GoPro Files For IPO

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/07/gopro-files-for-ipo-as-the-action-camera-maker-prepares-to-go-public/

by adidash • 12 years ago

175 118 12 years ago

af3• 12 years ago

They put cameras on the helmets? good enough to file an IPO...

jonknee3• 12 years ago

They put cameras everywhere and sell a ton of them for quite a bit of money. Makes a lot more sense than losing money shoving 140 characters around the globe...

Check out their YouTube channel for examples of what their customers do with their cameras. It's pretty amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/gopro

nether2• 12 years ago

We mount them in various locations on our aircraft during tests. GoPros have nice experimental science applications when you need a rugged camera with an integrated stable mount.

dshibarshin• 12 years ago

Really? The company might exceed $1 billion in revenue for all of 2013 in a Bloomberg TV interview last October.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/07/gopro-files-for-ipo-as-the-...

kcbanner• 12 years ago

This is a fairly ignorant comment. GoPro cameras are used in almost all sports or where weather hardened cameras are required.

jlarocco• 12 years ago

That's a pretty silly comment.

They're selling a somewhat specialized camera to a huge potential market, making billions of dollars.

It's a far more promising business plan than 99% of the startups I see mentioned on HN.

jaegerpicker• 12 years ago

They are hugely popular with a TON of different segments of sports. Everything from paintball to hunting to hang gliding to snowboarding to fly fishing. All have amazing user generated content from the gopro.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

And their market is limited to people who go outside and move about. Who here would'a thunk it?

chasing• 12 years ago

GoPro's an interesting company. Conventional wisdom would say that the market for dedicated mobile cameras is getting eaten up by general-purpose mobile devices. Think of what happened to Flip. And, yet, they seem to be thriving.

Anyway: They seem to have a good product and they definitely have been great at creating/expanding a new and distinct niche for mobile photography -- one not easily serviced by iPhones and other mobile devices.

So: Congrats!

jonknee3• 12 years ago

GoPro's are most useful in situations you wouldn't want your phone near (mounted on a helmet, attached to the outside of a car, underwater, etc). They tie in with phones though so you see the current video from your camera on your phone (handy if the mount is in an awkward spot).

jesbickhart7• 12 years ago

It is clearly a nitch in the market place but is it large enough to sustain and grow in a publicly traded company? That is the question.

Mobile phones are only going to start taking bigger bites out of the market. And sure we may not mount our phones on submarines or airplane wings like we could a GoPro but apart from the extreme cases, our phones will be much more convenient than another piece of hardware right?

sp3323• 12 years ago

I thought Flip was popular, they were bought by Cisco and summarily cancelled.

jmathai• 12 years ago

They were popular. Cisco bought them at their height. Shortly after the purchase Cisco saw the cliff.

Encosia• 12 years ago

Flip was cancelled just ahead of nearly every smartphone having capability to record comparable quality video. It was a smart move by Cisco.

It seems less likely that phones will be able to supercede GoPro in the same way, since you'd never want to subject such an important device to the physical situations that you would a GoPro.

The lens issue is also non-trivial. For a general purpose camera (i.e. smartphone), you wouldn't want a wide angle lens like you would for PoV video, and making a smartphone's camera lens interchangeable for a small segment of its customers probably isn't happening broadly if ever.

sheetjs• 12 years ago

I think the wisdom is "the market for dedicated general-purpose mobile cameras is getting eaten up by general-purpose mobile devices", and Flip didn't have a compelling niche.

On the other hand, GoPro cameras have a reputation for usability in some very extreme situations, use cases outside of the smartphone story (if you are going to mount a device on your helmet or elsewhere, you better hope that it can withstand the elements and a crash or two

LanceH• 12 years ago

I've been very pleased with mine. Not just the durability but how it handles jitter and rapid lighting changes, two things that are very important for filming moving things while on the move.

jmharvey• 12 years ago

Flip's compelling niche was that it was easy to get the pictures off the camera. But as easy as an integrated USB plug is to use, wireless is even easier.

marvin• 12 years ago

Funny anecdote re: good product:

I fly gliders recreationally. Last fall one of the guys in the club called me up and asked if I'd lost my GoPro. I hadn't, but from his description, it was probably the camera of a guy I flew a two-seater with in a competition a year earlier.

