By 25 He Had Made and Lost a Fortune. Now He’s Betting His Second One on AI.
The same passion that first brought him to the U.S. to pursue the American dream still drives him today.
Navigating the artificial intelligence (AI) arena takes flexibility, business acumen, and a solid sense of which developments are over-hyped, and which are here to stay.
Tomas Gorny, CEO of Nextiva, meets those requirements. In the three decades since he first launched himself into entrepreneurship as a young Polish immigrant, Gorny successfully navigated a series of highs and lows, innovating through cycles of disruption.
Now, at the helm of Nextiva, an AI platform for business conversations valued at $2.7 billion, he’s building AI customer experience tools aimed at everyday businesses.
Making a fortune, losing it all, and bouncing back to a billion
Gorny first bootstrapped his way to business success in the 1990s. He arrived in the U.S. with $200 and speaking broken English, driven by a passion for tech and the determination to build his own business.
Juggling multiple part-time jobs, and getting by on as little as $3 per day, he helped build an early web hosting company, Internet Communications. When it was acquired and later went public, Gorny became a millionaire in his early 20s.
Then, he lost his entrepreneurial focus. Keen to grow his net worth, Gorny started investing in different companies, only to see the dot-com crash wipe out his fortune.
He came out the other end with $6,000 to his name, and a new philosophy. Resist the hype. Focus on building value.
In 2001, he founded IPOWER, another web hosting company, this time centered on long-term viability rather than explosive growth. His goals were modest, as he has said publicly. Rather than aiming to make his millions back, he wanted to earn $5,000 a month to live on and pay off his mortgage.
The approach paid off. After several strategic mergers, including with Endurance International, the company went public in 2013 at a market value of roughly $1.5 billion.
At this point, however, Gorny’s main focus had shifted to Nextiva.
Confronting the illusion of tech democratization
Even in the mid-2000s, Gorny says he realized that the future of business communication and customer experience management lay in the cloud.
He’d already weathered one massive cycle of disruption. Others were to follow – from the shift to mobile-first customer experience that followed the advent of smartphones, to the emergence of unified communications and omnichannel customer experience management. Not to mention the pandemic and the rise of distributed teams.
Throughout all of these developments, Gorny’s core principles served him well — building products customers keep using. Critically, the customers that Gorny serves are not a handful of enterprises, but mainstream American businesses.
Gorny sees it as Nextiva’s mission to democratize access to tech, to help every business feel and operate like a Fortune 500 company.
When AI appeared on the scene, Gorny says he recognized the pattern. He also realized that, despite appearances, the benefits of AI were not accessible to the majority of businesses. Without deployment engineers and deep pockets, they see the potential of AI — but cannot tap into it.
That’s the challenge Gorny decided to tackle, charting his business’ new course.
Unlocking AI for business conversations
Nextiva’s recent innovations are geared toward unlocking the power of AI for business conversations and making it accessible for every business, regardless of its size.
One of its flagship innovations is XBert, Nextiva’s AI receptionist. Designed to enhance the capacity of businesses to provide an outstanding customer experience, XBert can autonomously handle routine workflows such as booking appointments, and cover after-hours calls that would otherwise get missed. As a result, it frees human agents for the conversations that need them and keeps business communications covered around the clock.
“We see an agentic future for businesses, where humans define outcomes and AI helps achieve them,” Gorny has said.
As Gorny has learned over time, many industry players overestimate the short-term impacts of disruptive changes and underestimate long-term ones. Businesses race to keep up with the hype and hastily implement new systems without building solid bases first.
With Nextiva, Gorny says he aims to steer against this current and build solutions that respond to actual customer demand. Providing actual functionality instead of a glossy veneer of innovation.
These days, Gorny has long reached the goal he set for himself in 2001, of paying off his mortgage and earning enough to live comfortably. He no longer needs to dedicate all his energy to growing his business, navigating an ever-shifting market, or staying ahead of the curve. Instead, it’s the same passion that first brought him to the U.S. to pursue the American dream that still drives him — a stroke of luck for both Nextiva and the businesses it serves.
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