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Foxconn Buys Stake In Camera Maker GoPro, Turning Founder Into A Billionaire
- mitchellh 14y agoJust noting that based on the valuation of the company he is a billionaire, but GoPro is still a privately held business, so he [probably] doesn't have that sort of money on hand or available as short/safe investments. There are rumors of a GoPro IPO early next spring though[1], so he may have the cash very soon. [1]: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-17/gopro-widens-the-view-of-its-customer-base http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-17/gopro-widens...
- sliverstorm 14y agoNow that is an IPO I am looking forward to.
- pavlov 14y agoTo invest indirectly in GoPro, there's Ambarella which IPO'd some months ago. They make imaging processors used in most GoPro cameras such as the Hero2 and Hero3 models.
- mikeryan 14y agoJust noting that based on the valuation of the company he is a billionaire, but GoPro is still a privately held business, so he [probably] doesn't have that sort of money on hand or available as short/safe investments. Kind of standard for most billionaires (or even millionaires) no?
- unreal37 14y agoHe was given $200MM for his stake, so I'd say he is set for life even not counting his 51%+ remaining stake.
- pcl 14y agoThe article doesn't get into details about the structure of the deal -- the $200M could be invested in the company (i.e., a dilutive event for shareholders), rather than a simple stock purchase. I'd guess that it's probably some mix of the two.
- antr 14y agoNo difference with wealth liquidity of US households. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#Wealth_and_housing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#Wea...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sk5t 14y agoWhat prevents a serious camera company like Nikon or Canon from rolling and and owning this market? Is a couple $bn not enough to get them out of bed in the morning?
- kunle 14y agoThey never took it seriously to begin with, and now that its clear that this is a serious market, they're too late. I wouldn't put it past them to invest additionally in GoPro (or some competitor). Separately - who are GoPro's competitors?
- krasin 14y agoIn some sense, Pivothead [1], but the quality of the video is considerably lower. [1] http://pivothead.com/products/eyewear/recon/black-jet http://pivothead.com/products/eyewear/recon/black-jet
- bennesvig 14y agoAgreed. A competitor is Conture. Search devinsupertramp on YouTube to see a few videos they have sponsored him to make with the cameras. I think one is of a blob.
- clueless123 14y agoThere are plenty, but none matches the video quality/rugged-nes/price/ergonomics combination that the GoPro offers.
- barrkel 14y agoThe Drift Ghost is definitely better in almost all respects as a motorcycle helmet cam. The GoPro form factor is ill-suited to helmet mounting.
- rorrr 14y agoThere are tons of GoPro competitors: Contour Contour+2, ContourRoam Sony Action Cam (HDR-AS10 and HDR-AS15) Polaroid XS7, XS20 and XS100 CamOne (camonetec.com) AEE BlackEye XTR (Magicam SD21) (www.aee.com/en/) Tachyon (tachyoninc.com) UnmannedTech FPV HD camera Tons of unknown asian brands like 808 #16 720p micro camera ($8 to $40).
- flyinglizard 14y agoDigital consumer video cameras predated GoPro by more than a decade, and the market was split between electronics giants. You wouldn't bet on a billion dollar company emerging from nowhere in THAT market, would you? But, apparently, when you build a great brand, find a solid niche and make something consumers WANT to buy - as opposed to need to buy - great things can happen.
- clueless123 14y agoThe GoPro for extreme sports is way above any digital consumer video camera, add to that a good price point and you get a winner. Congrats to them.
- jrockway 14y agofind a solid niche and make something consumers WANT to buy - as opposed to need to buy - great things can happen I don't understand this comment. The food and pharmaceutical industries seem to be doing just fine, even though food and medicine are things that people need to buy.
- Kliment 14y agoBut nobody loves them
- coryl 14y agoPeople do love their brands, such as Coca Cola, McDonalds, etc.
