What Is Nicholas Woodman's Net Worth?
Nicholas Woodman is an American entrepreneur who has a net worth of $300 million. He earned fortune and fame as the founder of GoPro, a technology company that manufactures action cameras. Woodman was named Entrepreneur of the Year (Retail and Consumer Products category) by Ernst & Young in 2013, and in 2014, GoPro's HERO3 HD camera won a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award in the Inexpensive Small Rugged HD Camcorders. In 2015, Nicholas made it onto several "Forbes" lists: "Richest In Tech" (#73), "'Forbes' 400" (#389), and "Billionaires" (#782).
Early Life
Nicholas Woodman was born Nicholas D. Woodman on June 24, 1975, in Santa Clara County, California. After his parents, Dean and Concepcion, divorced, his mother married Irwin Federman of U.S. Venture Partners in 1992. Dean came from a Quaker family and co-founded the Robertson Stephens investment bank. Nicholas graduated from the Menlo School in Atherton, California, in 1993, then he enrolled at University of California, San Diego. In college, he minored in creative writing and graduated with a bachelor's degree in visual arts in 1997. After graduating from college, Woodman founded the startups EmpowerAll.com and Funbug. EmpowerAll.com's purpose was to sell electronics for a markup of no more than $2, and Funbug was a marketing and gaming platform on which users could win cash prizes. Nick's father gave him a $235,000 investment, and he launched GoPro with the help of his parents' venture capital connections.
Career
In 2002, Woodman set off around the world, surfing. While attempting to photograph his surfing experiences, he came up with the idea for an affordable camera that could capture quality close-up footage, while being attached to the photographer's body. This led to the founding of GoPro, and the GoPro camera. Nicholas raised funds during his first year of GoPro by selling imported belts from Indonesia at a huge markup (sometimes as high as 50 times the belt's original price) while traveling up and down the California coast in his Volkswagen Bus. The first version of the GoPro camera was waterproof, had Wi-Fi, could be remote controlled, and had 64 GB of memory. It also cost less than $300. Woodman knew he was on to something when a Japanese company ordered 100 units. Sales grew astronomically, and the company sold 2.3 million cameras in 2012.
GoPro finally went public on the NASDAQ on June 26, 2014, under the ticker symbol GPRO. On the first day of trading, the company surged 38% and hit a market cap of $3 billion. On the second day of trading, the stock surged another 20%, giving the company a $3.25 billion dollar market cap. At that valuation, Nick's 45% stake officially gave him a net worth $1.45 billion. At the peak of GoPro's stock performance, the company was worth $11 billion, and Woodman was worth $4.5 billion. Unfortunately, the ride didn't last forever. GoPro's stock eventually took a big slide. In January 2016, GoPro announced it was laying off 7% of its workforce after losing 80% of its share price. Nick's net worth dipped below $1 billion. In January 2018, GoPro announced it was doing another big round of layoffs. By this point, the company's share price was down 90% from its peak, and Woodman's net worth was $800 million. As GoPro stock continued to slide, his net worth sunk to $300 million in July 2020. Still extremely wealthy, but a far crawl from being worth $4.5 billion.
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In late 2016, Rosen Law Firm announced a class action suit against GoPro, alleging that the company had "issued false and misleading statements to investors." The lawsuit states that GoPro's Karma drones "were prone to losing power midflight, causing them to fall out of the sky" and that GoPro had "significantly overstated the utility of and likely customer demand" for the product. The Karma drone was discontinued in 2018, and that year it was rumored that GoPro had hired JPMorgan Chase to help sell the company. Nicholas denied the claims, stating, "If there were an opportunity for GoPro to partner up with a larger organization that could help us scale the company, that's certainly something that we would consider. But it's not something that we're actively engaged in at the moment." In 2020, GoPro had to lay off employees due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 200 employees (over 20% of the company's workforce) losing their jobs. In March 2020, GoPro acquired ReelSteady, a stabilization software company.
Personal Life and Philanthropy
Nicholas met Jill Scully in a college art class, and they married in 2012. The couple has three children together and has owned property in California, Montana, and Hawaii as well as a Gulfstream V jet and 180-foot yacht. In 2014, the Woodmans donated 5.8 million shares of GoPro stock to their charitable organization, the Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation. Making the donation reduced Nick's taxable income by a whopping $450 million and let him avoid capital gains taxes. The value of the donated stock fell to $36.1 million by 2018. In March 2014, the nonprofit organization BUILD (Business United in Investing, Lending and Development) honored Woodman for his philanthropic work at their annual gala. The Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation donated $2.85 million to a San Francisco child abuse prevention center in 2015 and $4 million to a Montana community center in 2019.
Real Estate
In 2014, Nicholas paid $13.7 million for a 150-acre California ranch known as "Boogie Ranch." The property includes a five-bedroom home as well as two guest cottages, a bocce court, a swimming pool, and a tractor barn. In July 2020, Woodman put the ranch on the market for $20 million. He previously sold a nearby home in Woodman for $18.4 million; he purchased the 8,165 square foot home for $12.5 million in 2011.
