Nick Woodman, founder and CEO of sports camera company GoPro, was the highest paid U.S. chief executive of 2014, Bloomberg recently reported.
Woodman's financial success is more than a decade in the making. He founded GoPro in 2004, initially just making wrist straps for small cameras and then eventually branching out into building the hardware itself.
Woodman's life hasn't slowed down since — he's an adrenaline junkie, Red Bull addict, snowboarder, mountain biker, race-car driver, and an avid surfer.
Woodman's high school classmates remember him as being immensely passionate, waking up at five in the morning to go surfing before classes. "Now professional content is inspiring kids around the world to pursue their passions, just like I was inspired by those Surfer magazine tear outs on the wall," he told UCSD's alumni magazine.
Source: CNBC, UCSD Alumni
After building his first startup, a web marketing company that eventually flopped during the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, Woodman decided to fund his next venture himself. He moved back in with his parents and traveled up and down the California coast in a Volkswagen Westfalia van called "The Biscuit," where he worked on the first GoPro wrist straps and cameras.
Source: GoPro, YouTube
Woodman sold his first GoPro cameras in surf shops and even on QVC, which he appeared on several times in GoPro's early days. Here he is on the home shopping network in 2005, three years after creating the first GoPro. "It was very humble beginnings for GoPro, but I think it's the right kind of beginning," he told Outside.
Source: YouTube
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