Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My twenties were my practice. My thirties were when I really hit my stride with GoPro and did all the heavy lifting to build the business.
It sounds cheesy, but if you are having fun, people will love your company, you will be more successful, and more ideas will come your way.
My first business was a retro-gaming site where you'd go and play all these cool old-school games. It was a good idea but ahead of its time.
The magic of GoPro is that we are enabling the world to communicate in this new way, to express themselves in a new way, and it's snowballing.
Your passions are a bit like your fingerprints: Everybody has them; everybody's are different. One's passions may just be a guidebook to one's life.
I enrolled in a race car driving school, where you go for three days, and they wanted to rent me a video camera and charge me $100 for every half-hour.
I grew up with stories of people who start their own businesses and do really well. So I thought, 'OK, that's what you do.' I can thank my dad for that.
In France, a hip replacement was captured using two GoPros in a stereoscopic 3D arrangement. Students can watch the surgery using a virtual reality headset.
To get GoPro started, I moved back in with my parents and went to work seven days a week, 20 hours a day. I wrote off my personal life to make headway on it.
If I'm a content creator, and I get recognition for my work, that's going to motivate me to spend even more time on my next production and make it even better.
GoPro's capture devices and Kolor's software will combine to deliver exciting and highly accessible solutions for capturing, creating, and sharing spherical content.
I think that devices like Glass are going to do a terrific job of capturing your first-person perspective. And that's what people first think of when they think of GoPro.
As long as you can bootstrap, not at the sacrifice of competitive advantage, bootstrapping is a really powerful thing because it allows you to be totally devoted to your vision.
Now I'm the father of three young boys, I find myself using GoPro to film them more than anything - trips to the amusement park, the beach, the pool - just chasing them around as they grow.
I got an email from the Crown Prince of Norway asking me to talk at a summit for young Norwegian entrepreneurs. I ran to my wife and was like, 'Hey! I got an email from the Prince of Norway!'
A really important thing when you come up with a concept is that you solve a pervasive problem for people, and you don't try to create a new way to do something that isn't necessarily broken.
If I walk up to a can of Red Bull, I'm thinking about Formula One; I'm thinking about incredible athletic performances. And it helps me choose that can over something else to either side of it.
The worst way to fire somebody is to let it drag out. It's not good for that person because they're not succeeding in their role. And it's not good for the organization because it's just not working.
I feel like I've done a pretty good job of scaling because I got some great mentors along the way that helped me realize I just have to build a phenomenal team around me that makes my job a lot easier.
I think that that's something that's pretty interesting about a GoPro - it's the one camera that we know of that you can combine with like cameras to form new cameras. So it's a bit of a modular system.
When I think about dropping team sports and picking up surfing and also then geeking out radio control planes and gadgetry and all that stuff I love, that's what really now has led me in big part to GoPro.
I didn't want to take anybody else's money. I wanted to do something small that could be profitable from the beginning, and grow that way - and never need someone to write me a check to keep the business going.
When I got out of college, I gave myself till I was 30 to invent a product. If I couldn't do it by then, I would just get a real job. And that fear - the fear of a real job - motivated me to be an entrepreneur.
I originally started GoPro with the sole purpose of helping surfers capture photos of themselves and their friends while they were surfing. I thought it was crazy that very few surfers had any photos or videos of themselves.
You have to ask yourself: how much does any one person or one family need? And when you start thinking about the universe as an organism, it's important that we, as components of that organism, take care of each other and ourselves.
I was inspired by how Red Bull isn't about the drink; it isn't about the product or the can. Red Bull is a platform to celebrate all that humans are capable of accomplishing. They built a lifestyle movement, a brand that sold this product.
Bootstrapping allows you total creative freedom. For example, if you decide to approach your business in a certain way that makes it a two- or three-year process to get to your first product, you can do that, versus being rushed into it by investors.
When I have a difficult decision to make, I imagine myself as a 90-year-old guy looking back on his life. I imagine what I'll think about myself at that point in time, and it always makes it really easy to go for it. You're only going to regret that you wimped out.
Before GoPro, if you wanted to have any footage of yourself doing anything, whether it's video or photo, you not only needed a camera, you needed another human being. And if you wanted the footage to be good, you needed that other human being to have skill with the camera.
Somebody captures an incredible video, shares it online, and inspires millions of other people to go and do the same with their GoPros, and then it happens again and again - and what you've got is this incredible snowball of stoked customers capturing and creating rad content with their GoPros.
It's very difficult to get any footage of yourself doing what you love unless you have a friend who's a photographer or videographer and wants to document you. That was really the idea and the goal from the beginning: to help people get a good photo, and then it was to help people get a good video.
I feel like I went through the Great Depression. All these companies are being successful around you, you're on that track, and then the market collapses, and you're out of a job. You're trying to save your investors' investment, and it doesn't work, and you sell the company for nothing. It was brutal.
I think our slow, humble beginnings in surf shops, ski shops, bike shops, and motorcycle shops have been extremely important for our success. GoPro is all about celebrating an active lifestyle and sharing that with other people. It's authentic. It's not a brand that we went out and bought a bunch of ads for to create.