♪ emily: like a shot of adrenaline, gopro shares soared in 2014. nick woodman became the highest-paid ceo in america. gopro dominated the action sports camera market, branched out into media and content and launched a drone, but gopro's drones started literally falling out of the sky. and thek fell too, media strategy sputtered. there were layoffs, and gopro

tumble down the road. when we sat down with founder and ceo nick woodman in march 2019, gopro had stabilized, become profitable, and gone back to its roots, making cameras. ♪ joining me today on "bloomberg studio 1.0," gopro founder and ceo nick woodman. thank you for joining us. you have had some high highs and lows lows. what do you think the best action sports metaphor is, writing a big wave, wiping out, and getting back on the board? how would you describe it. ? nick: it is more of a free climb. i think free climbing is a good metaphor for being an entrepreneur. you start out with an idea,

which is a bit of a cliff, but you think i got this good i can climb that no problem. you start climbing, and went to get into the pursuit of your idea, you get far enough along that you can't stop climbing, because it is too far down, but the question is do you believe in yourself? idea?lieve in the if you do, you have got to keep climbing. i started climbing in 2002, and some pitches have been straightforward, some pitches have been challenging, inverted, and you are hanging by one hand them a but it has been a great climb and is going well now. emily: now the company is closer to $1 billion. it has been that way for a few years. do you feel like you fell off the cliff, hanging on? climb withs been a

highs and lows, but mostly highs. to have achieved what we have achieved, still doing what we are doing, a leader in every market around the world and recognized as a technical imaging asn digital a whole, i am blown away by what we have accomplished with gopro, and the momentum is in our favor. emily: i love the optimism come up but for you emotionally, have you had moments where you felt like maybe i can't get to the top? nick: absolutely. i have gone through every human emotion. i don't think consumer interest in capturing and sharing experiences will go away, so the opportunity for gopro is everlasting. even in the toughest times i would ask myself, is our work meaningful and is our work appreciated? and the answer has always been coming yes, we just need to

adjust our approach to solving these challenges for people and we can thrive again. we have done that and gopro is thriving again. emily: let's talk about where the idea came from. you grew up in california. what kind of kid were you? were you surfing at three years old? nick: i wish. i didn't start surfing and tell it was 10 or 11. i grew up 30 minutes from the ocean. i didn't know what surfing was until i saw magazine terror outs on a friends wall, beautiful places, faces, waves. oh my god. i want to be part of this. content got me started, and now were letting content inspire people to go out and pursue their own interests. emily: you studied visual arts in creative writing in college. typicalt your silicon valley ceo. nick: i didn't go to stanford.

i didn't study business. i have a creative background. i learned business on the go, but my creative background, you can see it in our brand and everything we do at gopro. in times where i don't know what to do, i rely on my creative training to help find the way. emily: you started a couple of companies out of school. they didn't get off the ground but sound pretty cool. empowerall.com. nick: i decided to take what money i saved up from my previous job and take a surf trip. i am a big believer that if you follow your passions, you have your best ideas. i had my idea for gopro before i

left for the trip, which was a , iy crude body board strap took a body board strap and reconfigured it to hold a camera to my wrist. it works so well that i thought this might be my business idea. >> you and your wife were selling necklaces out of a van. were you real beach plums? nick: we were entrepreneurial. it was pretty cool. wiferlfriend who is now my , when we were in indonesia, we shell belts made that we brought back to california and spent two months driving up and down the coast of california selling these belts out of my 1970's volkswagen, and it served as the seed money for gopro.

and use10,000 worth that to start the company. emily: this is one of the first cameras. nick: yes, that is the first gopro. that sold for $20 in surf shops, snorkel shops. we built the gopro today off this 35mm reusable film camera. are on this. your wife is on this. nick: i didn't have a budget to hire any models. that's me. that's me. that's my wife. emily: didn't you borrow a sewing machine from your mom? nick: yes, i started gopro with $20,000 i had saved, plus $10,000 from selling belts. my mom loaned me $35,000 and the sewing machine. i launched gopro with $65,000 and the sewing machine, and down

the road over the next couple of years to build inventory, my dad loaned me a couple hundred thousand. i paid my mom and dad back and they both became shareholders in the company. the gopro you know today was built on $265,000. we took outside investment along the way before going public, but never spent the investment money we brought in, so i can say that really we built this global on $265,000. i found this camera, the first gopro, on an early version of alibaba. i reached out to the company that made it, but we could not communicate clearly, so we emailed. their english was better than my chinese, but i could not do it over the phone. i ended up making this first gopro without meeting the company that made it.

