Troy Henikoff - OneWed.com

Today Gigs at Startups is interviewing: Troy Henikoff - CEO at OneWed.com.

Name: Troy Henikoff

Company: OneWed

Role: CEO

What is OneWed?

OneWed is the ultimate online source for the truth in wedding planning, providing couples with a wealth of tips, advice, and creative suggestions to help personalize their wedding experience. The site’s newest platform, WeddingPreParty.com, is a virtual way for couples to start the celebration early and keep in contact with guests through a social wedding planning network. OneWed boasts the largest searchable directory of local wedding vendors with over 230,000 vendors nationwide with honest ratings and reviews. Additionally, the site has all the other things you would expect; Blog, online wedding checklist, free wedding websites and ideas for everything from engagement rings to honeymoon planning.

How did you get involved with OneWed?

Most start-ups begin the entrepreneur in the basement or garage, working hard to prove out an idea and then having to pitch it to potential investors to get it financed. With OneWed, the process was reversed. Lake Capital, a local Private Equity firm, had the idea initially and was looking for an Entrepreneur to take the reins. It started as a consulting gig, doing market research, building out the business plan and financial model and presenting to the investment committee. Once they gave the idea a "thumbs up", it became a full time job executing on the plan. We launched the new OneWed in October of 2008 and have not looked back since!

What is the best thing about working at OneWed?

We are taking an existing, established industry (total wedding spending in the U.S. is over $100 Billion / year) and leveraging new technology to turn it on its head. We are constantly looking at how users are looking for information and making buying decisions and providing them the tools to do more of it on OneWed. User contributed Ratings and Reviews are a big part of our vendor database. Allowing the brides to create their own mini social network in WeddingPreParty is leveraging our target market's familiarity with Facebook, and we are always looking to do more!

What kind of people do you think are best suited to work at start-ups?

Working as part of a team at a start-up is very different from working in corporate America. You have to be comfortable with a much higher level of ambiguity than in larger organizations. By their nature, larger organizations have been around longer, have proven ways of achieving well defined goals and a structure to make that process repeatable. In a start-up, you are trying to figure that all out still, so things are constantly changing and there is much less structure and process. For some people this is liberating (me for example...) for others it can be paralyzing. I look for people that seek adventure, like figuring things out and are intellectually curious. You couple that with a willingness to work very hard and a competitive streak and you will have a great fit.