The Inspiring Story of Tomas Gorny

There’s a great scene in the 1989 movie Parenthood in which the grandmother equates life to a rollercoaster. Some people don’t like the ups and downs, the grandma adds, but she enjoys the ride. Tomas Gorny seems to have a similar outlook.

Today Gorny is CEO and chairman of Unitedweb, which he founded in 2008. That’s the parent company of Nextiva, which Gorny established and leads as CEO.  (SiteLock is also under the Unitedweb umbrella.)

Gorny created Nextiva more than a decade ago after he was unable to find a VoIP phone system suitable for a team of more than 300 customer service representatives. Today Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Nextiva is one of the fastest-growing cloud-based business communications providers in the country. It counts Allstate, Conan, IBM, Netflix, and Target among its customers.

Frost & Sullivan notes Nextiva’s “customer service excellence.” And Gorny aims to build on that strength and its success to date to become an even larger player in the business communications arena.

He has a lot of experience tackling new challenges and taking businesses to the next level.

Gorny spent most of his childhood in Poland. He moved to Germany at 14. Three years later he was running a PC distribution service in Europe.

Shortly after that he moved to Los Angeles. He became an early employee at Internet Communications, a web hosting company. He had to face some lean times, but his willingness to take risks and work hard enabled him to amass great wealth – and then to do it all over again.

When Interliant bought Internet Communications, Gorny became a millionaire at the ripe old age of 22. He then took those funds to invest in other businesses. Unfortunately, the dot-com bubble burst, wiping out most of that wealth.

But he clawed his way back, starting a new web hosting company called IPOWER in 2001. A few years later the company was a leading U.S. web hosting company.

IPOWER merged with Endurance International. And after that Warburg Pincus and Goldman Sachs bought the company for nearly $1 billion.

Edited by Maurice Nagle