i wired the company $5,000 for injection molding. they turned out to be a legit company. emily: they sold it for three dollars, and you sold it for $35. nick: $3.05. when you take receipt of it at the port in hong kong, i sold these two surf shops, snorkel shops for $10, and they would sell it to the consumer for $20. emily: when did you realize that this is the thing that people wanted? nick: gopro was successful from the first trade show, profitable from the first trade show. we had no overhead. it was one employee, me. our first sale was to a japanese distributor. he bought a couple thousand units and i thought, oh my god, i am successful right out of the gates. the first year, $150,000 in

sales, the next year is $350,000, then $800,000, three point $5 million, $19 million, then it ran away. ♪ nick: i have been very vocal about our need to come out with exciting new products every year. ♪

emily: when you think about the success and a lot of entrepreneurs want to know, how much was luck and how much was skill? nick: a time of luck. timing is incredibly important in business. some people are able to identify market trends and time things atl and they are fantastic it. others like myself are incredibly fortunate to have the ,ight idea at the right time

and they emerged that with a determination to make it happen. worked seven days a week, 300 65 days a year for the first few years, never took a single vacation, never took a break, never took a day off, and i sacrificed a lot of my personal life and personal relationships to make gopro successful, but i was going to succeed no matter what. emily: 2012, you took money from foxconn, and 8%, 9% stake in the company. that value the company a $2.25 billion. that made you a billionaire. a long way from the van in australia. people called you the mad billionaire or something. did you like that nickname?> nick: it made for a good story title. i am enthusiastic and i and be explore

adventurous and try different things also if that makes me mad, i am mad. emily: how did you handle that transition from the guy selling necklaces in a van to one of the wealthiest ceos in the united states? , it does feelit like a disney movie. one of the things i am most proud of his eye and the same i was when i was living out of a van, but look at me. authenticity is one of the most important things in life, one of the most important things at when youd people know are authentic. our customers know when we are authentic. that is something important to me. emily: you took the company public in 2014. a lot o was made of the money. there was a lot of controversy. was that fair? but i also understand how the world works, how media works, how the markets work, and

ultimately, it is not whether it is fair or not. it is just how you manage it. i'm trying not to get too caught up in all that. i am not here to do anything else than to be a terrific husband to my wife, father to my children, a positive contributor to the world, and be the best ceo i can be for gopro, and i am proud of the work on all fronts. emily: 20, things started to change. there were layoffs. there were layoffs and 2017. what was happening inside the company? nick: we were trying a lot of new things. just because you are successful in one area, it does not translate to another. just because you are an all-star pitcher doesn't mean you can play quarterback. to grow gopro, we tried things that made a lot of sense. emily: at one point, a media

company? nick: that's right. we still have opportunity in these areas, and more, but we didn't have the right approach, the right skill set, and i think we took on too much, too soon, and we would have been better served, i believe, to stay inused on our core purpose the world, which is to help people capture and share experiences that would otherwise be difficult to do. now we are back to that, and wouldn't you know the business is growing again? we are on track for profitability again. emily: you also got into drones. that come at the time, also made sense, but then the drum started falling out of the sky and it was caught on gopro. what went wrong there? nick: it was a big deal because of the simple problem. there was a hinge that holds the

battery into its compartment. the hinge was made out of plastic and it would lose its retention over time. you only have to have a battery act out to lose power. once we replace that hinge with a metal hinge, problem solved, but our challenge in the drum space wasn't because of that initial product failure, it was because the consumer drone market -- we are a consumer product company -- the consumer drone market isn't as big as everybody thought it was going to be. we looked at it and said not enough of our customers want these. there is not enough profit. it is too expensive. let's get out of the business. emily: how did you decide to go back to your roots, focus on making cameras? of teenage 2.5 years

years of finding our way, we what made us so successful in the first 12 years of our business and we recognize that during those years we weren't laser focused on solving -- were laser focused on solving the problem of how to capture and share their active lifestyle. that is all we did. so we decided to go back to that winning formula and go back to the same product strategy and market strategy that was so successful during those years. 2018, we had very good quarterly performance, meeting or beating guidance, and we reestablished our reputation as a predictable business, and that is continuing into 2019 come at we are proud of. emily: there is competition, sony, chinese companies doing what you do or trying to do what you do.