Turns out that the camera had been returned by a hiker who found it while hiking on a mountain, approximately 10 kilometers from the airfield. Looking at the last footage in the camera, you could see three guys using a suction cup holder to attach the camera on the outside body of the glider. The video continued as the glider launched, and for approximately ten minutes of flight. Then, the camera detatched from the airplane. As it went tumbling down, there were a couple of frames where the glider was captured from below, rapidly disappearing into the sky.

The camera landed on the mountain, where it remained through the winter. A year later, a guy hiking there found it and returned it, in working order, to the glider club.

IgorPartola5• 12 years ago

Does GoPro do any kind of video stabilization? I am a bit worried about getting one of these and having a video that's completely unusable (I am thinking about taking it for some trail running).

Also, are things like Gear Pro and other knock-offs worth anything?

ye• 12 years ago

There's no mobile phone camera that's even close to GoPro's video quality. I can't put a phone on my helmet and go skiing or windsurfing, it will simply not survive.

sliverstorm3• 12 years ago

There's also the issue of wind noise. GoPro hasn't completely solved wind noise, but they are leagues ahead of what a cell phone is going to achieve at 65mph.

jesbickhart7• 12 years ago

I would call "windsurfing" and "skiing" extreme cases of POV usage. The normal application of POV cams could easily be filled by a more practical mobile device such as a cell phone.

JonLim2• 12 years ago

Perhaps this is anecdotal, but the launch of the HERO3 Black was personally very anticipated.

It was shipped to my house a few days after launch, as I had pre-ordered, but the camera just does not last beyond half an hour when recording 720p@120fps. This seems a bit... silly, but I was willing to chalk it up to launch day jitters. Nothing was fixed as time went on.

I have emailed support regularly, to the tune of once per week for the month and have received zero response. I wanted to just ask about why my battery dies so quickly and what would they suggest.

Nothing.

For a company with such a great product, they sure make a champion of their product and once-happy customer feel worthless.

Sorry for getting off track, it just bothers me still.

cdk• 12 years ago

I had a similar experience. I purchased a GoPro to use for a trip to Mexico. I had heard great stories about how durable and reliable they were from friends. So I didn't hesitate to buy one on Amazon.

Long story short all the footage from my vacation were unusable as many of the videos and pictures were corrupted/distorted which was annoying. Tried customer support but weren't able to fix the issue so I ended up returning it.

modoc• 12 years ago

FWIW the framerate has a big impact on the battery life for me (Hero3 Black). 30 fps = longer batter life. That said the battery life on the Hero3's isn't great, especially in the cold. I have the battery backpack thing, and a few spare internal batteries for this reason. The upside is the video quality, and low light performance, is WAY better than previous generations. So PITA but worth it for me.

startupfounder• 12 years ago

This is a big win for hardware startups! Showing that being a cash cow and having sustainable growth is signaling the market that the startup hardware revolution is upon us.

debt• 12 years ago

Completely agree which makes it such an awesome IPO. I'm really blown away by the popularity of their cameras. They seem like a really creative bunch so it'll be cool to see what's next.

thrush• 12 years ago

Next, GoPro announces Google Glass competitor for recording video and taking pictures.

mikeryan• 12 years ago

There's actually a company exactly trying to fill that niche called Recon

http://www.fastcompany.com/3018645/fast-feed/this-google-gla...

http://www.reconinstruments.com/products/jet/

_zen2• 12 years ago

Jet Recon looks very promising, but professional cyclists will probably not consider it until they iterate on the design and improve peripheral vision. Proper cycling glasses have unobstructed peripheral vision on the left/bottom/right, and sometimes even top. This is where Google glass slightly edges the Recon Jet, but the Recon Jet looks to have far more stabilization for sporting than the Google Glass.

jesbickhart7• 12 years ago

Although this is sarcastic you do bring up a good point. GoPro is a maker of a single product - the GoPro POV camera - just as RedBull is the maker of a single product - the wing-inducing energy drink. How much longer will GoPro be able to survive in the increasing competitive market of solely POV cameras, especially with opportunities for mobile to eat up a share of the market.

