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In 2014, GoPro was worth $11 billion. Its founder was the highest-paid CEO in America.

This month, it's being sold for $285 million to a defense-optics company. That's less than 3% of its peak.

This is how the action camera king lost almost everything.

The rise

Nick Woodman wasn't always winning. His first startup, an electronics site, flopped completely. His second burned through $4 million and died in the dot-com crash.

Defeated at 26, he fled the country for a five-month surfing trip to Australia. That escape changed everything.

While surfing, he noticed a problem hiding in plain sight. Amateur surfers had no way to film themselves. The pros had photographers. Everyone else strapped cheap disposable cameras to their wrists. Woodman came home obsessed with fixing it.

He moved back in with his parents at 26 and got to work. Haunted by his past failures, he worked 20-hour days for two years straight. No outside money, no office, no team.

The first GoPro was shockingly basic: a 35mm film camera in a waterproof case with a wrist strap. Cost? $30 in parts. Retail price? $150.

Then it exploded. From surf shops to REI to Best Buy. Sales topped $1 billion by 2014. YouTube flooded with GoPro adventure footage. The tiny, indestructible cameras sold themselves.

Exactly ten years after that first camera, GoPro was worth $11 billion.

The turn

But success created its own problems.

The 2014 IPO changed everything. In Woodman's own words: "We went from being thrifty, scrappy, efficient and wildly innovative to being bloated and the opposite of thrifty." They doubled headcount to 1,600. Woodman took a $285 million pay package, the biggest of any CEO in America.

Meanwhile, the hype was hiding a real problem. The action camera market was smaller than investors hoped. And smartphones were coming, with better cameras every year. GoPro desperately needed to become more than a camera company. The attempts were disastrous.

First, an entertainment division to cash in on their social media fame. They hired execs from Hulu and HBO, then found original content far harder than expected. After burning millions, they shut it down in 2016.

Then the Karma drone. It launched after months of delays, and got fully recalled three weeks later when units lost power and fell from the sky.

The fall

By 2016, the stock had crashed 93%. Woodman's billion-dollar fortune evaporated. Layoffs became routine. The man who once earned $285 million in a year cut his salary to $1.

The company kept making excellent cameras. It just never answered one question: what are we, beyond the camera?

The end came fast this year. In June, GoPro warned it might go out of business. In July, Woodman put in $20 million of his own money to keep it alive. Two months later, it agreed to sell for $285 million and become an American defense and optics company. Cameras for national security, not for surfers.

What actually killed GoPro

Looking back, GoPro is a masterclass in how not to handle success:

Four mistakes, one root cause: a great product is not the same as a great business.

GoPro still makes some of the best action cameras on earth. But the dream of becoming the next Apple? Shattered. The $11 billion company that taught the world to film its own adventures is being turned into something you'll never recognize. And the peak valuation? Gone forever.

YC's hottest startup wants nuclear data centers… on boats

VCs at the latest Demo Day kept circling Atomarine: floating, eventually nuclear-powered data centers that use seawater for cooling. The company says it already has $4B+ in customer interest. Also buzzing: Isengard, which wants to mass-produce cheap jet-powered drones in allied countries. Deep tech is having a moment.

Zero just raised $10.3M to make your CRM feel prehistoric

Helsinki startup Zero, founded by Smartly.io vets, closed one of Finland's biggest seed rounds to replace Salesforce and HubSpot with AI agents that prospect, email, and babysit deals on their own. Lovable and Supercell founders piled in. The pitch: stop logging notes. Let the system run GTM for you.

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya raised $5.5M to make music apps fun again

Ex-Spotify innovation chief Máuhan Zonoozy is launching tiny, playful music tools (remix apps, YouTube samplers, browser audio toys) instead of another "type a prompt, get a song" AI product. Dawn Ostroff is advising. Think music software label, not streaming clone.

OpenAI reportedly just bought an Apple-alumni camera startup for $300M+

Glass Imaging, a Los Altos company built by former Apple engineers, is going to OpenAI as the lab pushes into AI devices. The product: smarter smartphone cameras. The signal: OpenAI is collecting hardware talent, not just model researchers.

Bending Spoons bought Miro for $1.36B, about 90% off the old sticker price

The once-$17.5B whiteboard unicorn is selling to the Italian roll-up machine in an all-cash deal. Miro still does ~$600M ARR and is profitable. Bending Spoons bought Airtable weeks ago. The SaaS-at-any-valuation era is officially in the discount bin.

Sam ranks 4 ways to get your first 100 users, from best to worst:

1. Start with your network. Email everyone you know. Ask for favors. But if it's a paid product, charge them. Why? Friends and people who like you may be too nice with their feedback. Paying customers give you a much more honest signal.

2. Reach out directly to potential users. Find people who might actually use your product and email them. Conversion rates are low, around 1-2%, so you need to contact a lot of people. Keep it simple: "Hey, I just made this new product. I'd really appreciate it if you would try it out." Most people want to help.

3. Use social media and communities. Post on social media, Hacker News, forums, PR, and so on. But don't chase one viral spike. Look for a sustainable source of traffic. Airbnb did this well by repeatedly creating press-worthy stunts instead of relying on one big hit.

4. Buy ads. Send paid traffic straight to your website. Sam calls this the "laziest" and least impressive approach, and says he wouldn't recommend it. Most importantly, he doesn't know of any startup that got big by starting this way.

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