Go Pro, a producer of action cameras, was founded by Nicholas Woodman. He was born in California in 1975. He is married to Jill Woodman, with whom he has three children.
Dean Woodman, his father, is a prominent investment banker and philanthropist. He loaned his son $235,000 to help him establish his photography company. His father has a 6% stake in GoPro.
Before Success
Nicholas D. Woodman was born on June 24, 1975, in Santa Clara County, California. His parents, Dean and Concepcion, separated in 1992, and his mother married Irwin Federman of US Venture Partners. Dean was born into a Quaker family and co-founded the investment bank, Robertson Stephens.
Nicholas graduated from Menlo School in Atherton, California, in 1993, and then went on to the University of California, San Diego. He minored in creative writing in college and earned a bachelor’s degree in visual arts in 1997. Woodman launched the firms EmpowerAll.com and Funbug after graduating from college.
The goal of EmpowerAll.com was to sell devices for no more than $2, while Funbug was a marketing and game platform where customers could earn cash rewards. Nick received a $235,000 investment from his father, and he established GoPro with the support of his parents’ venture capital contacts.
Also Read: Joe Burrow Net Worth: How Much He Made Through Football?
Nick Woodman’s Net Worth
Nicholas Woodman is a wealthy American businessman with a net worth of $300 million. He became wealthy and famous as the creator of GoPro, a technological business that produces adventure cameras. Woodman was nominated for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year (Retail and Consumer Products category) in 2013, and GoPro’s HERO3 HD camera won a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award in the Inexpensive Small Rugged HD Camcorders category in 2014. Nicholas appeared in numerous “Forbes” lists in 2015, including “Richest In Tech” (#73), “‘ Forbes 400” (#389), and “Billionaires” (#782).
| Net Worth: | $300 Million |
| Date of Birth: | 1975 (48 years old) |
| Gender: | Male |
| Nationality: | United States of America |
Career
In 2002, Woodman set out to surf his way around the world. While trying to take pictures of his surfing, he came up with the idea for a cheap camera that could take good close-up shots and be attached to the body of the photographer. This led to the creation of the GoPro camera and the company GoPro. During the first year of GoPro, Nicholas made money by driving up and down the California coast in his Volkswagen Bus and selling imported belts from Indonesia at a huge markup (sometimes 50 times the belt’s original price). The first GoPro camera was waterproof, had Wi-Fi, could be controlled from a distance, and had 64 GB of storage. It cost less than $300 as well. When a company in Japan bought 100 units, Woodman knew he was on to something. The company sold 2.3 million cameras in 2012. Sales went through the roof.
On June 26, 2014, GoPro finally went public on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GPRO. On the first day of trading, the company’s value went up by 38% and reached $3 billion. On the second day of trading, the stock rose another 20%. This gave the company a market cap of $3.25 billion. Nick’s 45% share of the company was worth $1.45 billion at that price. At the peak of GoPro’s stock performance, the company was worth $11 billion, while Woodman was worth $4.5 billion.
How did His Net Worth Drop?
The ride didn’t last forever, which was a shame. In the end, GoPro’s stock went down a lot. After its share price dropped by 80%, GoPro said in January 2016 that it would lay off 7% of its employees. Nick’s wealth went down to less than $1 billion. In January 2018, GoPro said it was firing a lot of people again. At this point, the share price of the company was 90% lower than when it was at its highest, and Woodman’s net worth was $800 million. As the price of GoPro stock kept falling, his wealth dropped to $300 million in July 2020. Still very rich, but not even close to worth $4.5 billion.
Rosen Law Firm filed a class action suit against GoPro at the end of 2016, saying that the company had “given investors false and misleading statements.” The lawsuit says that GoPro’s Karma drones “tended to lose power in the middle of the flight, causing them to fall out of the sky,” and that GoPro “significantly overstated the usefulness of and likely customer demand” for the product. In 2018, GoPro stopped making the Karma drone, and it was said that the company had hired JPMorgan Chase to help it sell. Nicholas said, “It’s not true.”
“If there was a chance for GoPro to work with a bigger company that could help us grow, we would definitely think about it. But it’s not something we’re doing right now.” In 2020, GoPro had to let go of more than 200 employees because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was more than 20% of the company’s workforce. In March 2020, GoPro bought the stabilization software company ReelSteady.
Also Read: Here’s How Sanaa Lathan’s Net Worth Rose to $5 Million!
Personal Life
Nicholas met Jill Scully in an art class in college, and in 2012, they got married. The couple has three children together and has owned property in California, Montana, and Hawaii, as well as a Gulfstream V jet and a 180-foot yacht. In 2014, the Woodmans gave 5.8 million shares of GoPro stock to the Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation, the charity they run together. Nick’s tax bill went down by a huge $450 million because of the donation, and he didn’t have to pay capital gains taxes.
By 2018, the value of the stock that was given away had dropped to $36.1 million. At their annual gala in March 2014, the nonprofit group BUILD (Business United in Investing, Lending, and Development) gave Woodman an award for his charitable work. In 2015, the Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation gave $2.85 million to a center in San Francisco that works to stop child abuse. In 2019, they gave $4 million to a community center in Montana.
Assets
Nicholas paid $13.7 million for a 150-acre ranch in California called “Boogie Ranch” in 2014. The property has a house with five bedrooms, two guest cottages, a pool, a bocce court, and a tractor barn. Woodman put the ranch up for sale for $20 million in July 2020. He sold a nearby home in Woodman for $18.4 million. He bought this 8,165-square-foot home in 2011 for $12.5 million.
