Alex Schultz on Why Your North Star Isn't a Metric—and Growth Teams Are Overrated

Your North Star Is Not a Metric—It's a Goal

Most founders confuse the map with the territory. They set a metric and call it their North Star. Alex Schultz, CMO at Meta, draws a hard line: the North Star is your goal, and the metric merely describes it.

When Schultz joined Meta, the goal was simple: connect the world online. The metric came second. This clarity saved the company during its darkest moment—when most executives wanted to sell to Yahoo.

It felt like the North Star wasn't clear within the leadership of the company. For Mark, the North Star was connect the world online, do what he felt would make the world a better place. And that was at odds.

— Alex Schultz

The executive team turned over entirely. Out of that fire came absolute clarity on what everyone was signing up for. Metrics will always be broken. Goals shouldn't be.

Pre-Product Market Fit, Only One Metric Matters

Schultz is blunt about early-stage metrics: retention is the only thing you should track. Not MAU. Not activation. Retention.

Too many companies game vanity metrics with massive acquisition while retention collapses underneath. Gravity catches up. The numbers implode. You've seen the headlines.

Pre-product market fit, I wouldn't get too complicated. I'd have a clear north star, what your company is about and what you want to achieve. I would have retention, like you need to get to actually a product that's retentive. Otherwise it doesn't have product-market fit.

— Alex Schultz

The hard part isn't choosing retention as your metric. It's resisting the dopamine hit of acquisition numbers that mask a dying product.

You're Hiring a Growth Team Way Too Early

Here's the part that will sting: if you have 200 to 300 employees, you shouldn't have a dedicated growth team. Your entire company should be working on growth.

At Meta—a company with nearly 100,000 employees—fewer than 1% work in growth. The central growth team is a few hundred people. Instagram's growth team? Around 25. Small, talent-dense teams win.

Most companies hire a growth team at 50 employees. Schultz calls this silly. Growing the company is the CEO's job. You delegate it far later than you think.

Growing your company is probably the single most important job of the CEO. There's a transition period when you flip over from your entire job is growing the product to actually I've got a team that's working on growing the company. That transition period is far later than most people do it.

— Alex Schultz

The structure at Meta: a central growth team handles platforms like SEO, paid channels, and email infrastructure. Each product (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Reality Labs) has its own small embedded growth team. The central team helps everyone. The product teams own product-specific growth.

Power Users Will Kill Your Growth

Instagram's product team were power users. When you upload to Instagram as a power user, 1,000 likes means your phone is unusable. So they made notifications off by default.

For a new user uploading their first photo, that first like is heartwarming. Meaningful. You want notifications on for the first year.

Growth teams exist to remember the marginal user. Product teams optimize for people like them—power users. You need both perspectives, structurally separated, or you'll alienate everyone who isn't already obsessed.

One-Person Companies Are Inevitable

Schultz believes entire companies will be run by one person. Not in some distant sci-fi future. Soon.

Instagram was 7 people when it hit tens of millions of users. Why won't the next Instagram be one person? AI advances aren't random. They're predictable, like semiconductor progress in Chip War. We know what's coming 2 iterations ahead.

Continental-scale training systems. Better NVIDIA chips. Reinforcement learning breakthroughs. Mega data centers the size of Manhattan in Louisiana. These aren't lab rumors—they're corporate roadmaps.

The supply chain is the bottleneck. Generators, fiber optics, switches, energy. There's an 18-month lag before humanity catches up to demand. But it will catch up.

Schultz points to founders already doing 90% of their legal work with GPT, then asking 3 precise questions to their law firm. That's scaling an in-house legal department to one person today. Finance, customer support, engineering—it's all next.

The question isn't if. It's when. And whether we hit a plateau before superintelligence arrives.

Mark Zuckerberg's Superpower Is Learning

Schultz has worked with Zuckerberg for years. His answer on what makes Mark exceptional is simple: learning.

Zuckerberg listens more than he talks in meetings. He asks smart people for input before making decisions. He spends an enormous amount of time learning. That's the superpower.

Consistency matters too. Mark's North Star has never wavered: connect the world online. When executives wanted to sell to Yahoo, Mark stayed the course. The entire executive team turned over. The company that emerged was forged by that clarity.

In a world where AI might create one-person companies, where China is distilling models at breakneck speed, and where Meta is building data centers the size of Manhattan, learning faster than the rate of change is the only durable advantage.