I don't want to wake up and see my kids going off to college and wonder what happened.
When I got out of college, I gave myself till I was 30 to invent a product. If I couldn't do it by then, I would just get a real job. And that fear - the fear of a real job - motivated me to be an entrepreneur.
You don't have to raise millions of dollars to be successful, you just have to work on something you are passionate about.
Somebody captures an incredible video, shares it online, and inspires millions of other people to go and do the same with their GoPros, and then it happens again and again - and what you've got is this incredible snowball of stoked customers capturing and creating rad content with their GoPros.
In the early years, I would say GoPro's products were not that impressive.
Now I'm the father of three young boys, I find myself using GoPro to film them more than anything - trips to the amusement park, the beach, the pool - just chasing them around as they grow.
I was inspired by how Red Bull isn't about the drink; it isn't about the product or the can. Red Bull is a platform to celebrate all that humans are capable of accomplishing. They built a lifestyle movement, a brand that sold this product.
When I think about dropping team sports and picking up surfing and also then geeking out radio control planes and gadgetry and all that stuff I love, that's what really now has led me in big part to GoPro.
I originally started GoPro with the sole purpose of helping surfers capture photos of themselves and their friends while they were surfing. I thought it was crazy that very few surfers had any photos or videos of themselves.
I come from surfing, and surfing is the worst cool-guy industry of all. I decided long ago to try and kill the cool guy.
I think that that's something that's pretty interesting about a GoPro - it's the one camera that we know of that you can combine with like cameras to form new cameras. So it's a bit of a modular system.
I think our slow, humble beginnings in surf shops, ski shops, bike shops, and motorcycle shops have been extremely important for our success. GoPro is all about celebrating an active lifestyle and sharing that with other people. It's authentic. It's not a brand that we went out and bought a bunch of ads for to create.
Things that burn very brightly, we wonder how long they can keep burning.
Bootstrapping allows you total creative freedom. For example, if you decide to approach your business in a certain way that makes it a two- or three-year process to get to your first product, you can do that, versus being rushed into it by investors.
It's very difficult to get any footage of yourself doing what you love unless you have a friend who's a photographer or videographer and wants to document you. That was really the idea and the goal from the beginning: to help people get a good photo, and then it was to help people get a good video.
Smartphones are always in your pocket. They're about reactive capture.
I'm half Puerto Rican.
I enrolled in a race car driving school, where you go for three days, and they wanted to rent me a video camera and charge me $100 for every half-hour.
A really important thing when you come up with a concept is that you solve a pervasive problem for people, and you don't try to create a new way to do something that isn't necessarily broken.
If we can become the de facto standard for image capture of unique perspectives around the world, we have a lot of growth ahead of us.
