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/

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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 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 just listening to other companies

Àlex 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/

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🎬 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/

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🎬 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 industry
• Companies vs. products vs. features
• How to pick technologies for new projects
• How to find a technical co-founder or CTO
• How to hire developers
• Current technologies vs. more established programming languages
• How to communicate the cost of tech to non-technical business partners
• And 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/

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🎬 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 MarsBased
• Why we have ARR as a services-based company
• Economics of a company like MarsBased
• What is Startup Grind Barcelona and how it is managed from MarsBased
• Why haven't we gone into product
• Why we don't have churn either in clients or employees
• Àlex's adventures in angel investing

If 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/

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🎬 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/

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🎬 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/

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🎬 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!

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🎬 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/

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🎬 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-capitalism

For 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/

Support the show

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