Prepare to navigate the high-stakes world of mergers and acquisitions with insider expertise as Dimitri Steinberg and Brian Flynn from Founder Partners join me, Àlex from MarsBased, for a riveting discussion. In the ever-turbulent market of dwindling venture capital and faltering tech stocks, our guests share invaluable wisdom from their impressive careers on how to steer a company towards a lucrative sale or merger. We'll be revealing the art of reading between the lines during negotiations, the strategic finesse behind successful M&A, and why having seasoned pros at your side is a game-changer.As we peel back the layers of M&A strategy, you'll discover why timing, organization, and information management are critical for startups looking to sell. Dimitri and Brian illuminate the intricate dance of revealing just enough to pique interest without oversharing early in potential partnerships. We also tackle the nuances of inbound acquisition offers, dissecting how to filter out the noise and recognize serious contenders. And if you're considering an advisor for your next business sale, you won't want to miss our insights on aligning incentives for a mutually beneficial outcome.Finally, and after all the verbose AI-generated stuff, I've got to say that this is one of the most fun and insightful episodes I've recorded. The 60+ years of combined experience of these two gentlemen cannot be summarised in just one hour, so we will have to invite them again!Support the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

With our special guest, Khash Sajadi, the founder and CEO of Cloud 66, we're unlocking the story of a technology that transformed the world of software deployment. Imagine a world where developers are freed from the drudgery of repetitive tasks. Cloud 66 began as a solution to that exact problem, and Khash takes us on a journey from the early days of the company, through the evolution of its technology stack, to its present success.We embrace the nitty-gritty details of technology, discussing everything from the revival of Rails-based startups to the pros and cons of microservices and monoliths. What are the implications of measuring technical debt as a key performance indicator? How does the availability of talent influence our choices in technology? Khash provides intriguing insights into these questions and more. Not just that, we delve into the emergence of Go as a popular programming language and the impact of containerization and Kubernetes on the industry.But it's not all tech-specs and jargon. Khash regales us with the humorous story of how a small mistake led to him winning the 'Donkey of the Week' award at his company. To top it off, we tackle the often overlooked complexities of pricing for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, underscoring the importance of predictability and feature distinction. So, buckle up for a roller coaster ride through the highs and lows, the successes and mistakes, the serious and the fun facets of the software industry.Support the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Ever wondered how a tech company rides the tumultuous waves of an industry in flux? Journey with us, as Àlex, founder of MarsBased, shares his company's evolution in managing a surge from one to two contracts a year to a whopping 10 short-term contracts. Get an inside look at the challenges, triumphs, and the newfound dynamism this pivot has injected into the company operations.Unsure about the effects of the pandemic on tech prices? Listen up as we dig deep into the wider industry impact, discussing how businesses right from startups to corporates have been grappling with business adaptability. Hear out Àlex's insightful reflection on the reduced competition's influence on project pricing and the ripple effect it has had on businesses. Get ready for a raw, real, and revealing chat about the trials, tribulations, and tenacity of the tech industry in these uncertain times. Buckle up, it's going to be an enlightening ride.Totally generated with AI, all of the above.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

In this episode, our good friend in and out of business, Josh Feldberg, interviews Àlex to discuss many topics for a good hour and a half.Two friends discussing business, where the podcast host, Àlex, becomes the interviewee in a long, free-flowing and casual conversation across all topics, ranging from usage of social media and discussing politics there, to considering selling the business, passing through having side projects like a punk rock band and doing angel investing, and much more.Josh, we know you won't read this, but if you do, market the sh*t out of this episode to help our podcast grow further with your marketing wizard skills!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

The story of MarsBased can't be told without a city in particular: San Francisco.Even though MarsBased started up in Barcelona, where the three co-founders are from and where most of the events pre-incorporation happened, San Francisco played a pivotal role.In late 2013, Àlex quit his corporate job and left for a three month trip to SF to soak up as much technology, innovation and entrepreneurship as possible, and that's also where, among other things, Àlex found the first client for the company. That first client motivated us to incorporate the company and sped up the process of making MarsBased a reality.Our CEO, Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit, explains why does he go every year to San Francisco and how he's built a brand and a network there throughout the years, from 2013 to 2023, through business development, friendship and lots of burritos.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We hosted Job van der Voort, CEO @ Remote, to discuss the status of remote work (obviously) but also derivates of this: employee benefits, async work, leadership, our day-to-day as CEOs of tech companies, services vs product and more.Prior to founding Remote, Job served as the VP of Product at Gitlab, one of our reference companies when it comes to remote work, and now he's scaled his own venture to over 1000 employees worldwide to lead by example. Remote allows you to manage your HR needs for your remote team, from onboarding, to compliance and payroll, passing through employee benefits and much more!For the first time in the history of this podcast, Àlex gets downright outclassed by Job's professional background, with LEGOs, neon lights and more! Check it out!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We have talked a lot about no-code back in the day, and far from being the technology that would render developers obsolete and take our jobs, it's become somewhat of a complement for quick experiments and lightweight MVPs.Now, in light of the recent happenings with AI, we're sort of seeing the same narrative around AI replacing developers and taking our jobs and eventually destroying life on Earth as we know it... but is it real this time?We discuss AI and no-code with Toby Oliver, CEO at Bravo Studio, a no-code tool that turns your Figma designs into apps. Toby was formerly the CTO at Typeform, so he knows a lot about what can be built with no-code or low-code.A more technical episode than what we've been used to lately, but that's good for a change! Enjoy!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

One of the downsides of running an agency, or a services-based company per se, is that you don't get media coverage. Only the biggest ones get some coverage but for us, small agencies, it's nearly impossible: we don't do B2C, we don't have products consumed by large chunks of population, most of our work is behind NDAs and also we don't raise funds.The reality is that agencies are largely profitable and enjoyable businesses to run, even more so if you focus on value not on scale. Hence, we invited Jamon Holmgren (CTO and co-founder of Infinite Red) to jam on running a boutique agency like theirs.We riff for about an hour, discussing NDAs, how to run boutique agencies, team crafting, React Native, lifestyle businesses and much more.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

