A Kid Born Behind The Iron Curtain Follows The American Dream and Builds A $110 Million Business

Perched behind his office is a priceless painting of his favorite mentor and idol, Albert Einstein.

His favorite mantra by the renown Nobel Prize Physicist appears everywhere around his offices and home:

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited.
Imagination encircles the World.

Born and raised in Communist Poland, Tomas Gorny moved to the United States penniless and with no knowledge of English at the age of 20, to pursue the American Dream.

As a kid in Communist Poland, Tomas always told his parents that he wanted to go to America. They didn’t know what he was talking about. When the family moved to Germany to take care of his great grandmother, when Tomas was 14, he kept the American Dream alive. He loved the California lifestyle on the TV show Beverly Hills 90210, and loved the movie Wall Street and the idea of freedom and capitalism.

When he was 16 he had saved up enough money to start a business selling PC parts and computers and began attending business school.

At the age of 20, he bought a ticket to Los Angeles. In the United States, he worked odd jobs as a part-time valet boy and carpet cleaner while he was working at Internet Communications, a hosting company, in Hollywood, California. He was aged 22 when the company was acquired by Interliant.

Following the sale of Internet Communications, the Dot-com bubble and 9/11 occurred. Many Internet start-ups closed down and Tomas found himself broke.

He still had his American Express card which he used to process $6,000 to start IPOWER, a web-hosting company. IPOWER went on to become the second largest web hosting company in the country after GoDaddy within six years.

In 2007 IPOWER merged with another company, Endurance International. In 2011, the merged company was sold to Warburg Pincus and Goldman Sachs for close to $1 billion. 

The company is now part of Endurance International Group, a publicly traded company.

After the sale of IPOWER, he formed three more companies - Nextiva, a cloud-based VoIP service, UnitedWeb, a startup incubator, and SiteLock, a web-security company. 

Both Nextiva and SiteLock were the two highest ranked Arizona companies in the 2015 Technology Fast 500.

Nextiva went on to become a $110 million company.