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Hi, I'm shooting this intro on a GoPro. A GoPro Hero 8 to be exact. It came out in late 2019 and reviews have been fairly standard for what it was. But while researching this episode, one review caught my eye. The headline reads, "Have action cameras finally hit a wall?" This sentiment was 6 years ago now and it was the first signs as to where GoPro and the market was heading. In June of 2014, GoPro went public and just 4 months later in October 2014, it hit its peak valuation of 12 billion. Today, the company has lost about 98% of that value. That's quite a story for a company whose name has practically replaced the product category itself.
The corporate collapse of GoPro was just one of those ones that happened in the background while life went on. Over the course of a decade, their sales just kept sliding. But despite the company becoming a shadow of its former self, there's been some recent interesting developments. On August 30th, 2026, Bloomberg ran a story that had been sitting in plain sight in an SEC filing for 10 days. On Sunday, Bloomberg reported that Mark Fischbach, more commonly known as Markiplier, had become its largest shareholder. On Tuesday, GoPro announced that it would be pivoting into AI and then, much to Markiplier's delight, the stock surged by about 200%.
Mark Fischbach, the famous OG YouTuber that millions know as Markiplier, has surprisingly become GoPro's largest shareholder with an 8.5% stake in the company. Within 1 day, the stock jumped 46%. Within 2 days, it had more than doubled. Now, the events involving Markiplier have a whole lot of drama of its own, which we'll get to later in the episode. But within days, GoPro had agreed to be bought out by a private photonics firm for 285 million. That sounds like a lot of money, but to put that into perspective, a company once valued at 12 billion dollars was just sold for 2.4% of its peak value. In late 2026, circumstances looked dire. So, what is GoPro's next move? Pushing
further into drones would be a fair guess. Although, GoPro already has a history with drones, and it's not a happy one. Its future might actually be something that nobody would have guessed earlier. Military defense and AI. In this episode, we'll take a look at the rise and not-so-spectacular fall of GoPro, and how it's gearing up for a strange afterlife. You are watching ColdFusion TV. I want to tell you a story about a very small little company that set out to build wrist cameras for surfers.
Nicholas Woodman, welcome. I want to tell you the story about this little wrist camera company. I want to tell you about GoPro. Famously, GoPro was inspired by a surf trip. In 2002, a surfer named Nick Woodman went to Australia and Indonesia. While surfing on his trip, he got frustrated that he couldn't capture decent footage of himself riding the waves. While professional surfers had photographers trailing them, everyone else just had memories. Nick just knew there had to be a better way. GoPro wasn't even Nick's first attempt at a company. It was his third.
The one right before it, an online gambling marketing startup called Funbug, raised around $3.9 million, then went under during the dot-com crash. His investors lost everything. By his own telling, that event stuck with him. Hold on to that information because I'm going to come back to that later. To fund GoPro, he took $200,000 from his father, then his mother threw in another 35,000, and strangely, a sewing machine, which Nick did use to stitch his own camera straps by hand. He and his then girlfriend also raised a few thousand dollars by selling bead and shell necklaces they'd picked up in Bali.
They hawked them out of an old Volkswagen bus they nicknamed the bus kit. The first actual GoPro wasn't even digital. It was a rebranded 35-mm camera bought from a Chinese manufacturer called Hotex for $3.05 a unit. The lens was fixed at 28 mm focus free. It was wrapped in a plastic housing and sold for $30. The market for a durable action camera was so thin and vacant that their first cameras did $150,000 in sales in the first year. Sales stayed modest for years. GoPro would go digital in 2006, but the real turning point came in 2009 with the HD Hero. A cheap, reliable high-definition camera.
It landed at exactly the right moment in time because YouTube had just gone mainstream. The camera objectively wasn't very good. Grainy footage, a jelly-like rolling shutter, and mediocre audio. Although none of that mattered much to the adventure sports types, they just wanted something cheap and durable enough to strap to a helmet without crying if it broke. Revenue went from about 60 million in 2010 to over 1.5 billion in 2015. It was largely because GoPro footage was practically built to go viral. Every extreme sports clip on YouTube doubled as a GoPro ad. In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from
the edge of space for Red Bull's Stratos project. He had GoPro strapped to the capsule and his suit. Around 8 million people watched it live on YouTube. Absolutely monumental numbers for the time. Now for GoPro, they may have helped create a whole bunch of viral videos, but there was a massive problem. All of this free marketing and the engine behind it, it belonged to their users, to Red Bull, and to YouTube. And GoPro had no control over whether it kept running. But the big investors didn't seem to care for now. In late 2012, Foxconn, the company that
assembles iPhones, paid around $200 million for just 9% of GoPro. The valuation was now 2.25 billion before it even went public. And in 2014, the company did go public on the Nasdaq. The ticker was GPRO and it was priced at $24 a share. The share price rose as high as $33 in early trading that first day. The IPO raised $427 million for the company. That September, GoPro backed up the hype with actual products. It rolled out three new Hero 4 cameras at once.