By filing for an IPO Nick Woodman must believe that the GoPro brand is worth as much as the product they make itself. That is the only justification I can think of for filing. How many iterations of the camera can they make and for how much longer is this sustainable without some sort of a pivot?

josefresco• 12 years ago

Nothing to do with the IPO but I found the Hero3 both hard to learn and operate. Maybe I'm spoiled by user friendly tech, but it seems the compromises in usability to achieve durability severely limits the ability for an average person to use the product. The tiny control interface and cryptic symbols required much time in the tiny but dense instruction booklet.

I was only helping a family member (as the resident family geek) but was left with the impression that it would take a solid weekend (or three) to fully understand the options and how best to get the footage you want.

To contrast I have a "tough" Lumix digital camera which is water, drop and generally abuse resistant that is drop dead easy to use, records in high-def and also has a large LCD and dedicated record/photo buttons that make operating it easy. And I'm not talking about normal recording conditions, I've used both extensively on the trail, in the cold (winters in Maine) and mounted on various vehicles and body parts.

I do think the reasoning behind many of these inconveniences is toughness but the net result is a very difficult product.

/rant

sp3323• 12 years ago

I liked my Lumix a lot (it got stolen in Canada, of all places) and even went swimming in the Mediterranean with it, but it was still a general purpose point-and-shoot. GoPros generally have wide-angle lenses and I don't doubt they're even more durable. It makes sense to me to make a product that's as tough as possible, just to make sure they're not going head-to-head with Panasonic et al.

drone• 12 years ago

To be fair, I always thought the Contour was miles ahead in form factor and usability, it's a shame that they weren't able to continue to compete with GoPro.

Edit: a couple of links:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-21/three-lesson...

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/investor-plans-revive-contour-r...

btgeekboy• 12 years ago

I actually bought a Contour before I ended up selling it to get a GoPro 3 Black. The video quality just wasn't comparable at all. The laser level was a great concept, but the WiFi viewfinder is far easier to use, despite sucking down battery like there's no tomorrow.

There were 3 things I really liked on the Contour, though: the standard tripod screw on the bottom (that's an extra accessory on the GoPro), the battery life was far better, and the model I had was able to withstand a few feet of water without a big bulky case. (Snorkeling/swimming okay, SCUBA not.)

melarina• 12 years ago

Connect to the camera using wifi and you can control it with a much more user friendly app (from Gopro) on your phone.

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

Connecting to it via wifi without the benefit of the paper manual is itself a WTF-worthy process. Even with the manual it was a PITA for me, I can't imagine what it's like for a non-techie.

JonLim2• 12 years ago

You'd be lucky to get any decent battery life out of it too. (The GoPro.)

baddox3• 12 years ago

I surprised to hear that you had so much trouble. I think my GoPro is at least as easy to use and navigate menus as my Canon point and shoot camera, which has a bunch of buttons and a full color LCD.

NDizzle• 12 years ago

I love GoPros and I wish the company well.

My favorite GoPro video is this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2AfsBrpwRQ#t=1m10s

Skip to 1 minute, 10 seconds if it doesn't place you there automatically.

mbesto• 12 years ago

1. I heard somewhere that GoPro hasn't produced any video for it's own marketing material - they just leverage user generated content. (genius)

2. This company is going to get really interesting when it starts to compete with YT/Vimeo in specific verticals for video publishing. (http://gopro.com/channel)

shittyanalogy• 12 years ago

1) They do. I have friends that work for GoPro. They fly all around the world shooting video for ads. I am extremely jealous of their jobs.

lquist• 12 years ago

Not reported here, but they recently (i.e. a few months ago) brought their software consultants (General Things: http://generalthings.com/) in-house. General Things did all the work behind the GoPro website, and I always thought it was a bit odd that a company so big had almost completely outsourced web dev. Once they acquired General Things, an IPO seemed a foregone conclusion. Congrats all!

bennesvig• 12 years ago

Beyond the fact that they have an amazing product, a good chunk of their success is due to phenomenal user-generated content. I can't think of any other recent company that has better user-generated marketing than GoPro.

alexcroox• 12 years ago

Yep, so good 5 years ago I built a site to try and catalog the best ones! http://goproheroes.com

wil421• 12 years ago

Interesting what causes a successful company to file an IPO?

I understand why some do it, they've reached a point where they need funding to scale and already have many private investors. Maybe thats not even right.

