In recent months, the business community in London and beyond hasn’t had much to celebrate. The continuing woes stemming from the Brexit fallout and COVID-fuelled inflation are both continuing to stifle growth. Included in the doldrums is the tech startup scene, which once outpaced the rest of the world but has since slowed to a crawl. However, that doesn’t mean that London tech entrepreneurs have to sit on the sidelines and wait for conditions to improve. Instead, they can take a page from the playbook of Nextiva CEO Tomas Gorny. He’s built multiple tech companies over the past few decades, overcoming the kind of adversity that would have stymied a lesser businessman.
Poland-born Tomas Gorny had the kind of early entrepreneurial career that most can only dream about. After emigrating to the US with next to no money in his pocket in the mid 90s, he joined a web hosting startup called Internet Communications in exchange for a 20% equity stake in the business. When the business was sold to a competitor amidst the dot-com boom of the era, Gorny became a millionaire by the age of 22.
However, it wouldn’t last.
By the following year, a string of bad investments—caused by the bursting dot-com bubble—left Gorny with very little money in the bank. Undeterred, he got right back to work. By 2001, he had founded a new startup, IPOWER, a web hosting provider focused on helping businesses build, manage, promote, and profit from their websites. It didn’t take long for the business to take off, which was notable given how many other technology companies spectacularly failed during the same period. By 2011, after a merger with Endurance International Group, the business sold to Warburg Pincus and Goldman Sachs for almost a billion USD.
According to Gorny, the whole experience of striking it rich, losing it all, and soaring back to the heights of the tech industry taught him a variety of lessons. They’re the very kinds of lessons that today’s London tech entrepreneurs can use right now. Many revolve around the right ways to approach the process of building a startup, and some fly in the face of the conventional wisdom on the topic.
One of the most important among them is to avoid laying out an exit strategy as a part of your startup planning. According to Gorny, doing so distracts you from what should be your main mission as a founder—creating a business that delivers real value to customers. In an interview with Thrive Global, he said “I firmly believe that as an entrepreneur, you shouldn’t have an exit strategy. If you are planning for an exit, your mind is focused on the wrong things for your business.” In other words, if you’re too busy eyeing the exits as you work to get your business off the ground, you won’t make decisions that foster lasting success.
He also believes that you should always have a personal stake in any business you start. As he puts it, “The best investment you can make is in yourself.” By doing this, he insists that you’ll make more prudent decisions for your fledgling business. This also allows you to treat your failures as “free tuition”, as he calls it. “You can [always] reflect and analyse not to repeat mistakes. It’s much harder to break down successes to learn how to improve.”
It’s not as though London tech entrepreneurs need to take Gorny’s advice on faith. Instead, they can look at his track record since his recovery from those early losses. Today, Gorny is the co-founder and CEO of a tech unicorn, Nextiva. In the intervening years, he also built the highly successful website security company, SiteLock, which he has since sold to private equity firm ABRY Partners.
In all of those instances, Gorny applied the lessons he learned in his earlier endeavours. For example, they all grew organically by creating products that customers loved. That approach can serve as a ready model for those looking for a path to launching a startup in London’s suddenly-barren VC environment. And if Gorny has accomplished all that he has despite his own near-financial ruin—the present headwinds shouldn’t pose nearly as much of an obstacle as the pundits claim.