A couple of weeks ago, shit hit the fan. A bank run on Silicon Valley Bank had to be intervened because hundreds of companies pulled their funds out of this popular bank.The US 16th largest bank, very popular among tech companies and startups, had to be sold because it became insolvent due to a series of bad decisions and their accumulated derivates.We bring in our good friend Victor Horcasitas, CEO at Metropolitan Magazine and President of the American Society of Barcelona, to discuss the happenings and their consequences: how it all happened, what kind of regulations are in place, the decisions of former administrations that might've had an impact in this particular situation, predictions of the future, how to diversify banking risk for companies, and much more.Grab a very cold clara and join us in this friendly conversation with Victor and Àlex!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We're excited to share this episode with you in which we talk to Kat O'Brien (Chief Partnerships Officer at ClimateTrade) about all things partnerships.Kat has been operating in the partnerships and marketing sector of both startups and corporates in the last years - as a matter of fact, we met when she was CMO at Polaroo, a former client of MarsBased - and, to be honest, we have never discussed this topic on this podcast.We've had our share of failed partnerships over the years because, quite frankly, we suck at partnerships. If we had met Kat before, we wouldn't have been so terrible at partnering with other companies.We discuss KPIs for the partnerships, paid vs. free partnerships, who should spearhead these initiatives, reporting, selling to enterprise, finding the right key people to sign contracts... and more!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We bring in one of our references in UI/UX, Fabio Basile, to discuss freelancing in this sector. About time we discussed building a portfolio (with all the restrictions we can find as an agency: unlaunched projects, NDAs, etc.), choosing the right freelancer/agency for your project, red flags in clients AND in providers and much more.Of course, we also discussed AI, because if not, we wouldn't be in 2023.Join us in this very interesting conversation, with BLUNT opinions and "ahà" moments between two non-native English speakers who could've recorded this in Italian, but it would've been awkward for most of our audience. #customerfirst🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Kicking off the new year in great fashion with a solo episode of Àlex (CEO) doing a recap of our historic 2022 and some of the landmarks we've accomplished as a company and a look into 2023, with some hints regarding what we will research as a company and new technologies we will be tinkering with.This episode is short and easy to digest, which comes in handy after two weeks of big and heavy meals. You're welcome.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

This week, we didn't have a guest speaker either, so we decided to record a solo episode.Àlex has addressed the team in an internal basecamp post to let us know that the company is very stable and that we're signing very long contracts with clients. That in mind, he gave us three things the company is doing to ensure more stability during this downturn of the market, where literally almost every company out there is firing employees left and right.Listen directly from Àlex what is MarsBased doing to ensure stability, because it could be applicable also to other agencies and contractors/freelancers.Also, someone tell him to stop recording episodes a few minutes before midnight.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

One day you're a developer, like all the rest, and then you're not one of them anymore. That's what happens when you go up the management ladder in technical teams.You still want to code and be cool, but you have to be focused on business, fundraising, managing people, putting processes into place and talking to partners and the leadership team or even the board. Definitely, not what a developer has to do.In this episode, we discuss at length with Pau Minoves (ex-CTO at Typeform) and Xavier Noria (Rails Core Member) about the solitude of the managers, especially in remote environments.There's some intrinsic solitude in what was mentioned in the first two paragraphs, but throw in full-remote working environments and BOOM, the perfect equation for developing solitude and other mental issues, if not dealt with carefully.We talk about the pandemic, challenges of managing people remotely, impostor syndrome, communication styles, leadership in rough times, the importance of offsites and company retreats, and much more.Also, this is the last episode Àlex recorded with his iconic brick wall background!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We had our friend Mark from AWS calling in from Websummit last year, we also had Jorge Jaramillo recording his podcast episode in a camper van, and now it's the time for someone to record from his car!Jonas Rinde, serial entrepreneur in the Nordic region of Europe, and current CEO of Nomono, shares with us a masterclass of calculating risks and taking decisions at critical times, mixing his experience in extreme sports and high-level management in big corporations.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Breaking news: Factorial raised 123.5MM in a series C funding round led by Atomico and Tiger Global, and Kantox has sold to BNP Paribas for 120MM.Both companies are built with Ruby on Rails, which might sound as irrelevant, but it's also great news for the technology and for its ecosystem.In this episode, Àlex rambles on for 20 minutes about how these companies are showing the potential of B2B in Barcelona and how they should spearhead the third wave of startups in the city. Àlex also talks at length about the previous two waves and how they differed from one another.Yeah, we also didn't have a speaker for this week. You guessed right!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

This episode will see us discussing text input and how to build keyboards for smartphones with Olivier Plante, CEO at Fleksy.Olivier has had a fruitful career in entrepreneurship but our paths didn't cross until some of the first Startup Grind events we organised in Barcelona, where he came and pitched his latest invention, ThingThing, a most flexible smartphone keyboard. A Swiss army knife of sorts, if you will, that integrated with other apps to manage files and other stuff within the conversation, without ever leaving the context of the app.In this conversation, Àlex and Olivier nerd out about how to get your custom keyboards into your smartphone, how they hacked iOS before the keyboard APIs were public, how Fleksy found a niche market in pharma, and how they're helping big players in the industry to detect early signs of neurological decline with their platform.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Remote worker solitude is something that strikes within 12-18 months of working remotely. We all suffer from it yet very few speak about it publicly.As an officeless company, we have to be very aware of this, and coach people into spotting it and dealing with it correctly. That's why we have decided to normalise it, speaking about it publicly, on our blog, on our podcast, and so forth.In this occasion, we speak with two friends of the company: Nikki Parsons and Sara Ronzero.We discuss home office setup, the importance of documentation, the definition of productivity, personal schedules and mental bandwidth optimisation, how to deal with this with your partner/housemates/family and much more.Also, Sara is a strong contender for fanciest drink category on the upcoming Life on Mars awards.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

In this episode, our CEO Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit, devotes some time to answer questions from our friends from in- and outside of business, clients and other people we admire.Àlex rambles on for half an hour giving answer to the following questions:Who's the most brilliant individual you've ever worked with?What are your business weaknesses and what do you want to improve on?When are you going to launch the Startup Grind Mars chapter?What are the pros and cons of founding companies with friends?How do you establish a company culture in a remote environment and how to keep the team aligned?What drove you to start the company?What are the main excuses people have to procrastinate on launching their startup?Many thanks to Marc Collado, Josh Feldberg, Clemens from Barcinno, German from Exedra, Francisco Javier and Joan for the questions!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Back in the day, pre-pandemics and whatnot, we used to organise an annual conference called Startup Grind Tech. Oh, boy, long gone are those days.We hosted Carlota Pi, former CMO of HolaLuz, in her new role as chairwoman, to discuss their TV marketing campaign and marketing at scale.Carlota breaks down and shares all the learnings from that campaign, their revenues, their spend, how they sweated bullets when nothing happened for the first days and more.Funny story, Àlex messed up with the time scheduled for that session and cut it short, so here's a condensed version of the HolaLuz story!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Appear.in was a video conference platform we started using in the early days of MarsBased, back when Google Meet Chats Hangouts, or whatever it was called back then, sucked big time, and the only alternatives were corporate platforms like WebEx and so on.We exchanged a few emails with them, from starting company to starting company, and since then we've been in touch a few times over the years.Eventually, Appear.in rebranded to Whereby and went from a fully bootstrapped company to raising funds and rewriting the entire product along with the rebranding.We talk to one of their co-founders, Ingrid Ødegaard, who was their CTO until she moved to VP Product at IndyRIOT, about the technology needed to build this product, how did their rebranding work, their techstack, how they rewrote their app from Angular to a full-fledged React one and many other angles to building a SaaS product.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

