Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased

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

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 themselves.We talk about their business model, incentives, how to tell a good bootcamp from a bad one, learning Ruby, how to teach and train new developers, bootstrapping a business, how they fundraised during the pandemic, and much more.If you love Ruby on Rails, this one is for you. If you don't love Ruby on Rails, we can still be friends.🎬 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/

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 permeate the lower ranks of the company and how they create new leaders and managers internationally in the context of hyper growth.It's a shorter episode because we were only given 30 minutes at the conference. We're too much to handle, we guess.And no. Àlex and Jordi didn't coordinate to have the same boots on the same day. You'll have to check the video to see this.🎬 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/

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 that's not very relevant because we miss him at Startup Grind.At MarsBased, we have been organising the Startup Grind chapter of Barcelona since we founded the company, in early 2014, and continue to do so eight years after, without ever having skipped a single month. Month in, month out, we are hosting events with the most relevant entrepreneurs and investors around.Back to topic: with Francisco, Àlex discusses community building, cohorts of new applicants, bootstrapping an initiative like this, values-driven organisations, hosting events and conferences, cultural differences and they walk down nostalgia lane, hand in hand, reminiscing about days gone by.If you're curating a community and are building tools to nurture it, either with code or no code, this episode is for you!🎬 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/

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 most recently. Also, and most importantly, we also cover the Techstars acquisition of the project.We talk a lot about newsletters, which is something we had never covered in our almost 100 episodes of both feeds of Life on Mars, and they're still VERY relevant in 2022. In fact, they keep evolving with the edition of dynamic elements, the new approach of certain innovative email clients like Superhuman, Spark and others.We also talk about the role of newsletters and established brands in startup ecosystems to build community like Startup Digest, Startup Grind, FuckUp Nights, TEDx and other brands available for entrepreneurs out there and how sometimes these brands will work better than your own ideas. Because, let's face it, your ideas are not that great, Jim. Let's face it. It's time to talk about that.We also noticed that every paragraph in this description starts with "we". What a great way to talk about community, focusing always on the "we".🎬 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/

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 - mostly on the async side - should implement, for many years. He's become a fundamental thought leader on Twitter and on podcasts and events to talk about what we cover in this episode. At MarsBased, we truly look up to this company and we're so thankful for all the learnings they've shared on their blog throughout the years.Learn from Amir and Àlex, in a conversation where the models of Doist and MarsBased are confronted and compared in areas like how to manage junior personnel, how do our employees report to C-levels, how we do our one-on-ones with the team and much more.🎬 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/

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 myths and legends of no-code and the conversation turns into a career plan for non-technical people, to repurpose themselves into pseudo-technical profiles who can build software, thanks to the progress of no-code tools.Also, we discuss how big corporations can build teams of no-code people to replace the need for engineers for everything. Sometimes, some automations and a landing page will do, and you can do that by combining Typeform, SquareSpace, Stripe and Zapier, for instance.We discuss this, and much more, with Nile, who comes all the way from Scotland and now resides in Barcelona, but we'll discuss weather on another episode!🎬 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/