruz to check out the surf, and I had my camera on. There were these two kids going out surfing. As they jogged by me in wet suits, one of them nudged his friend and went, “Hey, look, dude, he’s wearing a GoPro.” And they turned around and yelled, “GoPro, be a hero!” and gave me a little shake. We hadn’t done any advertising, and I remember thinking, “They know our name—and our slogan? It’s working!”

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Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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