49-year-old started his business ‘to make $5,000 a month to survive, pay my mortgage’—he sold it for $100 million

When Tomas Gorny started a tech business in 2001, he wasn’t thinking about becoming a billionaire someday. He only needed a simple paycheck.

The 49-year-old is currently the CEO and co-founder of Nextiva, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based customer experience management company. Nextiva was most recently valued at $2.7 billion, giving Gorny a net worth of more than $1 billion, a company spokesperson says.

But 23 years ago, Gorny was a struggling entrepreneur who’d lost nearly all his money in the dot-com bubble crash. He was a Polish immigrant who’d only been in the U.S. for five years, and he’d spent all of that time in the tech world. He desperately needed a small source of income.

“I just wanted to make $5,000 a month to survive, pay my mortgage,” says Gorny.

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The tech industry was financially in shambles, but people and businesses were still joining the internet for the first time. Gorny started a business called Ipower, which sold software that helped people build their own websites.

Six years later, he sold Ipower to web hosting company Endurance International for a reported $100 million.

Building for the long term

When Gorny started Ipower, he didn’t have much money, he says — but knew how to build a tech company.

In 1996, he helped launch a website-hosting startup called Internet Communications, which sold for $6 million in cash and stock to a company called Interliant two years later, Gorny says. As a minority owner, he got some of that stock, and when Interliant went public in 1999, his shares became worth several million dollars, he adds.

The dot-com crash wiped out all but $6,000 of that wealth, says Gorny. So when he launched Ipower, he prioritized consistent profitability over explosive revenue growth — hoping to build a business that could sustain itself over time, rather than aiming for a splashy acquisition.

“I never looked at it like, ‘I need to make the [millions] back.’ It wasn’t important to me,” Gorny says.

Perhaps ironically, Gorny says the more modest goal helped helped him grow his company’s bottom line far more effectively. Instead of trying to maximize revenue right off the bat, Gorny spent months developing products he believed his potential customers would value long-term.

The few people who signed up during Ipower’s early days gave Gorny a livable income, he notes. Once he released his more developed products, Ipower started adding hundreds of new customers per day, he says.

Gorny continued to build that business for six years, selling it to Endurance International in 2007 as Google and Microsoft rose up as larger competitors. Merging Ipower into one of its rivals gave both businesses a better shot at long-term success — and Gorny’s personal payout was incidental, he says.

The combined company went public in 2013 with a market value of roughly $2 billion.

‘Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession’

Gorny started Nextiva the year before he sold Ipower. He says he’s built his current company the same way, and it’s the advice he gives other entrepreneurs, especially those just starting out: Don’t focus on your exit strategy, or think about how you’ll one day cash out of your business for millions.

“When you focus on an exit, you maybe forget about building your business,” Gorny says. “When you focus on building your business, your exit will be significantly better than you ever envisioned.”

Gorny shares that belief with at least one other billionaire entrepreneur: Mark Cuban similarly advises against having an exit strategy in mind when you start a new business, because it suggests you’re not passionate enough about the business itself.

“Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love,” Cuban wrote for Entrepreneur magazine in 2012. “If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.”

Down the road, if you’re lucky enough to sell your company or take it public for a windfall, consider it validation for the more important goal of building something that people find valuable, says Gorny.

“Financial validation for what we do, like when we sell a business, or when you go public or the valuation of the business, does matter to me, a lot,” he says. “Because it’s just a validation that we’ve done something right and different.”

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank,” which features Mark Cuban as a panelist.

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