Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased

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/Support the show🎬 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/Support the show🎬 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!Support the show🎬 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/Support the show🎬 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-capitalismFor 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/

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 access to large amounts of data to help your company scale on this side of business.This is a great conversation about the meat and potatoes of building such a technical platform. We talk about latency in business intelligence platforms, their tech-stack and how they decided the technologies and frameworks to use, deciding product features, storing and ingesting data at scale, taking decisions based on speed outcomes, going back to coding after many years without doing it, Rails/Python/Kafka/PostgreSQL/etc. and much more.Join us on this long session of nerding out around all kinds of data between two CEOs highly nostalgic of their past times being developers.🎬 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/

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 uncovering that a lot of ads were being served in hate speech sites, far-right platforms and all sorts of dodgy sites.Nandini co-founded Sleeping Giants, an organisation devoted to brand responsibility through online activism. She's now running Check My Ads, an agency that ensures that your ads are not being served and thus funding the wrong sites.Actually, one of her findings in the industry was working with Uber, as their Head of Performance Marketing put it: "I ended up uncovering $90 million in advertising fraud because of your actions when I was running performance marketing at Uber." - Mind-boggling innit.We spoke with her and our friend Josh Feldberg about why adtech, as an industry, is broken, why technology has been the cause and can potentially be also the solution to this problem, what's the role of agencies in this, how to allocate marketing budgets and what tools are guilty of what amidst a very intense session of nerding out about advertisement and ethics in marketing and brand advertisement.If you want to learn more, you can also subscribe to Nandini's newsletter BRANDED on Substack.🎬 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/

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 in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.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, and in a lot of cases, the business owners don't see a nickel as a result. That is, if the process ever makes it to the agreement stage, so in a lot of cases, we're seeing what is called "survivorship bias".But one thing is still true: as business owners, we're all likely to receive offers for our companies. In fact, in 2017, we received an invitation to initiate talks about a potential acquisition, and if you want to learn the rest of the story, you should listen to this podcast.This time around, we talk to Michael Counihan about what happens when you're approached by a buyer. We wanted to cover the whole cycle, but the episode came out so long that we had to split it in two.In this first part, we'll be talking about the initial exchanges of intentions, what protocols to follow, how to behave in the meetings, what things to do and what NOT to do, how to bring more offers to the table, when's the right time to engage with an M&A boutique and more.Michael is the Managing Director of Transcend Partners (www.TranscendPartners.com), a technology focused international M&A boutique. Michael has executed company sales, mergers and acquisitions across a wide variety of technologies. He regularly speaks with acquirers and investors all across Europe, North America, Latam, Middle East, Asia and Australia.But most of all, Michael is a very great guy. Trust us. You'll like Michael.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 in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.🎬 You can watch the video on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/ozPyy_qgE9YSupport the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

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, and in a lot of cases, the business owners don't see a nickel as a result. That is, if the process ever makes it to the agreement stage, so in a lot of cases, we're seeing what is called "survivorship bias".But one thing is still true: as business owners, we're all likely to receive offers for our companies. In fact, in 2017, we received an invitation to initiate talks about a potential acquisition, and if you want to learn the rest of the story, you should listen to this podcast.This time around, we talk to Michael Counihan about what happens when you're approached by a buyer. We wanted to cover the whole cycle, but the episode came out so long that we had to split it in two.In this first part, we'll be talking about the initial exchanges of intentions, what protocols to follow, how to behave in the meetings, what things to do and what NOT to do, how to bring more offers to the table, when's the right time to engage with an M&A boutique and more.Michael is the Managing Director of Transcend Partners (www.TranscendPartners.com), a technology focused international M&A boutique. Michael has executed company sales, mergers and acquisitions across a wide variety of technologies. He regularly speaks with acquirers and investors all across Europe, North America, Latam, Middle East, Asia and Australia.But most of all, Michael is a very great guy. Trust us. You'll like Michael.🎬 You can watch the video on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/re1encsuwR4Support 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 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, you might now fully know what they do and what advantages they bring into the company.What do devrels do inside the companies they work for? When do they do it? How can they combine speaking at conferences, writing blog posts, helping in doing customer success, organising hackathons, developing community around their company, hiring and more? Are they extroverts or introverts? These questions, and a bunch more, are answered in this episode.Ana shares her expertise with us, as well as her background, and we even venture to peek into the future of events, as we're both very invested in that field.Random trivia: In 2009, Scottish scientists searching for the Loch Ness Monster found 100,000 golf balls instead.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode here:  https://youtu.be/12Cbnt1-gDESupport the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/