About

Troy Henikoff has spent his career on both sides of the table. He founded SurePayroll and co-founded Excelerate Labs, the Chicago accelerator that became Techstars Chicago, where he was Managing Director. He teaches entrepreneurship and innovation at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. He and his partners spent a decade at MATH Venture Partners, backing companies with an unfair advantage in customer acquisition.

Somewhere along the way he noticed he was answering the same questions over and over. How much should I raise, and when? What does a real financial model look like? What are investors actually asking when they ask about your CAC? Rather than answer them one founder at a time, he started filming the answers — a few minutes each, one question at a time, usually at a whiteboard. That became MATH 101: a decade of short, specific lessons on the unglamorous mechanics of building a company.

This site gathers that work in one place and makes it searchable. The lessons were scattered across years of blog posts, and most of what matters was said out loud rather than written down — so the video mattered more than the text around it, and none of it was easy to find when you needed it. Now it is organised the way a founder actually arrives: by the problem in front of you.