In this episode, we talk to Pau Minoves, CTO at Typeform, one of the longest-standing and hottest startups in Barcelona, which recently raised $135 million in Series C funding. We talk about deployments, about company culture for hiring as well as for retaining developers. Pau tells us how they spur innovation into the company, how they evaluate proposals coming bottom-up from developers and all team members, and how they go all the way to production. How they deploy as seamlessly as possible with a frictionless development environment. Typeform is a company that has undergone several changes. A few years back the two co-founders relegated themselves from their leadership positions to reallocate into product. We had the pleasure to host David Okuniev, co-founder and ex-CEO, to talk on this matter on one of our very first podcast episodes. Typeform is not the kind of company you see or hear about every day. They are pretty seclusive in what they share with the press, etc. and it’s very rare that they speak at events. Thus we are super happy that we could have Pau on our podcast, and we hope you enjoy it!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

In this week's episode, we discuss career paths for developers in the tech industry with Miguel Andrés (ex-Google, Badi, now CTO @ Simplr).If you're a developer and want to know what choices are out there, how can you choose between management, product or a purely technical progression path, this episode is for you.If you're someone looking to coach developers, this episode is for you.If you're a developer wanting to learn the differences of potential career paths between startups and corporates, this episode is for you.If you want to learn about Google's 20% rule, how to find mentors for your career, what's the role of a CTO, how to hire C-levels from bigger companies and more, this episode is for you.If you've got great taste for podcasts, this episode is for you.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Third episode talking about M&A and how to sell your business with our friend Mike Counihan, from Transcend Partners.On part 1 and part 2, Àlex and Mike discussed the first stages of the contact with prospective buyers, when to use M&A boutiques, what's the protocol, what to say, what not to do, how to calculate your price, how and when to prepare, how to keep it from leaking to the team and more.In this occasion, they discuss the three examples of M&A we've seen at MarsBased recently with three of our clients that have exited in the last six months: Spin to Tier, ValuationMetrics to Citadel Securities, and a third client we can't disclose that sold the technology, but not the team (because we are the team that built the project).If you want to learn how to calculate your valuation, differences between outbound and inbound M&A, how to establish relationships and cool off acquisition talks with potential buyers and more, then this is your episode.Also, unless you email us telling us to stop hosting Mike, we will keep recording episodes with him. You're warned!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We've been collaborating with developer bootcamps throughout the years to ensure that we contribute to the next generations of developers, which is one of our favourite ways of paying it forward.LeWagon has consistently been adamant at teaching not only one programming language but many. In fact, they know the value of learning multiple programming languages because they're developers themselves.We talk about their business model, incentives, how to tell a good bootcamp from a bad one, learning Ruby, how to teach and train new developers, bootstrapping a business, how they fundraised during the pandemic, and much more.If you love Ruby on Rails, this one is for you. If you don't love Ruby on Rails, we can still be friends.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We sneaked into 4YFN (4 Years From Now), the startups conference of Mobile World Congress, to host a Startup Grind event - an event within a bigger event.Factorial acquired Codegram, a Rails consultancy we respect a lot, in December 2019, so this is one of the topics we cover in this interview, and how organic vs. inorganic growth are working out for them, how they make their company culture permeate the lower ranks of the company and how they create new leaders and managers internationally in the context of hyper growth.It's a shorter episode because we were only given 30 minutes at the conference. We're too much to handle, we guess.And no. Àlex and Jordi didn't coordinate to have the same boots on the same day. You'll have to check the video to see this.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

BOOM! the audio intros and outros are gone! We keep improving and iterating this podcast thanks to your feedback, making it a little bit better every day.In this occasion, we talk to the man, the myth, the legend, mr. Francisco Cruz, who spearheaded the community growth of Startup Grind globally, since their very first days to well over 300 chapters worldwide. Nowadays, he works at Notion, but that's not very relevant because we miss him at Startup Grind.At MarsBased, we have been organising the Startup Grind chapter of Barcelona since we founded the company, in early 2014, and continue to do so eight years after, without ever having skipped a single month. Month in, month out, we are hosting events with the most relevant entrepreneurs and investors around.Back to topic: with Francisco, Àlex discusses community building, cohorts of new applicants, bootstrapping an initiative like this, values-driven organisations, hosting events and conferences, cultural differences and they walk down nostalgia lane, hand in hand, reminiscing about days gone by.If you're curating a community and are building tools to nurture it, either with code or no code, this episode is for you!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/¡🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We have been curating the weekly newsletter of Startup Digest Barcelona since 2016 at MarsBased. Startup Digest contains a curated list of the best events in every city and we send it every Monday.We hosted Jessica Ford, their Director, to speak about the early years of Startup Digest, how they bootstrapped the project, how they built a bespoke platform and how they eventually migrated to Revue most recently. Also, and most importantly, we also cover the Techstars acquisition of the project.We talk a lot about newsletters, which is something we had never covered in our almost 100 episodes of both feeds of Life on Mars, and they're still VERY relevant in 2022. In fact, they keep evolving with the edition of dynamic elements, the new approach of certain innovative email clients like Superhuman, Spark and others.We also talk about the role of newsletters and established brands in startup ecosystems to build community like Startup Digest, Startup Grind, FuckUp Nights, TEDx and other brands available for entrepreneurs out there and how sometimes these brands will work better than your own ideas. Because, let's face it, your ideas are not that great, Jim. Let's face it. It's time to talk about that.We also noticed that every paragraph in this description starts with "we". What a great way to talk about community, focusing always on the "we".🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

