MarsBased podcast - Life on Mars

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 mor...

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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...

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'...

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...

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 formats Content linked to current events & news More and stronger opinions More talking about what we do instead of jus...

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...

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...

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 wit...

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 w...

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 o...

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...

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 inves...

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 through...

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...

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 unc...

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 i...

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...

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,...

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 d...

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...

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 be...

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 t...

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 feel...

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:...