MarsBased podcast - Life on Mars

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 age...

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,...

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...

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&apos...

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...

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 alm...

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 wh...

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...

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...

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...

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 th...

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...

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...

We talk to Marc Assens, CTO and co-founder of Happy Scribe, an AI product from Barcelona offering real-time translations and transcripts, completely bootstrapped as a business. With Marc, we discuss both the business part of his company but also there's a lot of tech talk, regarding their choice of programming languages, how Ruby plays with machine learning engines, how they developed their o...

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 yea...

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 t...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 perm...

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 th...

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 m...

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 -...

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 myt...

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 2...