OK - this one is a BANGER. It's got everything we like: async work, remote, hard opinions on corporates and VC-backed businesses, disruptive management styles, calendar & meetings management, how to grow company culture in fully-distributed teams and lots, lots of product.Amir has been spearheading Doist, the remote company behind Todoist and Twist, two tools that every remote company - mostly on the async side - should implement, for many years. He's become a fundamental thought leader on Twitter and on podcasts and events to talk about what we cover in this episode. At MarsBased, we truly look up to this company and we're so thankful for all the learnings they've shared on their blog throughout the years.Learn from Amir and Àlex, in a conversation where the models of Doist and MarsBased are confronted and compared in areas like how to manage junior personnel, how do our employees report to C-levels, how we do our one-on-ones with the team and much more.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We discussed no-code one year ago with Ben Tossell, from Makerpad, a few weeks before he sold his company to Zapier, in what would become the first Zapier acquisition ever.One year later, we decided to bring an expert in the subject, Nile Frater (Director @ NoCode.Tech) to bring us an update on the state-of-the-art of the no-code/low-code/less-code/wtf-code industry.We discuss at length the myths and legends of no-code and the conversation turns into a career plan for non-technical people, to repurpose themselves into pseudo-technical profiles who can build software, thanks to the progress of no-code tools.Also, we discuss how big corporations can build teams of no-code people to replace the need for engineers for everything. Sometimes, some automations and a landing page will do, and you can do that by combining Typeform, SquareSpace, Stripe and Zapier, for instance.We discuss this, and much more, with Nile, who comes all the way from Scotland and now resides in Barcelona, but we'll discuss weather on another episode!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Hope y'all are having a very restful winter break wherever you are in the universe!We're kicking off the year with our chin up and a very positive attitude to bring you the best content for this podcast, and we're also super thankful for your following and support throughout this year and a half of episodes!In this occasion, we bring you an interview with our CEO Àlex, from late 2019, when he was interviewed at IndieHackers BCN to talk about bootstrapping businesses, indie development, B2B sales, being an officeless company and how to hire and nurture less senior talent in an all-remote environment, and the challenges we faced as a company back then. We also delved into what was our product, at the time, a project that never saw the light of day - but we won't spoil you why.Àlex also went over his relationship with Startup Grind and how this was combined with MarsBased in the first years of the company, and how he sold the idea to his two co-founders.Àlex is also the kind of person who writes in third person when speaking about himself, like right now - but he's not a bad person.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Our CEO apologises publicly for the interruption of the programming of this podcast. We've gone through very busy six months, culminating with lots of launches of big projects and a major acquisition of one of our most important clients - just to name a couple of events.Àlex rambles on for half an hour about these past events and how we've dealt with them, how this has affected team morale, what things have we stopped doing and other subjects like the changes in the jobs market (The Great Resignation), how boutique devs will struggle in the next years and how difficult it is to work with big corporations as a small company.All the above derived in a blunt conclusion: we need to raise our prices, so if you're reading this and want to work with us next year (not for us, as Àlex wrongly speaks during his rambling), it's a good time to talk!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community community is all we see/hear and talk about nowadays. Everyone has an opinion on it but, truth be told, most people don't know jack about it.That's why we brought in Mark Birch, from AWS, to discuss with our CEO Àlex what is community, why is it that fucking hard, and who can and who cannot do community. Let's dispell myths, drop some f-bombs and hard truths about community building, and most importantly, why most corporates will never understand the underlying truths of community.If you want to build community around your project and/or have first-hand experience doing it and know the real pains: empty events, plateau in growth, lack of motivation, other projects sucking all your energy, toxic people in your events and whatnot, then this episode is for you.This episode is also for you if you want to be the person in your group of friends listening to the most interesting podcast out there. Your choice.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We start this episode very well by stating that marketers ruin everything, so we don't expect to make a lot of friends with this episode - at least in the marketing industry.That's why we invited marketing & growth expert Thomas Petit to discuss ethics in product, marketing and growth because we really like his own perspective as an opinionated expert in those fields.We discuss the incentives of marketers and the philosophy of growth, especially that of VC- backed businesses and how that intersects with UX and technology. More specifically, we drill down into some of the most used dark patterns in marketing nowadays and who are the people using them and the reasons for it.If you're addicted to the dopamine kick of seeing interactions on your social media profiles, or you're getting tired of seeing the same tone, messages and tricks in each and every app you're using, you should be listening to this episode.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

For six hours, Facebook and some related services, like Whatsapp and Instagram, disconnected themselves off the internet.The whole world turned to Twitter and to other similar services, taking them down too because of the spikes in unexpected connections, all the while they were overloading the Facebook servers with the incessant F5s from anxious people, trying to connect like crazy to Zuck's empire.We brought two friends of the company to discuss this piece of news on an impromptu call: Jordi Miró (CTO @ TheHotelsNetwork) & Victor Castell (Job&Talent).In this conversation, we discussed what to do when an outage like this happens to your company: what kind of team to assemble, what to document, how to coordinate, what to announce externally and internally, how to do a proper post-mortem and more.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

One more episode remembering conversations from other events to kick off the new season of Life on Mars.We're bringing back the panel we hosted on our Startup Grind Tech 2019 Conference with our CTO & Co-founder Xavier Redó, and Laura González, from Schibsted, where they discussed hiring and managing developers, comparing the methods and workflows of a huge corporate like Schibsted with ours, at MarsBased.Huge congrats if you make it past Àlex's longest intro ever.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

In this episode, our CEO Àlex talks at length about the new season of Life on Mars and all the changes that come with it.It is a symbolic change, not a full season change, so you won't see a different episode numbering. Instead, this is what we will change:More diverse formatsContent linked to current events & newsMore and stronger opinionsMore talking about what we do instead of just listening to other companiesÀlex goes on talking about what's happened during the summer of 2021 to the MarsBased spaceship, detailing team changes, operations complications, a couple of clients selling their companies, projects starting/finishing, and whatnot. You will see more changes coming up on our social media, next episodes and our blog, too.It might as well be that he recorded this episode because he didn't have anything prepared after the holidays break. Everything is possible.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

For this last summer edition of Life on Mars, we're going all the way back to October 2018, when we hosted Elisenda Bou (CTO & Co-founder of Vilynx) at Startup Grind Barcelona.We usually don't host CTOs nor too technical people at Startup Grind, but Elisenda is not only a kickass CTO but also one of the co-founder of one of the most innovative startups in Barcelona.Recently, Apple has acquired the company, but at the time, they were hitting scale-up phase. Vilynx is a self-learning platform that categorises video for some of the most innovative companies in the planet, all developed from Barcelona.In this fireside chat, Elisenda and Àlex nerd out on how to hire developers, how to structure teams, how to promote senior staff and delegate (spoiler: she doesn't/didn't delegate), where do they find Python/AI talent, and how to and not to micromanage people, among other topics.Good acquisition, Tim Apple 👏🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We're repurposing an old (but still rings true today!) fireside chat we hosted at IronHack Barcelona in March 2017 with our good friend Dorion Carroll.Dorion had just quit his role as CTO/CIO at Zynga and was about to join Amazon as VP of Customer Engagement Technologies. All the while, he spent some time travelling, and visited us in Barcelona.Actually, you have heard Dorion before in this podcast, in episode #7 How to keep the house clean: sunsetting legacy systems and tech hygiene.The audio recording is pretty terrible - our sincere apologies for that - but the content is very good and we think that every aspiring entrepreneur should listen to this conversation where the following topics are discussed:Misconceptions and myths in the tech industryCompanies vs. products vs. featuresHow to pick technologies for new projectsHow to find a technical co-founder or CTOHow to hire developersCurrent technologies vs. more established programming languagesHow to communicate the cost of tech to non-technical business partnersAnd more!Also, you can enjoy Dorion's infinite tech wisdom and Àlex's failed attempts at standup comedy throughout the course of this fireside chat.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

