Troy Henikoff

Troy Henikoff teaches entrepreneurship at Kellogg, where he has been on the faculty since 2012, and is managing director of MATH Venture Partners.

He co-founded Excelerate Labs in 2010, the accelerator that became Techstars Chicago in 2013. He remains a senior advisor to Techstars and helped relaunch Techstars Chicago in 2026. He serves on the board of 1871, the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, and on the boards of several early-stage companies.

Before investing, Troy spent 25 years building companies. He co-founded and ran SurePayroll, the nation’s first online payroll company, later acquired by Paychex. He was CEO of OneWed.com, President of Amacai, and President of Systemetrics; he built the technology behind Jellyvision’s “You Don’t Know Jack!”; and his first company was Specialized Systems and Software.

A decade of his short lessons for founders — on raising capital, customer acquisition, financial modeling and pricing, each with a full searchable transcript — is collected at startups.henikoff.com.

Troy holds a BS in Engineering from Brown University and a Master’s in Project Management from Northwestern.