- flyinglizard 14y agoMaking something people want means you can have higher margins , means you can easily overcome customer loyalty to existing products or services overlapping with your offering and it means that people don't have to need your product to buy it. How many people need an extreme sports camera? How many want it? The lesson here is that even seemingly established markets still contain a large value for people who get it right.
- bennesvig 14y agoAmazing cameras. Super affordable. And, the amount of marketing consumers do for them is insane.
- sandieman 14y agoDoes anyone remember flipcam?
- gojomo 14y agoFor reference: Cisco bought Pure Digital, an SF-based startup that created the Flip camera line, for $590 million in 2009, only to shut them down completely 2 years later: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/technology/13flip.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/technology/13flip.html That episode may be more a reflection on Cisco's confusion than anything wrong with the original product/market. (Perhaps with a less neglectful acquirer, Flip would have been a worthy competitor to GoPro.)
- masklinn 14y ago> Perhaps with a less neglectful acquirer, Flip would have been a worthy competitor to GoPro. It'd have to flip mightily, Pure Digital did consumer "point and shoot" cameras, gopro does actioncams. They're the same thing only in that both are cameras (and then again, so are RED, would you argue RED is going to become a gopro competitor?)
- bonzoesc 14y agoThey're both simple video cameras, GoPro just has a more robust housing to make it into an action camera.
- gojomo 14y agoFlip and GoPro both offer(ed) <$500 rechargeable compact consumer HD cameras through electronics retailers. You can find a number of discussions where buyers were weighing them against each other. So it's not far-fetched they'd have become more direct competitors, with some sort of 'Action Flip' arriving, if Cisco hadn't essentially given up on retail/consumer video. (Red differs in form-factor, feature set, pricing, target market, and distribution channel, so no, the same ripe potential for competition with GoPro isn't present.)
- mrb 14y agopg says that founders should be relentlessly resourceful. Well GoPro founder Nick Woodman is definitely resourceful: he raised initial capital ($30k) partially by selling bead-and-shell necklaces! http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/gopros-incredible-small-durable-camcorder-07012011.html http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/gopros-incredible-small...
- imrehg 14y agoJust got my Hero3, it's brilliant! :) (and living here in Taiwan, Foxconn's CEO is regarded pretty much as a business hero by the locals)
- kjackson2012 14y agoI've used GoPros a few times on road trips, and they are fantastic. I did a time lapse of 5 days driving through the South-West on one occasion, and new SLC on another, and the picture quality is great, and its time lapse functionality is really amazing. The only problem is that it generates a lot of data... I had to scale down from 1 pic per second to 1 pic every 10s, and I still had about 30GB of data. Anyone considering using the GoPro for time lapse, though, 1s frequency is what you want for a smooth video afterwards, 10s is too coarse and it gets really jumpy.
- aresant 14y agoPrior to inventing GoPro Nick Woodman had a full on, VC funded bubble startup in 2000 called "FunBug". (1) (2) FunBug was "designed to drive consumer traffic and spending to online and offline client businesses" via games & sweepstakes. His FunBug co-founder, Stephen Baumer, is the current CTO of GoPro. Woodman credits FunBug's failure as partial inspiration for GoPro in that he wanted to pursue something he was genuinely passionate about. So what? Don't give up on the dream, fail fast and fail big, keep your best people close, and build stuff you wish existed. Good stuff to think about with the new year around the corner. 1 - http://www.dmnews.com/funbugcom-looks-to-infest-the-net/article/67854/ http://www.dmnews.com/funbugcom-looks-to-infest-the-net/arti... 2 - http://web.archive.org/web/20001017210942/http://www.funbug.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20001017210942/http://www.funbug....
- pbsurf 14y agoFunBug slogan: Be a winner. GoPro slogan: Be a hero.
- nakedrobot2 14y agoCongratulations to Gopro. They basically created the market of action cams. The dinosaurs Sony, Nikon, Canon are seeing their hegemony erode because of the incredible vision and product design of Gopro. One interesting thing is that we are seeing a huge amount of "fisheye" videos now because of Gopro. Where it was once an extremely gimmicky kind of image, now it is becoming much more normal to see. And in certain situations (surfing, skiing) it really makes sense.
