Re: 3 Star Hackers The Matrix V.1 2010
Cre Wallace
The idea behind the North Star Metric is that if your company brings more value to your customers, then the growth of your company has to go positive. The assumption is that if your customers receive a lot of value, they will stay longer, buy more and refer more friends to your company.
The danger of turnover as NSM is that you are more concerned with extracting as much money as possible from your customers in the short term, while a customer who really feels the value will probably pay much more in the long term.
The North Star Metric from LinkedIn was for a long time Number of endorsements given, since it proved that the users build relationships with each other, that users would be less likely to cancel their profile (since it carried so much value) and that recruiters were given more insight from the platform.
As a North Star Metric, Quora has Number of questions answered, which fits perfectly with their mission to offer a global platform for knowledge sharing. As you see in this example, your NSM can also be a good translation of your mission/vision as a company.
My name is Ward van Gasteren and as one of the first growth hackers in Europe, I help companies from startups to corporates to grow to the next step. I help you to see where you need to grow, how you should approach it and what is stopping your growth.
Ward van Gasteren is one of the first growth hackers in Europe, author of 'Growing Happy Clients', and freelance Growth Consultant to the fastest-growing startups (TikTok, StartupBootcamp, Catawiki) and biggest Fortune 500 enterprises (Pepsi, Cisco, Unilever)
I do have a question. Do you set your NSM based on the offerings you have today or based on what you want to offer eventually? In other words, does NSM only come to picture once you know that you have a product market fit?
If you change your business model and no longer do social media automation or that social media only becomes a subset, you will probably need to adjust it your new offering. But I imagine that your company will still be active in repurposing/curating/social media posts, so probably the amount of successfully repurposed posts on their social media is still relevant.
Hi Ward,
Great article. I want to take help of you to distill the difference between North Star Metric framework and Objectives in OKR. Do they mean almost the same in function but differ in form?
I would say that an OKR comes closer to a One Metric That Matters, in that you as a company can easily have several OKRs and OKRs will always change over time, while you can have only one North Star Metric as a company-wide focus and it will probably never change.
2. That a Vision Statement is often an end-state, while a North Star Metric is an ongoing metric. A vision is some finish line in the future, while the NSM is something you can try to hit every day and there is no finish.
Yeah, this should definitely be coming from the top-level management. They should be motivated to do this to get employee engagement up, future growth stronger & a better alignment of priorities of tasks.
Thank you for the article. Very well written.
Would there be a different approach that you would recommend for a service-based company. We provide tech solutions to a wide range of clients. How should I approach to find a NSM for my company?
The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction action film[5][6] written and directed by the Wachowskis.[a] It is the first installment in the Matrix film series, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving and Joe Pantoliano, and depicts a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside the Matrix, a simulated reality that intelligent machines have created to distract humans while using their bodies as an energy source.[7] When computer programmer Thomas Anderson, under the hacker alias "Neo", uncovers the truth, he joins a rebellion against the machines along with other people who have been freed from the Matrix.
The Matrix is an example of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction.[8] The Wachowskis' approach to action scenes was influenced by anime[9] and martial arts films (particularly fight choreographers and wire fu techniques from Hong Kong action cinema); other influences include Plato's cave and 1990s Telnet hacker communities. The film popularized terms such as the red pill, and introduced a visual effect known as "bullet time", in which the heightened perception of certain characters is represented by allowing the action within a shot to progress in slow motion while the camera appears to move through the scene at normal speed, allowing the sped-up movements of certain characters to be perceived normally.