For this episode, we'd like to share a small interview with Àlex, our CEO, at an investors pitch event hosted by our friends at itnig.This time around, Àlex is the guest, while Bernat Farrero (Co-founder of itnig), interviewed him in the middle of the pitching event with startups for the Itnig Fund One, where Àlex is a partner (for the full disclosure).Bernat improvised a fireside chat with Àlex to talk about his multiple initiatives, covering:How we work at MarsBasedWhy we have ARR as a services-based companyEconomics of a company like MarsBasedWhat is Startup Grind Barcelona and how it is managed from MarsBasedWhy haven't we gone into productWhy we don't have churn either in clients or employeesÀlex's adventures in angel investingIf you want to see Àlex sweating bullets when asked about financials*, you ought to see this episode.* Thank god we've got Jordi to make sure that the company is financially viable.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Studies show that over 50% of people have experienced sexual harassment at work, and even a bigger amount of people have witnessed it.We can't operate in business without acknowledging this and doing our small contribution to addressing this situation, irrespective of our team size.That's why we decided to bring on Eleanor Manley, CTO and co-founder of Metta Space, a deeptech company with the goal to completely eradicate sexual harassment at work. They do so using NLP (Natural Language Processing) and big data.We discussed how sexual harassment happens at work and the cultural differences between countries and cultural backgrounds, and also how being non-native in a given language brings people to pick the wrong words and how this can be solved with technology.From the technology standpoint, we cover their techstack, how they are training and cleaning their dataset (trained with Reddit data 😱), NLP, Python, text and chat processing and moderation and censorship in technology.Watch Àlex in full serious mode, tip-toeing on very muddy waters and being very concious about his word choice to avoid getting into trouble!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We had the pleasure of hosting Didier Lafforgue, creator of LocomotiveCMS and CEO of the development agency NoCoffee.In 2016, we compared all the Ruby on Rails-powered CMS systems out there to pick one with which to build sites for less tech-savvy clients who wanted an alternative to Wordpress. We picked LocomotiveCMS, and we have been using it ever since to build any size of projects, like the one we did for Startup Genome.We talk for an hour with Didier about the following topics:Why he decided to build another CMS when there were a lot of them already.How to balance product vs. services.Why he picked its techstack (Ruby on Rails + Liquid).How to create a product roadmap.Building first, finding clients later.Bootstrapping a tech product.How to balance client requests vs. gut feeling.His vision for the CMS market.Comparison with Wordpress.Fuckups and lessons learnt running this project.These topics, saltpeppered with our seasoned Catalan and French accents, in a heartfelt episode that will satisfy both techies and product people.It might also upset Wordpress lovers, but to be honest, who cares.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We wanted to celebrate our seven years as a company with a very special episode. Seven freaking years, already.We decided to take questions from the community, our closest friends and colleagues from the industry. The response was overwhelming, and we ended up with so many questions that we decided we're going to record an episode of Q&A with the founders every few months.In this first episode, we talk at length about our origins as a company, how we came to get the Startup Grind chapter, how we picked our technologies at the very beginning and how we see the future for all of them (more specifically for Ruby) and we also share a lot of anecdotes and lore of the company. You can't miss it!We recorded this episode in both English and Spanish, but in the English version you won't find any catalanadas from Xavi. You'll have to wait for the Spanish version for that!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Pixel art, dial-up modem sounds, 8-bit fantasy, RPG-like environments and tasks, retro music and HUGE loads of nostalgia. Does this sound appealing? This is what the folks at Twilio used to build their learning game TwilioQuest.TwilioQuest is a platform to learn how to code in PHP, Python and JavaScript using a videogame interface and dynamics. It's one of the many ways Twilio likes to invest in the new generations of developers and to give back to the community.We hosted two of their main people, Kevin Whinnery, its original creator and Lead Developer, and Chiara Massironi, in charge of Community and Developer Education, to discuss the whole product in a 360 examination: initial concept, pivoting, roadmap, techstack, features, marketing plan, community building, fuckups and much much more!Join us for an exquisite blend of programming-nerdiness and generational dissection of references, habits and interesting demographics for marketing purposes.Also, this is the episode in which Chiara and Àlex come out publicly as huge Pokémon fans, so it's definitely one to listen to!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Liz Dunn Carroll has spent big part of her life working in technology corporations and high-growth startups in Silicon Valley, like Technorati, Pandora or Verizon on the Product and Innovation areas.Liz took up Angel investing a few years ago, and coming from a Product profile helped her to spot good deals among all the Silicon Valley bullshit (in her own words). In more than one occasion throughout her career, she's worked in products that were too early for the market, so this helped her to hone her skills as an angel investor and futurist.We go over her endeavour as an angel investor, what kind of books she read to get into this world, what kind of events she attended, how she fought the gatekeeping in this industry, what kind of deals she does, what is an angel syndicate, what is the impostor syndrome, how to get dealflow and more.There's a lot of opacity in the investing sector, so we did our best to share everything we know, and a lot of the things we don't know. In fact, we share a lot of things, because besides having had a parallel career in angel investing, both Liz and me, Àlex, like to speak a lot.Also, during the conversation, we comment on this article and how VC is forcing us to reshape capitalism because it's breaking society: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/how-venture-capitalists-are-deforming-capitalismFor the full disclosure, this episode doesn't constitute investment advice and we strongly discourage you from listening to people like us if you want to be right in life.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Data, data, data and data. Millions of companies are generating more and more data every day, while others are focused on treating it or storing it. And while, generally speaking, dealing with data at scale sounds like something slow and sluggish, TinyBird is here to change the rules of the game.We hosted Jorge Gómez Sancha, one of the co-founders of TinyBird, a platform providing blazingly-fast access to large amounts of data to help your company scale on this side of business.This is a great conversation about the meat and potatoes of building such a technical platform. We talk about latency in business intelligence platforms, their tech-stack and how they decided the technologies and frameworks to use, deciding product features, storing and ingesting data at scale, taking decisions based on speed outcomes, going back to coding after many years without doing it, Rails/Python/Kafka/PostgreSQL/etc. and much more.Join us on this long session of nerding out around all kinds of data between two CEOs highly nostalgic of their past times being developers.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Companies are spending a fucktonne of money in marketing, and more specifically in ads, mostly on the main platforms like Google and/or Facebook. However, these platforms act like a black box. You have little to no control over where do your ads end up appearing.Nandini Jammi, a marketer at heart, started tracking the origin of the ads served to her and by scratching the surface, she ended up uncovering that a lot of ads were being served in hate speech sites, far-right platforms and all sorts of dodgy sites.Nandini co-founded Sleeping Giants, an organisation devoted to brand responsibility through online activism. She's now running Check My Ads, an agency that ensures that your ads are not being served and thus funding the wrong sites.Actually, one of her findings in the industry was working with Uber, as their Head of Performance Marketing put it: "I ended up uncovering $90 million in advertising fraud because of your actions when I was running performance marketing at Uber." - Mind-boggling innit.We spoke with her and our friend Josh Feldberg about why adtech, as an industry, is broken, why technology has been the cause and can potentially be also the solution to this problem, what's the role of agencies in this, how to allocate marketing budgets and what tools are guilty of what amidst a very intense session of nerding out about advertisement and ethics in marketing and brand advertisement.If you want to learn more, you can also subscribe to Nandini's newsletter BRANDED on Substack.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

