Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased

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/

The last twelve to fifteen months have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many. The COVID-19 pandemic brought several industries to a halt and forced many businesses to shut down. Suffice to say, people were gravely affected too on many levels.Among the most affected industries, we find the travel & hospitality sectors. International travel has plummetted to the bare minimum, creating distress and chaos among huge companies like Booking.com, Airbnb or all airline companies, just to name a few. Forloughing workforce, asking for credit, pivoting to other business models, shutting down temporarily, moving efforts to do the minimum to keep the lights on, hibernation mode... were just a few of the measures that a lot of companies were forced to do.To talk about how they navigated last year, traveltech startup Exoticca's CEO, Pere Vallés, joined Life on Mars for an open-hearted episode covering many difficult movements and decisions. If 2020 was a rough year, 2021 isn't looking much better for now, for travel.Exoticca digitises the travel agencies experience for travellers, and they hail from Barcelona. Pere has got an extensive background at the forefront of tech companies, from being the CFO of a NASDAQ traded company, to his latest spell at Scytl for almost two decades.In this episode, Pere and Àlex discuss how they had to communicate difficult decisions to their respective teams in 2020, how they managed the pandemic as business owners, who were in their crisis committees of their companies, when and how to communicate stuff and much more.For the bonus points, check the interview of Pere Vallés at Startup Grind BCN in 2016 to see the contrast and the evolution of his persona in the last five years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtcgARX2fvo🎬 You can watch the video of this episode here:  https://youtu.be/Ci_Xz6FitV4Support the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

The last few weeks have been crazy on the stock market, or should we say "stonks" market? The WallStreetBets movement against hedge funds, making GameStop skyrocket to an unthinkable price per share, made the front pages of all the newspapers and media outlets around the world. That caused a huge uproar and most trading platforms stopped trading on certain stock to avoid these so-called "unregulated" trades from "altering the market", which, in turn, caused WSB people to turn against the trading platforms, too.If that weren't enough, politicians and highly-influential people added fuel to the flames, allowing the battle to rage on even longer.Amidst all of this, Elon Musk is having the time of his life, trolling everyone, adopting the meme culture, proving he's embodying the current zeitgeist and riding the wave of this controversy like no one else is doing. By the end of it, he will have gained thousands, if not millions, of adepts of his cult.In this episode, we talk to the man, the myth, the legend, Alex Wilhelm (Senior Editor at TechCrunch) and our friend Josh Feldberg about what happened a couple of weeks ago, and try to shed some light on it all.We talked about the role of tech journalism in all this nonsense, but we also talk about clickbait, the madness of the crowds, memes, the mixing of politics and economy, stonks and not as much as we wanted, but also talk about metal towards the end of the episode. Join us in an episode with the guest with the best radio voice we've ever had, a lot of profanity and unfiltered and highly blunt opinions on this and that.Disclaimer: This episode constitutes no investment advice of any kind as we're not financial advisors nor serious people by any means. For further proof of the latter, just listen to the episode.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode here:  https://youtu.be/M3_tNhnz2rkSupport the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Brian Leonard co-founded the B2C startup TaskRabbit in 2009 and built its initial prototype coding it in Ruby on Rails, one of our preferred development frameworks.TaskRabbit went on to grow until it was acquired by Swedish powerhouse IKEA in 2017, to expand to Europe and beyond, and a couple of years later, Brian quit the company to pursue his new endeavour: Grouparoo.Brian transitioned from being the CTO and product guy at a B2C startup to co-founding a pure B2B startup based on an open-source model to provide data connectivity between marketing products.Brian tells us how to wear different hats: CEO, CTO, product, sales, and more while running a company effectively and keeping the focus on the product. Brian also spoke with our CEO, Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit, to explain why they followed the open-source approach and how the transition to B2B happened, among other topics like choosing the right technology for your company and how to prototype new projects within a bigger company.This is the first episode with a recorded intro by our CEO, Àlex, so don't be too harsh on him. We'll improve soon.🎬 You can watch the video of this episode here: https://youtu.be/HkYrYsBhAsESupport the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Pau Ramon has been spearheading the technical department of two of the hottest Barcelona-based startups of the last years: Redbooth (previously known as TeamBox) and Factorial.We've invited Pau to talk about how he behaves as CTO of Factorial: how does he take technical decisions, when to delegate them, who takes which decision in the technical department, who chose the tech stack, when is the right time to rewrite an MVP (if ever), tech hygiene & keeping lights on on side projects, how to align expectations between departments - especially with marketers! - and much more.If you're Pablo Villalba and you're reading this, you should listen to this episode because we speak about you, and drop us a line to say hi, pal! 👋PS: Ruby ain't dead in 2021 yet!Support the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/