MarsBased podcast - Life on Mars

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 ha...

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 (Cle...

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 a...

Musicians and bands are also entrepreneurs. Perhaps, one of the oldest forms of entrepreneurship we know, yet they often are overlooked in the business scene, as if music weren't a business or an industry. That's why we brought our good friend Julien Truchan, frontman and co-founder of the brutal death metal band Benighted, straight outta Lyon, France. That's right, we brought a rea...

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 Benchma...

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 the...

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 appro...

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 t...

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...

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 per...

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...

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...

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...

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 sellin...

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 thi...

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 f...

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. Support the show 🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/