No one reads podcast episode descriptions, so let's rehash the one from part 1 and add a bit of Lorem Ipsum text to see if anyone notices.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.Company sales: the miracle all entrepreneurs and business owners aspire to, mostly because we're bombarded every day with company exits news, and articles about serial entrepreneurs selling their 14th startup before they turn 40.However, the reality is very different. Selling a company is an overly-complicated process that drags along for many months, taking your focus away from your company, and in a lot of cases, the business owners don't see a nickel as a result. That is, if the process ever makes it to the agreement stage, so in a lot of cases, we're seeing what is called "survivorship bias".But one thing is still true: as business owners, we're all likely to receive offers for our companies. In fact, in 2017, we received an invitation to initiate talks about a potential acquisition, and if you want to learn the rest of the story, you should listen to this podcast.This time around, we talk to Michael Counihan about what happens when you're approached by a buyer. We wanted to cover the whole cycle, but the episode came out so long that we had to split it in two.In this first part, we'll be talking about the initial exchanges of intentions, what protocols to follow, how to behave in the meetings, what things to do and what NOT to do, how to bring more offers to the table, when's the right time to engage with an M&A boutique and more.Michael is the Managing Director of Transcend Partners (www.TranscendPartners.com), a technology focused international M&A boutique. Michael has executed company sales, mergers and acquisitions across a wide variety of technologies. He regularly speaks with acquirers and investors all across Europe, North America, Latam, Middle East, Asia and Australia.But most of all, Michael is a very great guy. Trust us. You'll like Michael.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.🎬 You can watch the video on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/ozPyy_qgE9Y🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Company sales: the miracle all entrepreneurs and business owners aspire to, mostly because we're bombarded every day with company exits news, and articles about serial entrepreneurs selling their 14th startup before they turn 40.However, the reality is very different. Selling a company is an overly-complicated process that drags along for many months, taking your focus away from your company, and in a lot of cases, the business owners don't see a nickel as a result. That is, if the process ever makes it to the agreement stage, so in a lot of cases, we're seeing what is called "survivorship bias".But one thing is still true: as business owners, we're all likely to receive offers for our companies. In fact, in 2017, we received an invitation to initiate talks about a potential acquisition, and if you want to learn the rest of the story, you should listen to this podcast.This time around, we talk to Michael Counihan about what happens when you're approached by a buyer. We wanted to cover the whole cycle, but the episode came out so long that we had to split it in two.In this first part, we'll be talking about the initial exchanges of intentions, what protocols to follow, how to behave in the meetings, what things to do and what NOT to do, how to bring more offers to the table, when's the right time to engage with an M&A boutique and more.Michael is the Managing Director of Transcend Partners (www.TranscendPartners.com), a technology focused international M&A boutique. Michael has executed company sales, mergers and acquisitions across a wide variety of technologies. He regularly speaks with acquirers and investors all across Europe, North America, Latam, Middle East, Asia and Australia.But most of all, Michael is a very great guy. Trust us. You'll like Michael.🎬 You can watch the video on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/re1encsuwR4🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

In this episode, we hosted Ana Cidre (Senior Developer Advocate at auth0) to talk about the role of Developer Relations in tech companies.Developer advocates, tech evangelists, developer relations and myriad of combinations describe a very versatile role that companies are incorporating to help them have deeper conversations with the communities of developers around them. But unless you have one, you might now fully know what they do and what advantages they bring into the company.What do devrels do inside the companies they work for? When do they do it? How can they combine speaking at conferences, writing blog posts, helping in doing customer success, organising hackathons, developing community around their company, hiring and more? Are they extroverts or introverts? These questions, and a bunch more, are answered in this episode.Ana shares her expertise with us, as well as her background, and we even venture to peek into the future of events, as we're both very invested in that field.Random trivia: In 2009, Scottish scientists searching for the Loch Ness Monster found 100,000 golf balls instead.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode here:  https://youtu.be/12Cbnt1-gDE🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

The last twelve to fifteen months have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many. The COVID-19 pandemic brought several industries to a halt and forced many businesses to shut down. Suffice to say, people were gravely affected too on many levels.Among the most affected industries, we find the travel & hospitality sectors. International travel has plummetted to the bare minimum, creating distress and chaos among huge companies like Booking.com, Airbnb or all airline companies, just to name a few. Forloughing workforce, asking for credit, pivoting to other business models, shutting down temporarily, moving efforts to do the minimum to keep the lights on, hibernation mode... were just a few of the measures that a lot of companies were forced to do.To talk about how they navigated last year, traveltech startup Exoticca's CEO, Pere Vallés, joined Life on Mars for an open-hearted episode covering many difficult movements and decisions. If 2020 was a rough year, 2021 isn't looking much better for now, for travel.Exoticca digitises the travel agencies experience for travellers, and they hail from Barcelona. Pere has got an extensive background at the forefront of tech companies, from being the CFO of a NASDAQ traded company, to his latest spell at Scytl for almost two decades.In this episode, Pere and Àlex discuss how they had to communicate difficult decisions to their respective teams in 2020, how they managed the pandemic as business owners, who were in their crisis committees of their companies, when and how to communicate stuff and much more.For the bonus points, check the interview of Pere Vallés at Startup Grind BCN in 2016 to see the contrast and the evolution of his persona in the last five years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtcgARX2fvo🎬 You can watch the video of this episode here:  https://youtu.be/Ci_Xz6FitV4🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

The last few weeks have been crazy on the stock market, or should we say "stonks" market? The WallStreetBets movement against hedge funds, making GameStop skyrocket to an unthinkable price per share, made the front pages of all the newspapers and media outlets around the world. That caused a huge uproar and most trading platforms stopped trading on certain stock to avoid these so-called "unregulated" trades from "altering the market", which, in turn, caused WSB people to turn against the trading platforms, too.If that weren't enough, politicians and highly-influential people added fuel to the flames, allowing the battle to rage on even longer.Amidst all of this, Elon Musk is having the time of his life, trolling everyone, adopting the meme culture, proving he's embodying the current zeitgeist and riding the wave of this controversy like no one else is doing. By the end of it, he will have gained thousands, if not millions, of adepts of his cult.In this episode, we talk to the man, the myth, the legend, Alex Wilhelm (Senior Editor at TechCrunch) and our friend Josh Feldberg about what happened a couple of weeks ago, and try to shed some light on it all.We talked about the role of tech journalism in all this nonsense, but we also talk about clickbait, the madness of the crowds, memes, the mixing of politics and economy, stonks and not as much as we wanted, but also talk about metal towards the end of the episode. Join us in an episode with the guest with the best radio voice we've ever had, a lot of profanity and unfiltered and highly blunt opinions on this and that.Disclaimer: This episode constitutes no investment advice of any kind as we're not financial advisors nor serious people by any means. For further proof of the latter, just listen to the episode.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode here:  https://youtu.be/M3_tNhnz2rk🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Brian Leonard co-founded the B2C startup TaskRabbit in 2009 and built its initial prototype coding it in Ruby on Rails, one of our preferred development frameworks.TaskRabbit went on to grow until it was acquired by Swedish powerhouse IKEA in 2017, to expand to Europe and beyond, and a couple of years later, Brian quit the company to pursue his new endeavour: Grouparoo.Brian transitioned from being the CTO and product guy at a B2C startup to co-founding a pure B2B startup based on an open-source model to provide data connectivity between marketing products.Brian tells us how to wear different hats: CEO, CTO, product, sales, and more while running a company effectively and keeping the focus on the product. Brian also spoke with our CEO, Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit, to explain why they followed the open-source approach and how the transition to B2B happened, among other topics like choosing the right technology for your company and how to prototype new projects within a bigger company.This is the first episode with a recorded intro by our CEO, Àlex, so don't be too harsh on him. We'll improve soon.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode here: https://youtu.be/HkYrYsBhAsE🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Pau Ramon has been spearheading the technical department of two of the hottest Barcelona-based startups of the last years: Redbooth (previously known as TeamBox) and Factorial.We've invited Pau to talk about how he behaves as CTO of Factorial: how does he take technical decisions, when to delegate them, who takes which decision in the technical department, who chose the tech stack, when is the right time to rewrite an MVP (if ever), tech hygiene & keeping lights on on side projects, how to align expectations between departments - especially with marketers! - and much more.If you're Pablo Villalba and you're reading this, you should listen to this episode because we speak about you, and drop us a line to say hi, pal! 👋PS: Ruby ain't dead in 2021 yet!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