- evan_ 14y agoIt's kind of interesting you mention that because the one place that fisheye lens videos WERE extremely common in previous decades has been in extreme sports videos- especially skateboarding videos.
- dharma1 14y agoGoPro and RED are definitely shaking things up in the camera business. The japanese companies are just too slow/old school to keep up. Both also uniquely have excellent proprietary video codecs - RED has http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDCODE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDCODE and GoPro acquired http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineForm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineForm AFAIK GoPro 3 is using Sony sensors, yet Sony can't seem to get it's act together to produce a decent GoPro competitor (ActionCam). My money long term is on high quality sensors from Sony etc. running on Android, and h.265 for higher resolutions/framerates rivaling offerings from GoPro and RED. Give it 1-2 years.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoThe GoPro is an excellent example of how product design can be hindered by an excessive feature list. The conventional wisdom is that consumers always want more features and removing features or failing to support the features your competition does is a recipe for business suicide. But the truth is that often times some features are not necessary and supporting them can serve as a roadblock toward developing other features or improving the core meta-features (usability, performance, robustness, cost, etc.) GoPro was smart enough to realize that there is a huge market for a camera which is not a jack of all trades, which is optimized to be compact, light, super easy to use, good for action shots or establishment shots and also inexpensive but not necessarily good for still photography, portraits, close-ups, low-light shots, etc. By making those compromises they were able to create a product that excelled in its niche, cemented its brand name, and destroyed the competition. If you want to learn how to disrupt existing industries and build billion dollar companies from nothing, there are few better examples.
- mason55 14y ago> a camera which is not a jack of all trades, which is optimized to be compact, light, super easy to use, good for action shots or establishment shots and also inexpensive but not necessarily good for still photography, portraits, close-ups, low-light shots, etc. This sounds exactly like Flip (RIP). What do you think the difference was? The GoPro anti-shake technology & the ability to attach to helmets?
- dvdhsu 14y agoThat was my first question as well. I think Flip was unlucky in that their releases coincided with the rise of smartphones, which took their lunch. When one device just takes video and costs around as much as an subsidized smartphone, there isn't any question which one I'm going to pick. GoPro, though, wasn't hurt by the rise of smartphones. Surfers won't use smartphones for footage; they'll use the GoPro, since it's waterproof, has anti-shake, and other inportant features, targeted specifically at surfers. Perhaps the moral is: when the rest of your industry is declining, focus on a niche, and execute well.
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- tiddi 14y agoYou don't just buy a GoPro, you buy all the accessories too. I bought a Hero 3 Black last month, my first GoPro and found myself spending almost as much on accessories (LCD, batteries, mounts,etc.) as I did on the camera. I would think thats where they make most of their money being that its cheap to manufacture a couple pieces of plastic that sells for $40. I don't do any sports, I'm not really interested in photography but a GoPro is something I always wanted. I used it to record the plane landing as I came home from vacation and even use it to record my kids in the backseat while driving. It's a fun camera and congrats to woodman. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zb7OBLtoAo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zb7OBLtoAo
- jzwinck 14y agoDid anyone else take notice of the percentage stake being 8.88%? It's interesting because eight is a lucky number in China where the buyer is located. I haven't noticed such a blatant use of this particular superstition in a western business deal before. Also, this post currently has a score of 88....
- winter_blue 14y ago> Also, this post currently has a score of 88.... Woa.. spooky coincidence... Anyways, spot on.
- eyeareque 14y agoI've used every GoPro camera made, minus the first film camera they started with. I love them, but I also tend to hate them at times too. I've had to RMA about three of them, and my friends have had issues too. Hopefully they can put their massive popularity and growth (money) back into the product to make it more stable and robust. They've really created an awesome product when it works well. I know that if someone came up with a product that worked flawlessly every time, they could chip away at GoPro's market share.
- fudged71 14y agoHonestly, I had no idea that they had a film camera. Thanks!