Ten years in, Mark Abbott sits down with Ninety co-founder Kris Snyder to talk honestly about what they built, what they would do differently, and what still is not solved. They get into why Ninety reached roughly $40M in ARR without a single salesperson, an idea Kris carried over from his first job out of college at McMaster-Carr, and why they eventually conceded that the "we don't sell, we serve" era had to end.
Kris walks through the Math of Trust, the three-part model the two of them developed around 2020 that treats character as binary, competency as a score, and connection as a percentage, and shares what happened when a leadership team rated a colleague's character at zero.
They also cover the Five Stages of Development, why nearly the entire EOS world is stuck in stage three, and why leadership development almost never happens by osmosis. The most candid stretch is about what they got wrong: going fully remote across 36 states, holding onto fractional leaders long past their usefulness, and the trap of covering for a direct report instead of replacing them.
Key topics:
* The Math of Trust: character times competency times connection, and why a zero on character ends the equation
* Reaching $40M ARR with no sales team, and knowing when that model has run out
* The Five Stages of Development, and why most EOS companies are stuck at stage three
* Why leadership development rarely happens on its own, and what to do about it
* The difference between coaching, mentoring, and judging, and why leaders conflate all three
* Going fully remote as the "non-gift" of the pandemic
About Kris Snyder:
Kris Snyder is a co-founder of Ninety and an EOS implementer who has been building companies since the dot com era. His first job out of college was at McMaster-Carr, the multi-billion dollar, century-old distributor that famously operates without any salespeople, an experience that directly shaped Ninety's early go-to-market approach. He spent 13 years in Entrepreneurs' Organization, including board service running its mentorship program, and he made his first investment in Ninety in December 2019, following it with a six-figure check in the opening weeks of the pandemic.
→ Follow Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krissnyder/
Mentioned in this episode:
- "The Creative Act: A Way of Being" by Rick Rubin: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/0593652886
- "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Fable/dp/0787960756
- "You Can Negotiate Anything" by Herb Cohen, who ran negotiation training at Mark's early bank: https://www.amazon.com/You-Negotiate-Anything-Herb-Cohen/dp/0806541229
- Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Jane Loevinger's stages of ego development, referenced as the intellectual roots of Ninety's Five Stages framework
Resources:
→ Subscribe to Mark's Founder's Framework Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3JiAaXT
→ Subscribe to Ninety's EOS Newsletter: https://www.ninety.io/impact-moments
→ Try Ninety free: https://www.ninety.io/?utm_source=you…
Connect:
→ Follow Mark on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/MarkAbbott
→ Follow Cole on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ColeAbbott
→ Follow Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krissnyder/
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
01:58 - AI as agency, and what Claude changes about hard problems
06:26 - Are we solving complexity, or creating it?
07:58 - Ideas are worthless without someone who owns them
10:22 - Humans are at the edge of creativity
11:02 - Creativity as a process, and Rick Rubin's "The Creative Act"
13:15 - McMaster-Carr and the origin of "we don't sell, we serve"
16:02 - Why Ninety never had incentive plans
20:34 - COVID as a gift, and the EOS Worldwide breakthrough
23:20 - Writing a six-figure check in the first weeks of the pandemic
23:58 - From Maslow to the Five Stages of Development
28:07 - Why most of the EOS world is stuck at stage three
35:25 - Leadership development does not happen by osmosis
37:42 - Finding a mentor, and what mentorship actually requires
41:03 - Coaching versus judging
45:55 - The Math of Trust
53:42 - What a genuinely healthy team looks like
55:24 - The CEO who fired his COO the next day
56:18 - Ego, empathy, and covering for people you should replace
1:01:42 - The "non-gift" of a fully remote team
1:05:28 - Fractional leadership, and holding on too long
1:09:01 - What each of them is most proud of
Subscribe for more founder-first conversations every other week.
→ Subscribe to Mark’s Founder’s Framework Newsletter
→ Subscribe to Ninety’s EOS Newsletter
→ Try Ninety free for 30 days!
