In the college admissions fight, it does not hurt to have the Green Mountains in your corner. When Nate Bosshard was a high school kid in La Crosse, Wisconsin, deciding where he wanted to go to college, he considered his priorities, snowboarding among them: “I wanted to be able to go to a good school, close to mountains. I picked UVM because I really liked the blend of lifestyle and academics.”
As a prospective student, Bosshard was not alone in that. Nor is he alone as an alumnus who found a way to turn his love for action sports into a livelihood. The new issue of Vermont Quarterly checked in with Nate Bosshard and fellow alumni who followed their passions into careers in the action sports industry. Read Bosshard's story here, and visit the VQ website to read more.
Nate Bosshard '01 isn’t a guy who does things in halves. A WRUV DJ during his student days and for a few years beyond, he figures that he listened to every single record in the student radio station’s collection of vinyl, the largest in the state. “I’ve never succeeded in anything if I wasn’t truly, truly, deeply passionate about it,” he says. For Bosshard, that arc of galvanized interest traces through hip hop music and snowboarding to a career in action sports brand marketing.
After establishing his credential at Burton Snowboards, then moving to the West Coast and working for North Face, Bosshard’s next step would be heading up brand marketing at GoPro, a rapidly growing company that bridges the action sports and tech worlds with headquarters in Silicon Valley. He describes his unit’s role as being “the hub on the wheel,” collaborating with GoPro colleagues from engineering to sales to public relations in the steps of bringing a new product to market.
So, how does a political science major find his way to a top job at GoPro? For Bosshard, it began with listening to his mom. When he told his parents, both lawyers, that he didn’t want to follow them into the profession, his mother suggested he diversify his education with internships in the things that did interest him. He laughs at the suggestion that it’s impressive he actually heard her out: “My mom continues to be a good source of advice. My dad is more of the lifestyle coach, and my mom is more of the career coach.”
Bosshard soon found his way to JDK Design, a Burlington-based firm with an impressive list of hip national clients, including Vermont’s own Burton Snowboards. Not long after graduation, he was on the staff at Burton in brand marketing—the lowest paid guy in the department, a considerable workload in volume, variety, and responsibility, but with all of the learning opportunities that brings.
Besides, he worked at Burton. “I remember when I first got my Burton email, when I first had Nateb@burton.com. I was like, ‘I’ve made it.’ I would go snowboarding before work and on the weekends. I was interacting with professional snowboarders who were my heroes. I could bring my dog to work. In my twenties, that was my dream job.”
Bosshard made his mark at Burton by conceiving the “Poachers Campaign,” a challenge for boarders to ride at resorts that banned snowboarding, create videos of their lawlessness, and share them with the carrot of a $5,000 prize for the best among them. In terms of user-generated content, the idea was ahead of its time, and it drew wide media interest from USA Today to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”
That work and the contacts he built from it, helped Bosshard take his next step, all the way across the country to San Francisco in 2008, where he signed on with North Face as the company’s new brand manager when the mountaineering-rooted clothing manufacturer looked to create a cooler, action sports brand.
“I took everything I learned at Burton and kind of put it in fifth gear with North Face,” Bosshard says. “I’m really happy with the work I did over four years. It was more of the same, ‘hub on the wheel,’ a lot of creative autonomy, bigger stage, bigger company.”
The tech industry’s magnet is powerful in the Bay Area and, particularly as he built friendships with professionals in the field, Bosshard started to feel its pull. He found a fit that bridged action sports and tech in GoPro, but this summer made the decision to jump into tech with both feet. He’s now marketing director for Dropcam, a software company that does cloud-based wi-fi video monitoring.
Married, a four-year-old and a two-year-old at home, and a demanding job in a new industry, some things have changed dramatically over the past dozen or so years for Bosshard. And others have not. “I still get out,” he says. “I surf, I mountain bike, I snowboard. That’s who I am. That’s what makes me happy.”