The Matrix opened in theaters in the United States on March 31, 1999, to widespread acclaim from critics, who praised its innovative visual effects, action sequences, cinematography and entertainment value.[10][11] The film was a box office success, grossing over $460 million on a $63 million budget, becoming the highest-grossing Warner Bros. film of 1999 and the fourth-highest-grossing film of that year. The film received nominations at the 72nd Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Sound and Best Sound Editing, winning all four categories. The film was also the recipient of numerous other accolades, including Best Sound and Best Special Visual Effects at the 53rd British Academy Film Awards, and the Wachowskis were awarded Best Director and Best Science Fiction Film at the 26th Saturn Awards. The Matrix is considered to be among the greatest science fiction films of all time,[12][13][14] and in 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant."[15]
The film's success led to two feature film sequels being released in 2003, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, which were also written and directed by the Wachowskis. The Matrix franchise was further expanded through the production of comic books, video games and an animated anthology film, The Animatrix, with which the Wachowskis were heavily involved. The franchise has also inspired books and theories expanding on some of the religious and philosophical ideas alluded to in the films. A fourth film, titled The Matrix Resurrections, was released on December 22, 2021.
At an abandoned hotel, a police squad corners Trinity, who overpowers them with superhuman abilities. She flees, pursued by the police and a group of suited Agents capable of similar superhuman feats. She answers a ringing public telephone and vanishes.
Computer programmer Thomas Anderson, known by his hacking alias "Neo", is puzzled by repeated online encounters with the phrase "the Matrix". Trinity contacts him and tells him a man named Morpheus has the answers Neo seeks. A team of Agents and police, led by Agent Smith, arrives at Neo's workplace in search of him. Though Morpheus attempts to guide Neo to safety, Neo surrenders rather than risk a dangerous escape. The Agents offer to erase Neo's criminal record in exchange for his help with locating Morpheus, who they claim is a terrorist. When Neo refuses to cooperate, they fuse his mouth shut, pin him down, and implant a robotic "bug" in his abdomen. Neo wakes up from what he believes to be a nightmare. Soon after, Neo is taken by Trinity to meet Morpheus, and she removes the bug from Neo.
Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two pills: red to reveal the truth about the Matrix, or blue to make Neo forget everything and return to his former life. Neo takes the red pill, and his reality begins to distort until he awakes in a liquid-filled pod among countless other pods, containing other humans. He is then brought aboard Morpheus's flying ship, the Nebuchadnezzar. As Neo recuperates from a lifetime of physical inactivity in the pod, Morpheus explains the history: in the early 21st century, humanity had developed intelligent machines before war broke out between two sides. After humans blocked the machines' access to solar energy, the machines responded by enslaving humankind and harvesting their bioelectric power while keeping their minds pacified in the Matrix, a shared simulated reality modeled on the world as it was in 1999. In the years following, the remaining free humans took refuge in the underground city of Zion.
Morpheus and his crew are a group of rebels who hack into the Matrix to "unplug" enslaved humans and recruit them; their understanding of the Matrix's simulated nature allows them to bend its physical laws. Morpheus warns Neo that death within the Matrix kills the physical body too and explains that the Agents are sentient programs that eliminate threats to the system, while machines called Sentinels eliminate rebels in the real world. Neo's prowess during virtual training cements Morpheus's belief that Neo is "the One", a human prophesied to free humankind. The group enters the Matrix to visit the Oracle, a prophet-like program who predicted that the One would emerge. She implies to Neo that he is not the One and warns that he will have to choose between Morpheus's life and his own. Before they can leave the Matrix, Agents and police ambush the group, tipped off by Cypher, a disgruntled crew member who has betrayed Morpheus in exchange for a deal to be plugged back into the Matrix to live a comfortable life.
To buy time for the others, Morpheus fights Smith and is captured. Cypher exits the Matrix and murders the other crew members as they lie unconscious. Before Cypher can kill Neo and Trinity, crew member Tank regains consciousness and kills him before pulling Neo and Trinity from the Matrix. The Agents interrogate Morpheus to learn his access codes to the mainframe computer in Zion, which would allow them to destroy it. Neo resolves to return to the Matrix to rescue Morpheus, as the Oracle prophesied; Trinity insists she accompany him. While rescuing Morpheus, Neo gains confidence in his abilities, performing feats comparable to those of the Agents.
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