When I start a company one day I dont think I will ever want to take in public. It seems like you loose too much control over where you are going. Maybe its because I am a build what our customer want type person and not a lets return value to our shareholder by delivering a cheaper product type. Maybe that doesnt make sense.

dhimes• 12 years ago

Good question. Part of the answer is probably selection bias: bad companies don't get to that stage (although I suppose that is quite debatable when they are in an arena where people can't tell the difference between good and bad).

sliverstorm3• 12 years ago

To my understanding, a company IPO's for one or both of two reasons:

1) To allow initial investors (be they the founder or venture capitol) to cash out

2) To generate capital for the next stage of the business's growth & development

beambot• 12 years ago

3) They have enough shareholders that it is effectively forced upon them by the SEC.

mahyarm• 12 years ago

If you want to stay private forever and always have full founder control, then you should never offer stock based compensation (maybe profit sharing instead) or have plan to cash out that stock based compensation in the future, that you communicate when you hire people.

blah32497• 12 years ago

"then you should never offer stock based compensation"

unfortunately most of your funding will be from VC companies, and it's unlikely they will give you money under a profit sharing arrangement b/c it does follow their IPO->cash out workflow.

The current system is flawed and self perpetuating

matthewmcg• 12 years ago

It depends how you structure the plan. Publix is an example of a privately controlled* company that has wide employee stock ownership.

*the stock is held by a small group of owners and many employees. Transfers are limited by contract and by securities laws. Because of the large number of shareholders, the company does have to file periodic reports with the SEC but the shares are not listed on an exchange and not available to the public. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publix#Publix_stock

_zen2• 12 years ago

Anyone know when the GoPro Hero4 is expected? What is GoPro's release cycle?

Luc• 12 years ago

The Russians have been using GoPros during the last couple of spacewalks they did (to install the earth observation cameras on the ISS). They have the regular helmet cams, but also a GoPro around their wrist in a little white box.

I'm not sure if they're 'stock' GoPro cameras. The temperature extremes are nothing to sniff at.

IgorPartola5• 12 years ago

But... there is no temperature in space: http://www.universetoday.com/77070/how-cold-is-space/

lutusp6• 12 years ago

But... there is no temperature in space ...

That's misleading (and the linked article offers no support for your claim). A vacuum has no temperature, but objects in space certainly do have a temperature and all the normal thermodynamic rules apply.

If what you said were true, you could safely approach the sun as long as you didn't come into contact with it. But that's not true.

In the neighborhood of the non-planet Pluto, the median temperature is just 33 Kelvins.

In the extremes of space, between the stars, the temperature of an object falls to the CMB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background), about 2.7 Kelvins.

The linked article makes the same points.

radiorental2• 12 years ago

My understanding is that they have difficulty with customer retention. Many people are drawn in by the amazing videos on youtube only to find

1) Video editing is tedious and often greatly underestimated.

2) Their product usability is wanting. I have both a v1 and v2, I still have to read the manual to figure out what the different modes are.

3) Battery life has been disappointing and I understand the v3 has issues too.

I've heard first hand evidence from insiders that loyal customer retention is a big challenge. Growing out of the niche they're in is hard to envisage.

bedhead• 12 years ago

Yup, this was me. Bought the Hero Black and returned it two weeks later, for all of the reasons you cited.

joelrunyon2• 12 years ago

I think the biggest killer for me has been battery life.

Video editing isn't that bad if you know what you're doing or willing to put in time to learn.

There aren't that many different modes, you can pick most of it up in 15 minutes of looking at the manual (which is probably worth doing with anything you're spending $300+ for.

The battery life though - it's a bummer to be out in the middle of nowhere & expecting to capture some awesome footage to come home & realize that your camera crapped out halfway through.

ntaso2• 12 years ago

Battery life is indeed bad. My advice:

- Turn off WiFi. This drains battery faster than just having the camera record everything.

- Take only "snippets". This makes editing easier later anyways, since it's usually more convenient to browse through smaller files than through one big long video over an hour. I try to keep every snippet < 1 minute. Most of the time, only 3-5 seconds of one snippet end up in my final video to give it a fast pace anyways.

- Keep a spare battery pack.

But I have to admit that this won't help you a lot, if you're in difficult situations where you can't easily change batteries (under water for long periods of time, climbing somewhere, flying, driving).

radiorental2• 12 years ago

"Video editing isn't that bad if you know what you're doing or willing to put in time to learn."

