Nearly three decades ago, Tomas Gorny came to the U.S. as a Polish immigrant living on $3 a day, after rent and transportation costs. He worked up to 100 hours per week at three different jobs to make ends meet, he says.
Today, the 49-year-old Gorny is the founder of multiple tech businesses, including a cloud-based business communications company called Nextiva that was most recently valued at $2.7 billion. Gorny, the company’s CEO, has a net worth exceeding $1 billion, according to a Nextiva spokesperson.
Gorny attended college in Germany while dreaming of moving to the U.S. to start a tech business. When a friend invited him to Los Angeles to help build a website-hosting startup in 1996, he took the chance, dropping out a few months before graduating and bringing his life savings of around $15,000, he says.
The money disappeared “super quickly” — spent on housing, legal fees for a work …