The Black with double the power of the previous flagship, the Silver with GoPro's first touchscreen, and a stripped-down entry-level Hero for the budget crowd. As per Nick, "The global scale and execution of our Hero 4 launch made this the most successful rollout in GoPro's history." End quote. At the time, GoPro had 130 sponsored posting Hero 4 footage under a campaign called Share the Stoke. Some of the athletes involved were surfers like Kelly Slater and skiers like Julia Mancuso. Within just 25 days, the campaign reached over 50 million people. They even shipped a mount called Fetch, built specifically so people could strap a GoPro to their dog. And by October, the stock had climbed to $98.47. That was the company's all-time high.
Nick Woodman was, briefly, the highest-paid CEO in America. His 2014 pay package was worth roughly $285 million, almost all of it in stock. Not bad for a company that started out selling shell necklaces from a van. Barely 10 years after that first film camera, GoPro was worth around $12 billion. But the thing is, investors weren't really valuing $12 billion for a camera company. Cameras alone couldn't justify that number. What they were buying was a story in two parts. First, GoPro would become a media company. They would turn all of that user footage into content, distributed, and sell ads against it. And secondly,
GoPro would build a software and subscription ecosystem around the camera. Basically, the razor and blades model. Sell the device once, then charge for everything around it every month. Neither of these businesses existed yet, and there was a bigger problem underneath. People who buy action cameras tend to keep them for years. By the time GoPro went public, a big chunk of everyone who wanted one had one. Unfortunately, the good times didn't last. Next, we'll see how GoPro fell from grace and how the company is reinventing itself in an unexpected way. But first, this part of the episode is sponsored by WhisperFlow. As I prepare
these videos, I spend a lot of time researching, messaging people, and working across different apps. And sometimes, with 100 tabs open and deadlines approaching, I find myself thinking much faster than I can type. That's why I've been using WhisperFlow. WhisperFlow is a voice-to-text tool that works across pretty much every app I use. Whether it's Gmail, WhatsApp, Slack, or even just sending a quick message on my phone. Instead of typing everything out, I can just speak naturally and it turns what I'm saying into clean, formatted text that's ready to send. Hey Matt, thanks for the call earlier. Just wanted to follow up on a few things. Um first, can you send me the documents we discussed? Second, let's schedule another call for Thursday. Actually,
make that Friday afternoon. And third, could you also share the research links you mentioned? Let me know if that works for you. Thanks. And an interesting thing is that it goes beyond transcribing what I say. It can organize the message, format it into a list, and even understand when I change my mind halfway through a sentence. What surprised me most wasn't necessarily the speed. Talking has always been faster than typing. It's just how much less editing I have to do afterwards. Most built-in voice tools will capture every pause, every um, and every correction. WhisperFlow actually cleans those things up. So, the result feels much closer to something you'd actually write. Hey
Rufus, could you send me the latest Premiere Pro update with the light applied before then? Make sure to include the photolithography bit. Thanks. It also handles names and technical terminology surprisingly well. And you can add words you use regularly to its custom dictionary. For me, the result is pretty simple. I spend less time typing and correcting things. If you'd like to try WhisperFlow for yourself, it's free to get started. And if you use my link in the description, you also get 1 month of WhisperFlow Pro with unlimited words at no cost. Thanks to WhisperFlow for supporting ColdFusion. So, where were
we? Oh yes, GoPro was invented as a surfing wrist camera. It got really popular, made a bunch of money, and now we're going to see how the business starts to fall apart. In July 2015, GoPro launched the Hero 4 Session, a smaller cube-shaped camera at $400. That was the same price as the existing Hero 4 Silver, which had a bigger camera and more features. Customers just couldn't see why they'd pay full price for something worse, and consequently, sales stalled. GoPro cut the price to $300 that September, and then to $200, and sales still didn't recover. That October, the company missed its own revenue guidance, and the stock dropped 17% in a single day.
