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.

Subscribe to Binary to Billions for more incredible stories of resilience and innovation. Share this episode with someone who needs to hear that setbacks can become setups for something extraordinary.

Join host Rob Scott as he sits down with Mark Bunnell, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Nuwave Communications Inc., for an inside look at building and scaling a telecommunications company in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Mark shares his entrepreneurial journey from the early vision that sparked Nuwave Communications to the operational challenges of growing a telecom business in an industry dominated by established giants. Discover how he and his co-founders identified market opportunities, navigated the complex world of telecommunications infrastructure, and built a company that's making waves in the industry.

In this candid conversation, Mark reveals the behind-the-scenes struggles of startup life, the pivotal decisions that shaped Nuwave's trajectory, and the leadership lessons learned while scaling operations. From technical hurdles to team building, funding challenges to competitive positioning, Mark provides authentic insights into what it really takes to succeed in the telecommunications sector.

Whether you're a founder facing scaling challenges, a technology leader curious about the telecom industry, or simply interested in the human stories behind business transformation, Mark's journey offers valuable lessons about persistence, innovation, and building something meaningful in a competitive marketplace.

This is the story of vision meeting execution in the telecommunications revolution.

Join host Rob Scott for an extraordinary conversation with Michael Tessler, the visionary co-founder and former CEO of BroadSoft who literally created the Unified Communications-as-a-Service industry. In 1998, while others focused on hardware, Michael saw the future: enterprise communications would shift to software delivered over the internet.

Discover how he and co-founder Scott Hoffpauir grew BroadSoft from humble beginnings into a global powerhouse serving 50 million users across 80 countries, pioneering the revolutionary partner-centric model that worked with telecom carriers rather than against them. Michael shares the pivotal decisions, hidden challenges, and strategic insights that led to BroadSoft's $1.9 billion acquisition by Cisco in 2018.

From his engineering roots at Nortel to scaling a 2,000-person global team, Michael reveals the execution principles and leadership philosophy that built an industry. Now as Managing Partner at True North Advisory, he's mentoring the next generation of tech entrepreneurs with hard-won wisdom about partnerships, culture, and knowing when to make the leap.

This is the untold story of how one engineer's vision transformed how the world communicates - and the human journey behind building a category-defining company.