Mark Abbott

Founder and CEO Ninety

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Mark Abbott spent close to four decades lending to, investing in and sitting on the boards of small and mid-sized companies — more than a hundred investments and dozens of board seats, by his own count — and what he took from it was a pattern rather than a portfolio. The same failures recurred: leadership teams that were not aligned on where the company was going, accountability that nobody could point to precisely, and management systems that worked at thirty people and broke at a hundred and fifty. Ninety is his answer, a software platform that gives companies of roughly ten to 250 employees a structured operating system covering vision, accountability, meetings, goals, processes and feedback, closely aligned with the Entrepreneurial Operating System framework. What distinguishes his route to it is the order he did things in: he had the idea in 2005, spent years as a certified EOS Implementer working with real management teams from 2012, and only started building software in 2016.

Career Highlights

• Founder and chief executive of Ninety, a business operating system platform for companies of roughly 10 to 250 employees.
• Invested in over a hundred companies and served on dozens of boards over nearly forty years before founding it.
• Certified EOS Implementer since 2012, several years before beginning development of the software.
• President of Heller Corporate Finance at Heller Financial from 1989 to 1999, a decade running a corporate finance business.
• Senior managing director at the private equity firm Trivest Partners, 1999 to 2004, and chief executive of Silver Point Commercial Finance, 2005 to 2006.
• Founder and managing member of VTH Partners since 2007, and founder of Humalytix since 2012.
• Author of Work 9.0, published by Ninety Press, and of The Enlightened Leader’s Notebook newsletter.
• Works as an executive-team coach alongside running the company.

Professional Journey

Abbott’s career began in banking. He joined Continental Bank, N.A. in 1982 and spent seven years there, rising to vice president, before moving to Heller Financial in 1989. He ran Heller Corporate Finance as its president for a decade, through the period in which mid-market corporate finance became a distinct and competitive discipline in its own right, and left in 1999.

The next phase was investing rather than lending. He joined Trivest Partners, a private equity firm, as a senior managing director in 1999, and stayed until 2004; in 2005 he became chief executive of Silver Point Commercial Finance for a year. Across this whole stretch — banking, corporate finance, private equity — he was doing variations of the same thing, which was forming a view on whether a small or mid-sized company was well run, and then living with the consequences of that judgement.

By 2005 he had seen enough repetition to have the idea that became Ninety. But he did not build software for another eleven years. Instead he founded VTH Partners in 2007 and Humalytix in 2012, and in the same year joined the EOS community as an implementer — deliberately working inside the framework with actual leadership teams before attempting to encode it. That sequence is unusual and is the most interesting thing about the company’s origin: most operating-system software is built by technologists who then look for practitioners, rather than by a practitioner who already knew exactly which meeting, which scorecard and which accountability chart teams actually struggle with.

He began building Ninety in 2016 and had the first customer in 2017. The product is closely aligned with EOS, the framework popularised by the book Traction, and serves the segment Abbott knows best — companies large enough that informal coordination has stopped working and small enough that they cannot buy their way out with enterprise software. He continues to coach management teams directly alongside running the business, writes regularly on work and organisational culture, publishes The Enlightened Leader’s Notebook, and wrote Work 9.0 through the company’s own imprint, Ninety Press.

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Gies College of Business

Bachelor’s, Finance, 1980-1982

Marquette University

Economics, 1978-1980

American School in London

Secondary education, 1974-1978