GoPro's media company efforts didn't fare any better. They launched an entertainment division and tried licensing [clears throat] user footage to platforms like Roku and Amazon, but clearing the rights to millions of amateur clips was a legal nightmare, and random clips without any story didn't hold an audience. By late 2016, GoPro reportedly shut down the division. Then came one of the stranger disasters in GoPro's history. The company launched its first drone, the Karma. Just 16 days later, it recalled every single unit sold, about 2,500 of them. Some of the drones were losing power mid-flight and literally falling out of the sky. Owners were filming their $799 drones plummeting to the ground.
The GoPro promotional machine was now working in reverse. It didn't help that DJI unveiled its own foldable drone, the Mavic, within days of GoPro's own drone. The DJI drone was smaller and better equipped. It promptly ran away with the category that GoPro was supposed to be leading. By early 2018, GoPro had quit drones entirely, and that set the tone for the next several years. Smartphone cameras kept improving. They gained dust and water resistance. This chipped away at GoPro's original pitch of being the only decent portable action camera around. Meanwhile, Chinese competitors like DJI and Insta360 kept eating into the true action camera market.
They were the classic fast followers. They let GoPro prove that the category existed, then shipped cameras with better battery life, better stabilization, and better software. By 2022, DJI had overtaken GoPro as the category leader, and it just got worse. By 2025, DJI accounted for roughly 2/3 of all action camera sales worldwide. GoPro was starting to run out of options to try. While it floundered, the company started shrinking. Layoff after layoff ensued. And in 2018, Nick Woodman cut his own salary to $1. Just 4 years earlier, he'd been the highest-paid CEO in America.
That same year, GoPro hired JP Morgan to explore selling itself. Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi was reportedly interested, but no deal ever happened. Although one bet did pay off, eventually. To the chagrin of customers, GoPro leaned hard into subscriptions, building cloud storage and no questions-asked camera replacements for about $50 a year. By the early 2020s, that sector was bringing in over $100 million a year at software margins. It was the razor and blades business that investors had been promised back in 2014. It just arrived years too late. Many of the most loyal customers had already moved on. Revenue, which had peaked at about $1.6 billion in 2015, slipped under 1 billion by 2023. And by 2026, things were genuinely dire.
Revenue fell 26% year-on-year in the first quarter, and the company laid off 23% of its workforce that April. In June of 2026, GoPro filed something called an 8K. That's a mandatory disclosure to the SEC, the US body that oversees financial markets. In it, GoPro admitted that there was, quote, substantial doubt about whether the company could keep operating. The stock, which had briefly traded above $1.70 that May, sank to around 60 cents by the end of August. Nick personally loaned the company $20 million just to keep the lights on. This is where Mark Fishback enters the story. Mark is best known for over a decade of gaming videos and nearly 40 million YouTube subscribers.
Earlier this year, he made a pivot of his own. He self-financed and self-distributed a horror film called Iron Lung. He shot most of the behind-the-scenes footage on GoPro cameras. The film ended up grossing $50 million at the box office on a budget of just 3 million. Somewhere along the way, he secretly started buying GoPro stock. By mid-July, he'd built an 8.5% stake in the company. At the time, it was worth roughly 9 million. He disclosed it to the SEC on August 20th through something called a Schedule 13G filing. That's the passive kind of ownership disclosure. He wasn't trying to take control of the company. He just thought it was cheap. And for about 10
days, no one noticed. But then Bloomberg happened. He would later tell Bloomberg that the investment was something he'd been, quote, cooking in the background. And here's Markiplier explaining his thinking. What the market cap said it was is undervalued, simply by the name. They are literally the Kleenex of cameras um because people will colloquially call an action cam a GoPro, even if it's not that brand. Uh so, I just assumed from that alone they had value, but I knew that they were up to something. It seems horribly ignorant of me to say that I accidentally [snorts] got to where I am. Uh but it there was no intention to get to this point where I have to submit paperwork and say, "I
am a blah owner of this company." I'd never done that for any company before. It was just, you know, I really believed in it and I was like, "This seems like a good uh investment." And then, things got messy. A week or so before the stake became public, Markiplier posted a glowing review of GoPro's new Mission 1 ILS. He compared it favorably to the far pricier Red Komodo X. You get an entry point into that world. You can get it for yourself through the link in the description below or with code Markiplier. But you can also have this in your school. I believe that there is value in this as an educational tool. You can ask your
film class or your film club or AV club to consider this as the entry-level cinema camera because it's built rugged, tough. People are going to drop this, especially if they're learning. People are going to lose The video included an affiliate discount code. He never mentioned that he was about to become the company's largest shareholder. Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee called it out saying, quote, "This is not a line I see crossed very often, but each to their own." End quote. When Mark Player was asked what he thought of Marques Brownlee's take, he had this to say on Philip DeFranco. So, I asked Mark what his reaction was to that. What's your reaction?
