Name: How the cofounder and CEO of Nextiva made his first million, lost it and then made nearly $1 billion
Uploaded: 2023-08-30
Duration: 8 min 46 s
Description: Tomas Gorny, cofounder and CEO of Nextiva, shares his story of his entrepreneurial career, how he made his first million, lost it, and then made nearly $1 billion.

Tomas Gorny, cofounder and CEO of Nextiva, shares his story of his entrepreneurial career, how he made his first million, lost it, and then made nearly $1 billion.

How the cofounder and CEO of Nextiva made his first million, lost it and then made nearly $1 billion

Tomas Gorny is the cofounder and CEO of Nextiva

Tech

How the cofounder and CEO of Nextiva made his first million, lost it and made nearly $1 billion

How the cofounder and CEO of Nextiva made his first million

How Tomas Gorny, cofounder and CEO of Nextiva, made his first million, lost it and made nearly $1 billion.

I was doing whatever I take to survive on three bucks a day. But I never felt pity for myself. I was living in the country and even in the city that I, you know, lost. And so for me, this was, this was a huge blessing. My name is Thomas Gorney. I am 47 years old. I'm the CEO and co-founder of and this is how I made my first million dollars. I grew up in Communist Poland, but I was born in 1975 and the 1st 14 years of my life, I lived there and I already knew around the age of seven that I want to come to America. As I was growing up as a teenager, my exposure to the United States was really to textbooks and American movies like Wall Street and 90210. And that's ultimately what intrigued me even more so to come to America. My parents were essentially factory workers and most people uh grew up in a a poor environment. My exposure to uh to business and my exposure to uh entrepreneurship was non-existent. This was just developed personally as kind of was part of my DNA giving credit to my parents. I never felt poor. I always felt that I'm well taken care of. And my parents always encouraged me to do more when we moved to Germany. I grew up during the era of uh the PC revolution and the very first P CS. If some of you guys still remember, they had those big dose manuals on your desk where you had to really write those long string command lines on your computer to get anything done. That was a pivotal moment in my life. I said, I don't know what I going to do in my life, but I want to be part of making tech easier for other people because I saw how windows opened the market to everybody, made it accessible to everybody. And I loved that idea and I wanted to be part of the type of revolution and already started a couple of businesses going to college. I really took advantage of the revolution and there were some big companies in Germany building businesses, but I thought we can do it better with delivering personalized service right to people's homes. And we started building that business and I didn't have any capital when I lived in Germany and I was building my business as the person who moved to America. I was actually doing in men internship for him while I was going to school. Then he decided to move to the United States. And I even visited him as he was coming back to visit his family to Germany. He saw what I was doing with the business and he was very impressed. And he said, look, you know, I'm just about to start a website hosting company. We didn't know what the internet will do at that point. And he says, look, join me. There are no guarantees I cannot afford to pay you, but I will give you sweat equity and just, you know, come over and I said, absolutely drop everything end up in the United States. I didn't speak English. So essentially I learned on the job, I never went to school by answering emails and by interacting with people in the business, I learned to communicate in English while I was working at the business in the morning, at the night, I was parking cars, cleaning carpets at restaurants and apartment buildings doing various years with our jobs at events. I was doing whatever I take to survive on three bucks a day. I remember I had a friend of mine that I, I playing soccer in the park. And, you know, we always on Sundays made the trip to Sisla, you know, all you can eat and then essentially it was like a $7 meal and we, we, we bunch of our money together and then one of us was always going to the buffet, you know, and then by the, by the time we were done, you know, you know, I was like a pigeon, you know, ready to fall over because I over ate but, but was about three for the week when you come to America. What I underestimated that you actually have to build your own credit. So, so I brought a little bit of money from sales of the businesses, but, you know, I didn't receive quite a good amount. So I ran out of the money very, very quickly by putting down payment on an apartment by literally getting a credit card that my deposit was larger than the credit that they would give me. So, no, I didn't have, I didn't have any credit, you know, at the beginning, I didn't have a social security number and I applied for, I needed to hire a lawyer so I stay legal in the country. So all of that, you know, really put a big strain on my financial position. I was kind of somewhat of an unusual story because I, you know, unlike probably a 23 year old that would go on a shopping spree and buy homes, cars and do private travel. I didn't do any of it. The goal was really to focus on the business. And uh we were very fortunate because we picked the right industry and eventually we knew that more and more people will have websites. Uh having website was still expensive. We were one of the very first website hosting companies out there and very quickly, the majority owner started getting pretty good offers for the business. Although I was a minority owner and probably had more, uh more internet to sell the business because I wasn't in control. I was advising him against to do this because I said, look, this market is going to expand. Eventually, everybody will have the website. He decided to sell in 98 2.5 years later, he honored the arrangement that we had and I end up, you know, becoming multimillionaire. Literally overnight, I bought a modest house where I put a down payment of less than $100,000. I bought myself the very first car in L A for $40,000. And if you know L A, you cannot rely on las public transportation. And the rest I invested along with people that I trusted. And unfortunately, that was part of my mistake. Softbank came around and invested in one of our businesses. And I invested along with Softbank to start the business. This was all 1998 99. And two years later, you know, the bubble bursts, some of the people that I trusted. I have made a mistake on. And uh all of that money was essentially gone by middle of 2001. I didn't know how to pay my next mortgage. I wasn't down on myself. I still saw the market as a huge opportunity. And I said to myself that there's still a huge opportunity. Nobody has done it. What I am willing to do, make website host easier for the nontechnical users, taking the middle men out, making it significantly more affordable. I just start decided to start the business. And at one point this talk that I had, which was worth probably between 8 to $10 million and crash, you know, was worth $6000. And I end up liquidating that stock buying a couple of servers for the web hosting company. Then I started the website hosting company on an American Express. And then later, I have rented a very small closet in somebody else's office, converted this to like little office and then put a couple of people in and literally within a year, the vision to make website hosting easier for every business. And I remember it was still the very early days where we were signing just three customers a day because we were still developing our tech and they just paid us like $100 a year. But I was thrilled within a couple of years, we were the fastest growing website company in the world. Then together, we continued to build the business in 2011. We have sold that business for nearly a billion dollars. Then we took it public and today it is the second largest website hosting company after God, we don't live love with life. Main thing is frugality and my wife is actually significantly better at that than I am. My airline of preference is Southwest that I travel often from Dallas to Scottsdale.