This Guy Gave His College Roommate $229 Million

LuxuryOctober 31, 2018

Imagine this scenario – you start a small company which you believe in with all your heart, but need a small favor from a friend in order to make it happen. Because you can’t pay him, you promise to pay him back whenever your company makes enough money. The day comes and you sell the company, making a ridiculous amount of money. Would you pay your friend $10,000? $100,000? Well, this guy just paid his friend $229 Million.

Nick Woodman is the genius behind the easy to operate yet very high-quality GoPro camera, a tiny HD camera which can be applied to almost any surface, making it very skater/surfer/skydiver/base jumper/any extreme sportsperson friendly. The 39-year-old visionary Woodman began his journey in 2004 with a 35mm film camera and very soon moved into the digital photography field, leaving many competitors behind, while gaining a sum of close to $2.3 Billion, making him the highest paid CEO in America according to The Business Insider.

What would a regular person do with all this money? Some people would invest it, others would spend it and some would go crazy from having so much of it. Woodman did something different. Based on a promise made to Neil Dana, Woodman’s old college roommate and GoPro’s first employee, the Billionaire and inventor gave 10% of his company’s net worth (around $229 Million) to Dana in stock options.

Dana was employed in GoPro as the company’s director of specialty sales and music and got a promise from Woodman to get 10% of the company’s worth when it would sell, which it did in 2014. This move is one of the most generous moves in the modern business world, and could have been very different had Woodman been less of a man of his word. We can learn from this story that it’s very important to have faith in your friends on one hand, and live up to you promises on the other. We wish every future Millionaire and Billionaire would follow the steps of Woodman, making the world a much better and harmonious place.