Troy Henikoff
Programmer to President
March 20, 2007 | by brett | Permalink
When Troy Henikoff entered Brown University in Rhode Island, he had the dream of designing sail boats for a living. He knew he liked to build and create things, but also knew he needed to enroll in a graduate program. The plan was to go to Brown, get an undergrad degree in engineering and go off to grad school.
While going through the engineering program there, he soon realized that his priorities had started to change. Sailing was no longer the most important thing in the world, and with his senior year approaching, Troy decided to interview with a number of technical firms for jobs. When he received a job offer from General Dynamics he made the trip down to visit the company’s headquarters andwitnessed a scene that would change his outlook on business.
During the office tour, he was shown to a floor that was about the size of a football field. The scene that would eventually lead him to work for himself consisted of rows and rows of cubicles, with engineers neatly tucked away in each crevice. The floor below it was the same, as was the floor below that one, and the floor two stories above. The office tour made Troy realize that there was no way he could be caught inside a cubicle, let alone a machine like General Dynamics.
So he interviewed with a company in Boston called Design Options because he “liked the name, liked design, and needed an option.” He knew nothing of what the company did, but really liked the experience of going in and designing software for other companies.
Troy was close to accepting their offer when he gave a work connection a phone call in his hometown of Chicago to see if there were any similar openings available. They got to talking about Troy’s past two summers where he had done an excellent job designing a couple of computer database systems, and the connection ended up saying that he needed a new accounting system. He offered Troy the job and encouraged him to go into business for himself.
Troy didn’t know anything about business. He had not taken a business course in school, and didn’t know the difference between a balance sheet and an income statement. The idea was appealing enough to lead him to take caution to the wind and go into business for himself.
So Troy graduated, went to Chicago to meet with his first customer about designing his first accounting system as a businessman,, When he arrived, he was disappointed to find that that the job that was promised to him had already been completed by someone else.
Troy had already lost his first customer before he even went into business. But instead of calling it quits or scrambling to find a job, he decided to stick to his original decision and pursue business for himself.
At 21 years old, Troy started to operate out of the basement of his parents home. He had a thousand dollars to buy a telephone, answering machine, and business cards, but had no computer to program with. At this point, Troy was visiting his clients on-site to program their computers. After about six months, however, Troy started to make the business work. He grew with the customers that needed more systems during their growth stages. He was now in business for good.
Despite his lack of experience, Troy never approached the situation with fear. Instead, it was more of an adventure to him because of the uncertain outcome that surrounded the choice of doing business for himself.
“If you are a person that fears the unknown, go work for a company. Don’t become an entrepreneur.”
In Troy’s entrepreneurial path of starting five businesses over the last twenty years, he says that there are hundreds of lessons that he’s learned along the way. One of which he shared with us regarding the preliminary phases of planning.
“No matter what you are starting, whether a new project, a new company, no matter how well you plan, or no matter how well you think you have it figured out, it’s going to take longer and it’s going to cost more than you planned. No matter what I’ve tried in the past, whether it’s adding a buffer of fifty percent, or doubling the amount of cash I’ll need, I’m always wrong. It always takes longer and costs more. That’s just the nature of the beast.”
Now at Amacai Corporation, Troy is in his first role of running an existing organization as opposed to being the “president, accountant and janitor” of a company he has created. As President, he is veering away from the “knitty-gritty” type of things like programming and selling, but is ensuring that the company has a clear direction and that the entire company understands what the goals are for the team.
Another lesson that Troy stressed was that sometimes the most valuable things in entrepreneurship, and life, are the things that you choose not to do, as opposed to what you choose to do.
“You need to focus on what you pursue. Your success is highly dependent on what you choose to pursue as it is on what you choose not to pursue. Unless you find a customer that will pay you money for something, you will sink a lot of time, energy, and focus into something that won’t help you build your business.”
One of the most humorous responses Troy gave was when we asked the question “How do you define passion?”
Troy’s response:
“It’s like the Supreme Court, I know it when I see it.”
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