What does it take to transform from a young immigrant surviving on dollars a day to building one of America's most successful unified communications companies? In this powerful episode of Binary to Billions, we sit down with Tomas Gorny, founder and CEO of Nextiva, whose extraordinary journey embodies the American entrepreneurial dream.

Born in communist Poland where his village had just one telephone, Tomas dreamed of America from age seven. His father's gift of a secondhand Atari computer sparked a lifelong passion for democratizing technology. At 20, he immigrated to Los Angeles with almost no money, surviving on a few dollars a day while carpet cleaning and building one of the internet's first web hosting companies.

By 22, he was a millionaire. Then the dot-com crash wiped out everything.

Unable to pay his mortgage, Tomas started over the same day he closed his failed business. With just $6,000 from selling his remaining stock, he bought two servers and launched what became the world's second-largest web hosting company, eventually selling for $4 billion.

But Tomas wasn't done. Identifying a critical gap—companies growing disconnected from customers—he founded Nextiva in 2008. For over a decade, he chose to bootstrap rather than take venture capital, growing organically to serve 100,000+ customers before his first VC round in 2021.

His philosophy: "Build for value, not an exit."

In one of tech's boldest moves, Tomas abandoned a product generating millions to rebuild Nextiva's entire technology stack from scratch, positioning the company for the AI revolution with a unified platform that creates a single source of truth for all customer interactions.

Key insights from this episode:

• How failure became fuel for even greater success
• The strategic benefits of patient capital over quick funding
• Why the era of disconnected business applications is ending
• How emotional intelligence trumps technical skills for entrepreneurs
• The loyalty principle that creates unshakeable competitive advantages

As Tomas puts it: "VoIP is to Nextiva as books were to Amazon"—suggesting this is just the beginning of something much larger.

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