NICK WOODMAN

Your passions are a bit like your fingerprints: Everybody has them; everybody's are different. One's passions may just be a guidebook to one's life.

I can sell anything that I totally believe in, but I'm a horrible salesman of something I don't believe in.

You know what the best thing about morning ski trips are? McDonald's!

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.

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.

Before GoPro, if you wanted to have any footage of yourself doing anything, whether it's video or photo, you not only needed a camera, you needed another human being. And if you wanted the footage to be good, you needed that other human being to have skill with the camera.

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.

I feel like in a world where we all try to figure out our place and our purpose here, your passions are one of your most obvious guides.

On the road and traveling - that's when people are at their most creative.

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.

In France, a hip replacement was captured using two GoPros in a stereoscopic 3D arrangement. Students can watch the surgery using a virtual reality headset.

Keeping people fired up starts with having a really clear vision for what the company is aiming to do.

You have to ask yourself: how much does any one person or one family need? And when you start thinking about the universe as an organism, it's important that we, as components of that organism, take care of each other and ourselves.

I decided that I want to live in a big world. And since then, any time I'm confronted with a challenging situation, I go for it.

If I didn't follow my passion for surfing... I would have never come up with the concept to make a wrist camera.

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.

I still drink a couple of Red Bulls every day.

Viral word-of-mouth marketing for GoPro is massive. Video is really the conduit.

A smartphone is a mobile computer in your pocket.

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.

A smartphone is great for when one person is documenting another thing or another person doing something.

Smartphones are always in your pocket. They're about reactive capture.

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.

My first business was a retro-gaming site where you'd go and play all these cool old-school games. It was a good idea but ahead of its time.

I realized that a surf trip on a jet can be like a road trip. If you see a road you want to turn down, you can just go there.