I don't know, actually. What is the line that's being crossed? I think for me, when I look at it, I believe very much in it and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. The accessibility that opens up, I want more people to make movies. I want more people to make YouTube videos. I want more people to make content that looks really good. Learning to the build the skills to be YouTubers. When Bloomberg finally picked up the filing, the stock jumped 46% the next day and it kept climbing from there. It added more in after-hours trading and by the following morning, it was up well over 100% from where it started. But before anyone had fully processed what was happening, GoPro announced something bigger. On September 1st, the company
signed a definitive merger agreement with Starboard Optical. Starboard is a privately held photonic startup. It makes optical transceivers, the components that convert electrical signals into light pulses for high-speed data transmission. Under the deal, GoPro shareholders get 285 million in cash or $1.14 a share. They keep about 10% of the combined company. GoPro's roughly $92 million in debt gets wiped clean. Nick Woodman framed it as GoPro turning into, quote, "a leading American imaging and optical solutions company." End quote. The goal, he said, was to address important areas of national security
related to cameras, optics, and AI infrastructure. Starboard, for its part, is pouring $150 million into a New Jersey plant. That's where they're going to build the transceivers to shuttle data between GPUs inside of, you guessed it, AI data centers. Some observers have pointed out that this looks a lot less like a merger and more like a takeover. Starman ends up owning roughly 90% of the new company. Existing shareholders, including are left holding a fraction of what used to be a scrappy camera company. And that company is now betting its future on defense contracts and yet more data center hardware.
Structurally, this has a lot in common with what's called a reverse merger. A private company buys its way into an existing public one. And in doing so, it goes public without the cost and the scrutiny of a traditional IPO. So, why GoPro? Well, underneath the dying hardware business, it still had three things worth having. A stock market listing, a brand name that almost everyone recognizes, and a subscription business that's generating some cash. Starman's industry is full of companies that most people have never heard of, while GoPro is a household name. As for his stake will reportedly gain around fifty million dollars once the deal closes. But he says that he's
disappointed with the merger and goes on to say that he hopes that GoPro doesn't drift too far from its camera roots. Some people online have raised an eyebrow at the timing. An influencer scooping up a huge stake right before a company-altering merger does look suspicious. But GoPro had already flagged the possibility of pivoting into defense and aerospace back in June, months before Markiplier's name entered the picture. We don't know for sure, but it really just could be a case of him spotting a cheap distressed stock and thought it was about to catch a break rather than getting a heads-up.
GoPro's saga looks like a strange microcosm of a few trends playing out across the market right now. Firstly, struggling companies throwing AI into the mix to juice their stock prices isn't anything new. The shoe company Allbirds tried something similar earlier this year. It announced a pivot to, quote, AI compute infrastructure and briefly rebranded itself New Bird AI, then Smart Bird. Its stock spiked, then slid right back down. Second of all, companies pivoting into defense to catch a new wave of government spending is also increasingly common. And lastly, GoPro's slow bleed to Chinese competitors fits a pattern that's played out across plenty of once dominant Western hardware brands
over the past decade. Look no further than China's BYD and other Chinese car brands. They're taking over every nation on Earth that isn't the US because of course they're banned in the US. There's an irony here, too. After his failed dot-com startup, Nick Woodman didn't want investors to lose their money again, and GoPro spent years running lean. But playing it safe didn't protect it. The company that grew up afraid of losing other people's money ended up losing 98% of it anyway. GoPro helped invent an entire category of camera, and now it ends up as a minority stake in an optics company making parts for AI servers and defense contractors. Whether that counts as a
rescue or a sad burial probably depends on who you ask. So, what do you guys think? Is this a genuine second act for GoPro, or is the company simply running out the clock under new management? Let me know what you guys think in the comments. Anyway, that's about it from me. My name is The GoGo, and you've been watching Cold Fusion, and I'll catch you again soon for the next episode. Cheers, guys. Have a good one.
