SAN FRANCISCO — While it may be getting easier to lock down VC funding, GoPro founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman says there’s still a case for bootstrapping.
“I know that it really helped GoPro that we didn’t have to answer to anybody for a couple years,” Woodman said today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.
Woodman started the action camera company with $65,000 from personal funding and a loan from his mother, and later bolstered the company with $200,000 from his father. He said that the benefit of a bootstrapped investment kept the company from being beholden to too many different investors early on in the process, which he thought was a key part of the GoPro’s success.
Bootstrapping seems to have worked out fairly well for him. According to Woodman, GoPro is now the best-selling camera on the market, and they sold a nine percent equity share to Chinese manufacturer Foxconn last year in exchange for $200 million at a valuation of $2.25 billion. Woodman said that investment was, in part, to deepen GoPro’s relationship with their supplier, and in part to put off an IPO for the company.
Woodman also talked about how GoPro plans to compete with Google Glass, hinting that he want to use Glass as a tool to make GoPro cameras even better.
“I think what’s going to be exciting is you’re going to see more of these products working together,” Woodman said.
