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!

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🎬 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.

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🎬 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/

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🎬 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/

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🎬 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/

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

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 own NLP algorithm, their architecture, and more. On the business side, we discuss hiring, prototyping and bootstrapping this kind of company.

We love this kind of businesses and we want to showcase more of them on our show, so if you're one of them, get in touch with us!

Insert funny joke here.

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

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🎬 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/

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🎬 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/

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🎬 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/

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🎬 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/

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