Speaker A
About a decade ago, when YouTube was more about extreme sports than AI slop, GoPros were, briefly, all the rage. Like lots of things from back then, they were essentially supplanted by smartphones and their ever-expanding functionality.
GoPro's stock surged 200% after pivoting from action cameras to AI and defense markets, reflecting broader tech and market trends.
Key Takeaways
- GoPro's stock surge is driven by its strategic pivot to AI and defense markets.
- Smartphone camera improvements and Chinese competitors caused GoPro's decline in action cameras.
- Legacy companies are increasingly rebranding or pivoting towards AI to attract investors.
- Government defense spending is influencing industrial companies' strategic directions.
- GoPro's story reflects broader shifts in technology, market competition, and investor behavior.
What the video covers
- GoPro was founded in 2002 to capture high-quality action footage, initially using 35-mm film cameras.
- The company saw explosive growth from 2010 to 2015 due to social media and viral videos, peaking with a $95 stock price in 2014.
- GoPro's decline began as smartphone cameras improved and Chinese competitors like DJI and Insta360 gained market share.
- Revenue and stock price fell sharply, with shares dropping from nearly $100 to under $1 in recent years.
- Recently, GoPro announced a pivot into AI and optical solutions, being acquired by Starman Optical at a $285 million valuation.
- This pivot led to a nearly 200% stock surge, reflecting investor enthusiasm for AI-related moves.
- The shift also includes entering defense markets, aligning with trends in government spending and industrial repositioning.
- GoPro's story illustrates broader market themes: AI pivots by legacy companies, defense sector focus, and competition from Chinese firms.
- The video also highlights other companies like Allbirds making similar AI pivots with mixed stock results.
- Overall, GoPro's trajectory is a microcosm of changing technology, market dynamics, and investor sentiment over the past decade.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and GoPro's resurgence
- 00:34Markiplier's investment and stock surge
- 01:20GoPro's founding and early history
- 01:53Growth through social media and viral videos
- 03:11Stock peak and subsequent decline
- 03:44Financial struggles and market challenges
- 04:26Competition from Chinese companies
- 05:09Pivot to AI and acquisition by Starman Optical
- 05:56Broader market trends and AI pivots
- 06:37Conclusion and subscription promotion
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
And unless you're into action cameras, you probably haven't heard the word GoPro for at least a couple of years.
Speaker A
However, in the past week or so, the company has suddenly returned to the headlines. 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
Speaker A
then, much to Markiplier's delight, the stock surged by about 200%. So, in this video, we're going to look at GoPro's pivot into AI, and what it says about the state of the market more generally.
Speaker A
Big tech companies are looking down their noses at you. No, seriously, they are. In the new version of our magazine Too Long, we get into the topic of creepwear and its many potentially violating repercussions. That's just one of the articles in our longest issue
Speaker A
ever. Subscribe to get your copy by clicking the link in the description. So, let's start with a bit of background, because GoPro has a pretty fun history. GoPro was founded way back in 2002 by a guy called Nick Woodman,
Speaker A
who had just been on a surfing trip to Australia, where he had become frustrated at how difficult it was to capture high-quality action footage.
Speaker A
This is why the company was called GoPro in the first place. Woodman and his mates all wanted to be professional surfers, and at the time, going pro was the only way you had any chance of getting good footage of yourself on the
Speaker A
water. Woodman received over $200,000 from his parents to get it started, and in 2004, GoPro sold its first camera. To give you a sense of quite how long ago this was, YouTube was only created in 2005, and the first GoPro wasn't even
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digital. It was actually a 35-mm film camera wrapped in a waterproof shell that you'd wear on your wrist. Now, for the first couple of years, GoPro was a successful but small company catering to quite a specific niche of
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high-adrenaline sports enthusiasts. But, around 2010, their sales exploded with annual revenue going from about $60 million in 2010 to over $1.5 billion in 2015.
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This was in large part a consequence of the rise of social media. GoPro footage proved unusually prone to going viral, which built name recognition and gave viewers a reason to get a camera themselves in the hope of being the
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protagonist of the next viral video. GoPros also became more and more popular outside of action sports with more and more people using them to do relatively mundane stuff, which they would then upload on social media. With sales going
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parabolic, in 2014, GoPro went public listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker GPRO. It was a massive success. Shares climbed by 30% to roughly $30 a piece in their first day of trading valuing GoPro at about $4
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billion. Not bad for an action camera company that originally catered to relatively skint surfer dudes. Boosted by solid earnings reports, shares then continued to climb throughout 2014 peaking at about $95 that October.