We have been receiving a lot of feedback about our podcast, and one of the most popular requests has been "why don't you talk about yourselves?".We've actually been hosting other entrepreneurs, investors and business people in our events for well over eight years, even before we created the company. And for the most part of these years, we had the impostor syndrome of not feeling like we've got a lot to share, so we kept interviewing others, barely ever talking about ourselves outside of the realms of our blog.Over time, we've published more content, like our employee handbook, or some open source projects, and we've even spoken at an event here, another one there, but we've never wanted to be in the spotlight.And here we are, almost seven years after creating the company, talking about the wild 2020 we experienced, broken down month by month. Our CEO, Àlex, recorded this in one go after a false start where he recorded himself for well over five minutes in Spanish, when we were supposed to record this in English.Learn about how we dealt with the pandemic from many angles: team cohesion, mental stability, sales, operations and internal organisation, communications, leadership and strategy in just one hour of Martian cocktail.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Cristina Vila is the fearless CEO and co-founder of Cledara, a company we hosted a few episodes back that happened to be fundraising at the time. Cristina was knee-deep into the jungle of fundraising, so we decided to host her in a different episode to talk about the fundraising process solely.Cristina shares the ins and outs of this fundraising round, led by Nauta Capital, of $3.4MM, including:What VCs to contact and whyHow many VCs they contacted and what percentages jumped to the subsequent stagesWhen to contact them and how to time the responsesHow to manage the entire pipeline and the different timings for each VCHow to negotiate your termsTime allocation as a CEO... and more!Join us in this episode and learn from one of the hottest companies in the market!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

A few episodes back, we discussed the future of the music industry and the role of tech in digitising concert and festival experiences with the lead singer of our favourite Grind Death Metal Band, Benighted. Now, it's time to talk about business events.Meetups, conferences, fair trades, conventions... you name it. All of them have suffered a terrible 2020 because of the pandemic, and most have had to reinvent themselves in order to keep their community alive and their business model afloat.We have seen an enormous transformation sped up by the pandemic, where we've had to adopt the purely online model, via Zoom, YouTube streaming, Twitch and whatnot, while others have morphed into a podcast, or the luckier ones into a hybrid model with speakers in the same venue with no audience, only the online audience via streaming.A new world is unfolding, and we talked to Victoria Gago, from the European Blockchain Convention, about the future of events and how is technology helping to accelerate this transition. They organised a few editions of their conference offline, in Barcelona and Copenhagen, before turning into a purely-online event.In this episode, we learn from Victoria's experience running events (online and offline), what tech stack she uses, what are her fuckups and much more!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Selling to big corporations is the holy grail of business. We all know that we need to do it, but no one teaches you how to do it. What's more: it seems that when others manage to succeed in it, they're not willing to share their recipe with the rest of us, mortals.We put together this episode to share a few things about selling to corporations from the perspective of a big company (ClearPeaks, a multinational BI consultancy headquartered in Barcelona), a mid-sized company (Prototyp, a development studio from Sweden) and MarsBased, a company of 15 people as of this writing.Gordon Cardiff (CEO @ ClearPeaks), Pontus Österberg (Co-founder of Prototyp) and Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit (CEO @ MarsBased) talk about their experience selling to big corporations and multinationals in their roles as CEOs/Founders of their respective companies, including first contacts, how to build a reputation and a network, how to approach the right person, how to craft a good sales proposal and more.For full transparency, Prototyp and ClearPeaks have been clients of MarsBased.Also for full transparency, that funny phone notification popping up randomly during the interview will bug you because you think it's coming from your phone. But it's not.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

With all the hype about Tesla, NIO and electric vehicles slowly creeping into the mainstream, we thought it'd be good to bring one of the hottest startups in the industry right now into our podcast.That's why we invited Jeff Dunham (CTO @ Wallbox) to talk about... meetings! Yeah, that's right. Jeff is an expert on running meetings, self-organisation and maximising the outcomes of any kind of meeting you want to run in a company. He's deeply passionate about this subject, and we discussed with him for over an hour about:How to prepare meetingsHow to structure your weekly agendaRecurring meetings: yes or not?Allowing for serendipity in tight agendasDealing with tech teams at scaleHow to scale yourself as the company scalesDealing with crises and the unexpectedAsync vs sync modelsWe also cover the usual tech fuckups and other matters of extraterrestrial interest, but we promise we will bring him back to talk about electric vehicles soon. First, you all need to learn how to organise your agenda and to run your meetings from Jeff!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Pieter created Sketch about 13 years ago as a remote-working company. In fact, he never met his co-founder until the day they launched the first version of the software, almost three years later.Now, Sketch sits at 120 people scattered across the globe, as an example of an all-remote company with a bright future ahead. Entirely self-funded for many years, they raised a Series A round with Benchmark Capital to help them grow and conquer new heights as a company.In this episode, we talk about bootstrapping, decision making when you're two co-founders, the struggles running an all-remote company, changes in the culture as you scale and as you receive investment, relationship with a board you didn't have before, how to keep the love alive for the company and with your co-founder ater 10+ years, and Àlex struggles to pronounce Pieter's full name correctly.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

SaaS is becoming messy. Companies tend to hoard them involuntarily just because they're cheap and easy to sign up for, so it's easy to subscribe and forget.Have we reached the point of SaaS fatigue? Difficult to say, as there are several actors within companies signing up for SaaS, so we might not know everything we signed up for unless we're in the finance department and audit them thoroughly.In fact, as a company, we also need to control not only what we sign up for, but what our team uses individually. Sometimes SaaS infiltrates companies through individual B2C usage, like it happened with Dropbox many years ago, or Mailtrack in sales teams.Brad van Leeuwen, COO and co-founder of Cledara, a SaaS that helps businesses to manage all of their SaaS subscriptions, explains in this episode how to keep expenses under control, how to control accesses and regulate governance within companies and most importantly, how to pronounce his surname.We also learnt how to build SaaS by asking feedback to your clients and keeping a healthy balance between all clients' requests and your own roadmap in a sensible way.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