You're thinking like a developer (o; End users see the cool videos and don't see the learning curve needed to produce slick videos. As soon as they're hit with that curve they realise it's not that simple. iMovie goes a long way but it's often a very foreign ui/workflow.

"There aren't that many different modes" not there are not, but the UI on v1 & v2 camera is simply confusing. Trust me.

hcarvalhoalves2• 12 years ago

I've seen a lot of advertising around GoPro lately, even on TV shows that normally have nothing to do with it. Now it's explained.

aluhut• 12 years ago

The latest spot with Red Bulls Stratos made me think: where do you want to go from there? We've seen those things can handle a jump from space. You can't do that. Nobody can do that anymore. This is the ultimate thing. Everything else we've seen already. All those crazy base jumps, flight suits, whatever.

There is nothing more to get there.

How do you sell a new product based on this??

hcarvalhoalves2• 12 years ago

They have been just iterating over basically the same product for a while. I don't think they will introduce any "new" product, just upgraded version with higher resolution, more FPS, etc.

trustfundbaby• 12 years ago

Now it makes sense why they were all up on 60 Minutes last November.

joering2• 12 years ago

GoPro is like Apple for fans; screw the price; I'm getting one anyways!

As of whether there are better solutions or not, I cannot attest. I will however tell you that a friend of mine working at BestBuy (Florida) told me they sell those like crazy. It is normal to sell five cameras a week from all major brands combined. It is normal to sell five of GoPros a day!

Their product seem top notch and going around reviews, they mostly seem to confirm. I am not sure, however what will they do with a buffer or cash? Their approach is we wont screw people over X amount of years and introduce new things into our devices; we go all the way in in version 1. That's goPro. Where will they go from here, not sure...

rmc4• 12 years ago

GoPro is like Apple for fans; screw the price; I'm getting one anyways!

Actually GoPro (& related action cameras) customers are probably very interested in expensive sports/hobbies. Many motorcyclists have one, and if you're interested in that you'll be spending a lot of money on the bike, the equipement, servicing, insurance, etc. So what's €300 for a camera?

joelrunyon2• 12 years ago

Tangent: Why does everything have autoplay videos these days? It's like we're going back to the terrible days of geocities.

evan_• 12 years ago

I'm watching the Olympic Opening Ceremonies right now and a lot of athletes are walking in filming with GoPros- in past years it's been iPhones and other cell phones. They probably got them in goody bags, but still it's a pretty good sign.

mr_shickadance• 12 years ago

ipo's keep making my rent go higher. Can't afford a house.

sizzle• 12 years ago

wow he is a fellow UCSD alumni, respect.

" featuresBack to SchoolA Full Ride to Fulfill DreamsThe Best Ride of Our LivesGame ChangerBeyond the Brew

The Best Ride of Our Lives

Nick Woodman still remembers the day he decided to become a surfer. He was eight years old, standing in his friend Brian’s bedroom. Brian’s family had a house in Hawaii, and his walls in California were plastered with tearouts from Surfer magazine depicting palm trees, beautiful people, and the curling turquoise waves of the North Shore.

“I didn’t even know that world existed,” recalls Woodman, Muir ’97, who grew up surrounded by tech startups in the wealthy Silicon Valley community of Atherton. “But from then on, I knew I wanted to live in that world.”

Thirty years later, Woodman is still in Silicon Valley, but he’s tan and fit and has a cheeky freckled grin that suggests he’s living the good life. He should be grinning. He’s the founder and CEO of GoPro—one of the world’s fastest growing camera companies, now worth an estimated $2.25 billion. He’s created a device that helps people capture and share their passions from the North Shore and way beyond.

It started as a durable wrist-mounted camera for surfers to record their feats in the lineup—effectively helping them “go pro.” Now the palm-size cameras, which sell from $200 to $400, can be fastened to helmets, handlebars, ski poles, and, yes, surfboards to document experiences both ordinary and extraordinary. Last October, the Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner—equipped with five GoPros—jumped from 24 miles above the earth’s surface, breaking the world record for the highest and fastest freefall, and broadcasting it live for all to see. A few months later, the cameras were streaming 30-foot waves at the Mavericks Invitational surf contest in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and a few days after that, snowboard slides and backside airs at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo. For GoPro, this is every-day R&D. "

GoPro Files For IPO

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