Woodman won the national Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in the retail and consumer products category in 2013. In 2014, Woodman accepted an Emmy Award on behalf of GoPro for Technology and Engineering in the category of Inexpensive Small Rugged HD Camcorders.
The first GoPro product was a 35mm film camera developed by a Chinese company named Hotax that incorporated Woodman's custom wrist strap, slight modifications to the housing, and the GoPro logo. Hotax sold Woodman the rebranded camera for $3.05 and the cameras retailed for about $30. Woodman would go about selling his products while using his 1971 Volkswagen Bus that he named 'The Buscuit' as his mobile home. The product has since evolved into a compact digital camera that supports WiFi, can be remotely controlled, has waterproof housing and records to a micro SD card.
Woodman is the son of Concepcion (née Socarras) and Dean Woodman. His Father was born into a Quaker family and co-founded the investment bank Robertson Stephens; and his mother is of Hispanic descent and re-married Irwin Federman, General Partner of U.S. Venture Partners in 1992. Woodman grew up in Menlo Park, California and Atherton, California, attending the Menlo School, where he graduated in 1993. He earned a bachelor's degree in visual arts and a minor in creative writing from the University of California, San Diego in 1997.
Woodman won the national Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in the Retail and consumer products category in 2013. In 2014, Woodman accepted an Emmy Award on behalf of GoPro for Technology and Engineering in the category of Inexpensive Small Rugged HD Camcorders.
In March 2014, Woodman was honored for his philanthropic work with BUILD at their 5th annual gala in San Francisco.
In 2015, GoPro formed a partnership with the NHL in which the NHL would use GoPro products to improve the viewing experience for fans. Woodman has been invited to speak at various tech conferences and in October 2015, Woodman was a guest on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and wore a GoPro camera for the entirety of the interview. Woodman appeared as a shark investor in the sixth season of the show Shark Tank. Woodman has invested $125,000 as of November 2015 on Shark Tank on two Investments.
In December 2016, a class action lawsuit against GoPro was announced. The complaint alleged that GoPro made false and misleading statements to Investors and/or failed to disclose flaws in the company's drones, overstating customer demand, and GoPro's public statements were materially false and misleading.