how do you continue to differentiate your core product when there is folks out there that are trying to make it cheaper and better? nick: reinvent it and push the limits every year. i have been vocal about our need to come out with exciting new products every year. that was one of the lessons learned, in years where we did not come out with something new and exciting for our customers -- one of the reasons we maintained our leadership position in every market we sell and around the world is because we are relent relentlessoping -- in developing new innovation and products, and we were running at a pace that is difficult to keep up with. our competitors have not come out with new products in the last two or three years, and i think we are wearing everybody out. ♪ ork: cameras going to europe cameras destined for asia will still be produced in china, but the u.s. production in mexico

helps us to avoid tariffs. ♪

emily: there was the threat of tariffs between the u.s. and china, and you decided to move some production out of china. nick: that's right. emily: tell me about that. nick: we are moving our u.s.-bound camera production to mexico, but keeping rest of world reduction of cameras in china, so cameras going to europe or cameras destined for asia will still be produced in u.s.-boundthe production in mexico helps us to avoid tariffs. emily: you said we are not going to get caught in this. ,ick: we have a saying at gopro we don't want to be a deer in headlights. we want to be the ones driving the truck. when not going to hit the deer. we definitely don't want to be the deer. we said let's go research where else we would build our products.

we landed on mexico. through our research, we learned there were financial benefits, logistical benefits to doing so anyway, regardless of tariffs or no tariffs also whether or not -- so whether or not the terrorist threat becomes real, we are happy to be moving our u.s.-bound production to mexico. you have a book about the challenges women face in technology, and your team was up front about their own cultural issues they were trying to work through. all of this was happening as you were trying to turn the company around. talk to me about how you work through those cultural issues inside your own company. nick: i was fortunate that since the founding days of gopro, i have had some powerful women in the business. my wife, she is employee number

three, and my two sisters, and they were vocal in the early days about, you know, that gopro being founded in an action sports culture and so forth, it was easy to rather take towards a male-dominated voice and imagery, but even with their influence along the way, i remember reading some employee posts and hearing a bit internally, the term was gopro culture.-b unless you were friends with your manager, it was going to be hard to advance to the ranks of the company. after the first time i heard that, we went to work on that. us,that is important to because not only do we need to be diverse because it is important for the health of the

company internally, it is important for the health of the company as a consumer product rand. emily: right. do more men by gopros? nick: yes. we can always do better. the markets that we serve our mail-dominated, so that skews the sales. , roughly 70%ago male, 30% female customer base. it has improved. emily: what have you done? as a brand, it is important to celebrate, showcase female accomplishments, whether athletic or culinary or musically or artistically, and not just be the male-dominated brand we were in our early days. it has been good for our business. but even more importantly, our tole brand purpose is

celebrate all that is diverse and positive in the world and leverage gopro as a platform to inspire people to live positive lifestyles. to do that effectively, we have to be diverse in that celebration. emily: you mention you are open to selling the company. are you still open to selling the company? i work at bloomberg. i have to ask that question. nick: as the ceo of a public a publicevery ceo of company is opening to selling the business if it is right for the business and shareholders. this is not what i spent my days thinking about. we are focused on building the strongest, most profitable gopro possible, and i think we are doing a terrific job of that. emily: if i remember correctly, three kids? nick: three little boys. emily: i have three boys.

i remember that because when we did our first interview, you were talking about your kids. , you get ithe gopro there i level and it is a beautiful thing. emily: what is your advice to your kids? what lessons do you want to impart to them? nick: stay authentic to yourself. don't do something because somebody else thinks you should do it. , your ownr own dream passion. i think our interests are our roadmap to our lives. our interests are what compel us ,o get out of bed every morning get off the couch and move in a certain direction. some of us don't listen to the voice inside ourselves and we do what other people think we should do, then we wonder why we don't find fulfillment or happiness, so i try to instill my kids with the confidence to follow their hearts and their

mind, and that will lead them to where they should be in the world. emily: all right, nick woodman, ceo and founder of gopro, thank you. nick: thank you. ♪ so with xfinity mobile

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hong kong. this is "bloomberg markets: asia ." hikee fed has no bias to a or cut, transitory forces are holding inflation back. david: china removes limits on bank ownership and scrapping size requirements. rishaad: a brexit compromise, theresa may could be crossing a the united keeping kingdom in the customs union.

two sets of tla's this afternoon. isn and pmi's. worse than the estimates. we are trudging through some sludge. notd: the pmi two days ago too good. you had this normalization. yvonne: you have japan and china closed, so there is not a lot of direction today. the fed should be a bigger story. we are dealing with liquidity and volume pretty low herein the aussie. pretty mixed picture with equities. , you cannot really tell a full story when it comes to equities, given the