No-code, low-code, less-code, zero-code... you name it! There's a trend of building applications - and even companies - without having to actually code anything, thus enabling less-technical people to assemble prototypes and MVPs to test their ideas for free and without technical chops.But... what's all the fuss about it? When should we use no-code, or for whom's it the right approach? Is there a moment when you should stop using it? What profiles know how to deal with these tools?Ben Tossell is CEO and founder of Markerpad, a platform for no-code projects that has built one of the biggest communities around this movement. So big, it's now launched a fund, to invest in no-code tools.Follow us in this conversation with Ben to dispel some myths and talk about the present and future of no-code, what do investors think about this new current of thought and how to scale such projects.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

A few years back, the industry of developer bootcamps emerged and went boom. Tonnes of new developers were manufactured to be poured into tech ecosystems around the world and help startups and tech companies scale up their development teams.This solved the problem of needing more developers in an ever-growing industry, demanding more and more professionals than there were available, but most of these bootcamps focus solely on getting them started.It's been a while since the first cohorts were started, and now, some of their people are getting senior positions as senior developers, tech leads or even CTOs in smaller startups.In this episode, we discuss with Startups advocate at AWS, Rob de Feo, about how to build a career in the development industry: learning from people above you, seeking counsel, learning constantly, do's and don'ts and much more.Also, for the bonus points, Rob has got one of the best voices in the industry. In fact, he runs the Startup Engineering podcast. Check it out here.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

When the first developer bootcamps appeared, no one could foresee the impact they would have in society henceforth.  A few years later, we have seen their huge influence in making the software development world more accessible to a broader percentage of population, and their efforts to help underrepresented groups cannot be overlooked.  As it happens, there's always both sides of the coin, and whilst most of them are created with good intentions, others have simply been created as a business opportunity to milk the tech market even further, and they're contributing to corrupting the model.  To talk about this - and more - we hosted Ariel Camús (CEO @ Microverse), one of our favourite bootcamps. Microverse has been founded on very strong moral values and a solid company culture, which feeds from the likes of Gitlab, Basecamp and Buffer, just to name a few.  We discussed with Ariel how to avoid losing value with scale, building a dev bootcamp using no-code tools, their techstack, their role in society, a bit of social mobility and much more!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Let's talk about politics. Politics and tech, or politics in tech, to be more precise.James Bloodworth worked undercover at Amazon, Uber and other companies with shady business ethics for six months to write Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. He also wrote The Myth of Meritocracy, so we invited him over to speak about both books, the systemic problems the tech industry is perpetuating and how social mobility is just not working and only the sons and daughters of rich folks are getting the top jobs in the industry.Accompanied by our friend Josh Feldberg, we discussed for over an hour how we seem to be going backwards when it comes to workers rights in part "thanks" to the tech giants like Amazon, Facebook or Uber, who are thriving businesses at the expense of their employees' rights, driving costs (and thus salaries) further down every year and revoking worker rights our ancestors fought for not that long ago such as minimum wage or an eight-hour work day. That was a hell of a long sentence, by the way.If you are interested in James' story, how the tech giants profit from these despicable tactics, social mobility, meritocracy and unionising in the tech industry, then this chapter is for you.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

In this episode, we talk to one of our favourite tech experts, former CTO @ Zynga and current VP of Customer Engagement Technologies at Amazon, Dorion Carroll.Dorion has been working on the development side of things for decades in the US, in companies like Oracle, Electronic Arts, Technorati, Postini, Zynga and more. For all these companies, he's been always advocating for keeping the house clean when it comes to technology.We discussed how to sunset old apps, turning the lights on/off on projects, how to deal with legacy systems, putting budgets against financials for new tech ideas and the concept of tech hygiene. We also talked about how to pitch finance departments and/or CEOs big investments into technology, like a big refactor, a change of technology or a complete rework of the architecture of the platform.Dorion has also got one of the best beards in the industry. Period.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

As developers, we learn by doing, and this is why we decided to interview one of our favourite podcasters: Chad Pytel, CEO and co-founder of thoughtbot, and host of the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast.Thoughtbot has over 100 employees and was founded in 2003. Their main business is development consulting, and of course they've been a huge inspiration for us in terms of culture and the way they go about work.They launched a bunch of podcasts in 2012, so they know what they're talking about. We discussed with Chad how to start a podcast, how to keep it running for so many years, his tricks for interviewing people and how they've evolved their podcasts over the years to reinvent themselves and avoid burnout and loss of motivation.Can Martians and Robots get along well? Find out for yourselves by listening to this episode!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Founding your startup and spearheading it as the CEO is far from being an easy journey. But it might be even tougher to know when it's the right moment to stop being the CEO of your own company. Some might even ask themselves "why should someone do that?". We sat down with David Okuniev, one of the two co-founders and former ex-co-CEOs (is that even a word?) to discuss how they did it at Typeform: how did they take this decision, who took it, how long did the replacement period go for, who was the replacement, what effect did it have on company culture and how they managed rumours going around the company - and a lot more!David rarely takes interviews, and this was the first one in about two years, so enjoy it!🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Howard Love is the CEO and founder of LoveToKnow Media, a US-based business that helps their users find the most useful information about a wide range of topics.LoveToKnow was founded over 15 years ago, and Howard has created more than ten companies and invested in over 50 of them.Howard has assembled a team of over 50 people in different countries, in a remote-friendly company buying and selling high-traffic portals focused on quality content, and therefore the range of products, technologies and methodologies in the company is so broad that they require only high-class product people.In this episode, we talked about this very particular kind of business and how Howard manages to hire world-class product people in today's competitive landscape.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

In this episode, Mailtrack's CEO Eduardo Manchón explains how he is hacking his way up from being a simple Chrome add-on to a full-fledged email tracking company with a most profitable business, bleeding-edge technology and tips on growth-hacking.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Affected by COVID-19, everyone has been forced to go remote, so we thought we'd bring one of our best friends in the industry and a person that has been working remotely for as long as he can remember.   In this episode, we talk about how to do remote work, how to deal with your employees/managers/colleagues/clients/etc, an overview of the tools required to do this transition, how to do things and how NOT to do things, and much more.  Sergio Gago has been a CTO in companies like Rakuten, Tangelo Games, Zinio and now is EVP Technology at Naviga, the company delivering the broadest range of technology solutions for the global news media industry, including content management, digital advertising, circulation & audience relationship management.  Sergio has also built his own businesses, including a development consultancy and a scuba diving portal while he was living the nomadic life around the planet, and has published two books, in Spanish, about how to live like a nomad, long before the trend began around these parts of the world.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Going back a couple years, we recover this interview from one of our first Martian Tech Talk events, with our friend Jordi Miró, who had just quit his job at RakutenTV (formerly known as WuakiTV before the acquisition by the Rakuten group) and was creating his new company, Lernin Games.  For this new venture, Jordi had to go back to coding, so we talked about how to pick the right technologies for a company, both in startups and in big corporations, how to deal with legacy code, how to build teams of developers and keep them engaged through different technological cycles, pair programming, Ruby on Rails, native mobile apps vs hybrid and more.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/