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.
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00:00 I was doing whatever I had to take to survive on three bucks a day, but I never felt pity for myself.
00:05 I was living in the country and even in the city that I, you know, loved.
00:10 And so for me, this was a huge blessing.
00:13 My name is Tomasz Gorni.
00:15 I am 47 years old.
00:18 I'm the CEO and co-founder of Nextiva.
00:21 And this is how I made my first million dollars.
00:25 I grew up in communist Poland, but I was born in 1975.
00:29 And the first 14 years of my life, I lived there.
00:33 And I already knew around the age of seven that I want to come to America.
00:38 As I was growing up as a teenager, my exposure to the United States was really through textbooks
00:43 and American movies like Wall Street and 90210.
00:48 And that's ultimately what intrigued me, even more so, to come to America.
00:54 My parents were essentially factory workers.
00:58 Most people grew up in a poor environment.
01:02 My exposure to business and my exposure to entrepreneurship was non-existent.
01:10 This was just developed personally as kind of, was part always of my DNA.
01:16 Giving credit to my parents, I never felt poor.
01:19 I always felt that I am well taken care of and my parents always encouraged me to do more.
01:26 When we moved to Germany, I grew up during the era of the PC revolution.
01:32 And the very first PCs, if some of you guys still remember,
01:37 they had those big DOS manuals on your desk where you had to really write those long string command lines
01:42 on your computer to get anything done.
01:44 That was a pivotal moment in my life.
01:46 I said, I don't know what I'm going to do in my life,
01:51 but I want to be part of making tech easier for other people.
01:58 Because I saw how Windows opened the market to everybody, made it accessible to everybody.
02:03 And I love that idea and I wanted to be part of that type of revolution.
02:06 And already started a couple of businesses, going to college.
02:10 I really took advantage of the PC revolution and there were some big companies in Germany building businesses,
02:17 but I thought we can do it better with delivering personalized service right to people's homes.
02:23 And we started building that business and I didn't have any capital.
02:26 When I lived in Germany and I was building my businesses, the person who moved to America,
02:30 I was actually doing an inmandatory internship for him while I was going to school.
02:36 Then he decided to move to the United States and I even visited him.
02:40 As he was coming back to visit his family to Germany, he saw what I was doing with the businesses.
02:47 He was very impressed and he said, look, I'm just about to start a website hosting company.
02:53 We didn't know what the internet will do at that point.
03:02 And he says, look, join me. There are no guarantees.
03:05 I cannot afford to pay you, but I will give you sweat equity.
03:10 And just, you know, come over.
03:13 And I said, absolutely. Dropped everything, ended up in the United States.
03:17 I didn't speak English.
03:18 Essentially, I learned on the job.
03:21 I never went to school.
03:22 By answering emails and by interacting with people in the business, I learned to communicate in English.
03:29 While I was working at the business in the morning, at night I was parking cars,
03:34 cleaning carpets at restaurants and apartment buildings, doing various weird jobs at events.
03:42 I was doing whatever it took to survive on three bucks a day.
03:45 I remember I had a friend of mine that I met playing soccer in the park.
03:52 And, you know, we always on Sundays made the trip to Sysla, you know, all you can eat.
03:59 And then essentially it was like a seven dollar meal and we bunched our money together.
04:05 And then one of us was always going to the buffet, you know, and then by the time we were done,
04:11 you know, I was like a pigeon, you know, ready to fall over because I overate.
04:16 But that was our treat for the week.
04:19 When you come to America, what I underestimated that you actually have to build your own credit.
04:25 So I brought a little bit money from sales of the businesses.
04:28 But, you know, I didn't receive quite a good amount.
04:32 So I ran out of the money very, very quickly by putting down payment on an apartment,
04:37 by literally getting a credit card that my deposit was larger than the credit that they would give me.
04:42 So no, I didn't have any credit.
04:45 I, you know, at the beginning I didn't have a social security number.
04:48 Then I applied for, I needed to hire a lawyer so I stay legal in the country.
04:54 So all of that, you know, really put a big strain on my financial position.
05:00 I was kind of in somewhat of an unusual story because I, you know, unlike probably a 23 year old
05:06 that would go on a shopping spree and buy homes, cars and do private travel.
05:11 I didn't do any of it. The goal was really to focus on the business.
05:14 And we were very fortunate because we picked the right industry.
05:20 Eventually we knew that more and more people will have websites.
05:24 Having a website was still expensive.
05:26 We were one of the very first website hosting companies out there.
05:30 And very quickly the majority owner started getting pretty good offers for the business.
05:37 Although I was the minority owner and probably had more interest to sell the business
05:44 because I wasn't in control, I was advising him against to do this because I said,
05:48 "Look, this market is going to expand. Eventually everybody will have a website."
05:51 He decided to sell in '98, two and a half years later.
05:55 He honored the arrangement that we had and I ended up, you know, becoming multimillionaire literally overnight.
06:03 I bought a modest house where I put a down payment of less than $100,000.
06:08 I bought myself the very first car in LA for $40,000.
06:12 And if you know LA, you cannot rely on LA's public transportation.
06:17 And the rest I invested along with people that I trusted.
06:21 And unfortunately, that was part of my mistake.
06:25 SoftBank came around and invested in one of our businesses.
06:28 And I invested along with SoftBank to start the business.
06:32 This was all 1998, '99.
06:34 And two years later, you know, the bubble burst.
06:38 Some of the people that I trusted, I have made a mistake on.
06:44 And all of that money was essentially gone by middle of 2001.
06:51 I didn't know how to pay my next mortgage.
06:54 I wasn't down on myself.
06:55 I still saw the market as a huge opportunity.
06:57 And I said to myself that there's still a huge opportunity.
07:02 Nobody has done it what I envisioned to do.
07:05 Make website hosting easier for the non-technical users.
07:08 Taking the middlemen out.
07:10 Making it significantly more affordable.
07:12 I decided to start the business.
07:15 And at one point, the stock that I had, which was worth probably between 8 to 10 million dollars,
07:22 and crash, you know, was worth $6,000.
07:27 And I end up liquidating that stock, buying a couple of servers for the web hosting company.
07:34 Then I started the website hosting company on an American Express.
07:39 And then later, I have rented a very small closet in somebody else's office,
07:49 converted this to like little office, and then put a couple of people in.
07:53 And literally, within a year, the vision to make website hosting easier for every business.
08:01 And I remember still the very early days, where we were signing just three customers a day.
08:07 Because we were still developing our tech.
08:10 And they just paid us like $100 a year.
08:13 But I was thrilled.
08:14 Within a couple of years, we were the fastest growing website hosting company in the world.
08:18 Then together, we continued to build the business in 2011.
08:22 We have sold that business for nearly a billion dollars.
08:26 Then we took it public.
08:28 And today, it is the second largest website hosting company after Godaddy.
08:32 We don't live lavish life.
08:34 Main thing is frugality.
08:36 And my wife is actually significantly better at that than I am.
08:39 My airline of preference is Southwest.
08:42 That I travel often from Dallas to Scottsdale.