Speaker A
Unfortunately for Woodman, things went downhill from here. GoPro share price fell by about 50% over the next few months in part because the October peak fell a bit silly, but also because GoPro's latest model at the time, the
Speaker A
Hero 4, didn't sell as well as investors anticipated. But, this was only the beginning of the end. Both GoPro share price and its revenues continued to decline over the next few years with its share price bottoming out at about 50 cent in recent
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years. Yep, you heard that right. Down from nearly $100 a pop to less than a dollar.
Speaker A
The most recent data looks especially miserable. Revenue was down 31% year-on-year in the second quarter and the company has had to take out millions of dollars worth of debt just to stay afloat. So, how did this happen? Well,
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first and most obviously, smartphone cameras just kept getting better. Some of GoPro's original appeal had stemmed from the fact that it was a portable but high-quality camera, which way back in 2010 was something of a USP.
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As smartphone cameras got better, however, GoPro got squeezed out. After all, you really don't need a mobile camera when you've got a great camera on your mobile. Now, there was still demand for robust GoPro-style action cameras, but even here GoPro's market share was
Speaker A
shrinking. This was largely due to competition from Chinese competitors, including perhaps most notably DJI and Insta360, who account for an ever-growing share of the global market.
Speaker A
The speed at which GoPro has been overtaken has been quite staggering. GoPro was the dominant player in the action camera market as recently as 2022, but has now been overtaken by DJI, which accounted for something like 2/3 of all action camera sales in 2025, and
Speaker A
were on track to be overtaken by Insta360 in the near future. We say were here because on Tuesday, GoPro suddenly announced that they'd be pivoting away from the action camera market into, yep, you guessed it, AI. To this end, GoPro
Speaker A
is essentially being bought out by a private company called Starman Optical, which manufactures optical transceivers, components that convert electrical signals into light pulses and back again. At a valuation of $285 million, which translates to about $1.14 a share.
Speaker A
In the announcement, Woodman, who doesn't sound much like a surfer dude anymore, said that he expected the deal to, quote, enable GoPro to grow across consumer, commercial, and defense markets as a leading American imaging and optical solutions company addressing
Speaker A
important areas of national security related to cameras, optics, and AI infrastructure. Predictably, the stock has since boomed and is trading at about $1.70 at the time of writing, well down from the heady heights of the mid-2010s, but still up nearly 200% in a couple of
Speaker A
days. Now, this story is interesting because, well, GoPro's a bit of a fun throwback, but it's also a microcosm of at least three wider trends in the market. First, it's just the latest in a long list of barely AI-adjacent
Speaker A
companies pivoting into AI, to the apparent delight of their shareholders. Allbirds, which used to make wool trainers for middle-aged men, is perhaps the most infamous example, having announced in April that it would be pivoting to, quote, AI compute
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infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU as a service or GPUAIS and AI-native cloud solutions provider, and changing its name to Newbird AI, later revised to Smartbird.
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Its stock, which like GoPro's had fallen 99% from its peak, briefly spiked, but is now trading below where it was.
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Second, GoPro is another example of a company moving into defense to take advantage of the incoming government largesse.
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This is a particularly popular move in Germany at the moment, where lots of struggling industrial companies are rejigging things in anticipation of the coming boom in German defense spending.
Speaker A
And third, it's yet another once-dominant Western company that's been squeezed out by Chinese competition.
Speaker A
All in all, GoPro is a bit of a meme, but it's also a genuine reflection and reminder of how much the world has changed in 10 years.
Speaker A
I've already told you about one of the articles in the next issue of Too Long, but there's so much more inside you're going to want to discover. So, if you subscribe using code summer26, you'll not only get 20% off every issue as a
Speaker A
subscriber, you'll also get an additional £3 off your first issue, bringing the cost as low as £4.99 for a digital edition. And yes, if shipping or increasingly tariffs are making deliveries to wherever you live a little too expensive, you can get a digital
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version sent straight to your inbox. Plus, we actually earn more from digital editions as we actually lose money on shipping. So, it's also a better way to support the channel. This is a good first issue.
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It's our longest ever 84 pages and it contains stories from all across the world, including Burnham here in Britain, the wars in Ukraine and Iran, China and the US's relationship, a bit from the Vatican, and of course the
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cover story on the plan to rebuild Europe. It also contains articles from our superb new writers Natasha, Isaac, and Ebba. So, make sure to use code summer26 at checkout and become a Too Long subscriber today.
Speaker A
Allbirds, which used to make wool trainers for middle-aged Well, I had I had Allbirds.
Speaker A
I still have them. I have two pairs. Brilliant.
Topics:GoProstock surgeAI pivotaction camerasMarkiplierStarman OpticalDJIInsta360defense markettechnology trends
