Tech Entrepreneur Tomas Gorny Strikes Again: Leverages Conversations To Help Businesses And Customers Connect

Tomas Gorny, whose hometown village in Poland had just one telephone. Today, his Arizona-based tech firm is valued at $2.7 billion.

He redefined the website industry, making it accessible to millions of businesses. He then went on to change the landscape of website security before it was a thing. He believes every business should have access to the same set of tools as the big tech companies. With his current venture, business communications giant Nextiva, Tomas Gorny is ready to level the playing field and give the power back to every business.

Ask Nextiva CEO and co-founder Tomas Gorny what today's successful businesses have in common and his answer may surprise you: it's all about the conversations.

"Conversations move your business forward," stated Gorny. "They're the most valuable asset a business can have, but most companies aren't approaching conversations in the right way."

In our very online and multi-channel era, Gorny disclosed that the majority of companies are using dozens and sometimes hundreds of apps to manage team collaboration, productivity and customer communication.

This means internal and external exchanges are scattered across multiple apps and channels – including email, phone, messaging, apps, social media, video conferencing and more. When a customer engages with the business, there is no way for an employee to instantly know all the necessary information to provide a great experience. Customers often end up repeating themselves and feeling frustrated. On the backend, the company lacks a clear and holistic picture of its customers, which limits business growth.

"Business communications are in a state of crisis," said Gorny. "We're seeing it in the data. Customers are unhappier than they've ever been." In a recent study published in Harvard Business Review, the data revealed just that: Customer satisfaction is "now at its lowest level in nearly two decades."

Gorny's mission today is to gather these business-driving conversations into one unified, accessible place.

"Technology should not be a limiting factor for any business, even a one-person shop," expressed Gorny. "I want to arm the underdogs and give them the same kind of technology that the largest corporations have been using to their advantage. I want to empower every business to compete on its ingenuity."

With many patents under its belt, Nextiva offers an antidote to the app overloads and siloed interactions that can make today's hybrid workplaces so complex and inefficient. The company's latest innovations include NextivaONE, a first-of-its-kind work hub that threads together customer exchanges and internal team collaborations into a single-view workspace.

In April 2023, Nextiva announced its acquisition of Simplify360, a leading AI customer experience platform that will soon be integrated into Nextiva's business conversations platform. On artificial intelligence, Gorny emphasised that while many concerns about AI are legitimate, and careful adoption is needed, he believes businesses of all kinds need to adopt AI for customer experience as quickly as possible.

The CEO said: "It's the only viable path to meeting customer expectations today. And I see it not as humans versus machines, but rather, as humans and machines working in harmony. When technology is doing its job, it's powering human connection."

With a $2.7 billion valuation and $200 million in its first-round VC funding from Goldman Sachs, Nextiva is quickly becoming the go-to communications provider for some of the world's largest brands. With Nextiva's 99.999 per cent uptime reliability, which helped it land on GetVoIP's Best UCaas Providers of 2023 list, and its unique, connected communications offering, Nextiva is capturing the attention of some of America's favourite brands. Customers today include the NHL's Florida Panthers, Shelby American and national food retailers like Jeni's Ice Cream and Taco Bell.

But big brands and corporations aren't Nextiva's only interest. When Tomas Gorny co-founded the company in 2008, he had the vision that any company should be able to communicate like a Fortune 500.

It is no small irony that the CEO of America's largest privately held business communications provider grew up in a village with only one telephone. Raised in Poland in the late 1970s and early 80s, Gorny dreamed of moving to the United States to become an entrepreneur.

When he arrived at 20 years old, he didn't speak English and was juggling multiple part-time jobs while working in an equity role at a web-hosting startup, Internet Communications. What followed was a classic rags-to-riches immigrant story—living proof of the American Dream. During the dot-com eruption of the late 1990s, Gorny quickly became a twenty-two-year-old millionaire when the company sold—only to see his savings and investments crash after 9/11.

But with his passion for making technology accessible to all, Gorny soon helped build and create more companies, including a small business web-hosting service, IPOWER, which sold for nearly $1 billion to Warburg Pincus and Goldman Sachs before he started Nextiva. All of the ups and downs have shaped Gorny and led him to where he is today.

He believes: "There's no better education than failure, it provides perspective that you can't buy."

Only recently did Nextiva raise any outside investment. Prior to raising venture capital from Goldman Sachs Asset Management in September 2021, Nextiva's entire growth had been self-funded. Today the company boasts over 100,000 clients and employs over one thousand employees.

With a team this large, Nextiva has also been innovating in-house, too. As the company expanded its team globally and embraced more flexible and remote work for its team over the last few years, its video team reignited one of Nextiva's oldest traditions, a TV show made by and for employees. NexTV newscasts feature fun and interactive interviews, company updates and community-building content.

Featuring brightly coloured sets and one-on-one conversations, the shows help build company culture and set an example for the kind of connectivity Nextiva wants all its partners to enjoy.

"Last year the team decided to share it with the world, and put the show up on YouTube," stated Gorny. "We want to show people our culture and way of working. I think it's a great way to attract the type of people we want to join us."

Looking ahead, Gorny declared that Nextiva will be driving forward an ambitious roadmap and continuing to execute its rapid expansion plans. It was only a few years ago that TechCrunch referred to Nextiva as a "quiet giant" of the tech communications industry. That won't be true for much longer, though Nextiva and its CEO are driving a vital conversation that is shaping the future of work.

"I want to make technology simpler to use for people," Gorny has said. "That is what I want to do with my life."