Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased

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/

We have been receiving a lot of feedback about our podcast, and one of the most popular requests has been "why don't you talk about yourselves?".We've actually been hosting other entrepreneurs, investors and business people in our events for well over eight years, even before we created the company. And for the most part of these years, we had the impostor syndrome of not feeling like we've got a lot to share, so we kept interviewing others, barely ever talking about ourselves outside of the realms of our blog.Over time, we've published more content, like our employee handbook, or some open source projects, and we've even spoken at an event here, another one there, but we've never wanted to be in the spotlight.And here we are, almost seven years after creating the company, talking about the wild 2020 we experienced, broken down month by month. Our CEO, Àlex, recorded this in one go after a false start where he recorded himself for well over five minutes in Spanish, when we were supposed to record this in English.Learn about how we dealt with the pandemic from many angles: team cohesion, mental stability, sales, operations and internal organisation, communications, leadership and strategy in just one hour of Martian cocktail.Support the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Cristina Vila is the fearless CEO and co-founder of Cledara, a company we hosted a few episodes back that happened to be fundraising at the time. Cristina was knee-deep into the jungle of fundraising, so we decided to host her in a different episode to talk about the fundraising process solely.Cristina shares the ins and outs of this fundraising round, led by Nauta Capital, of $3.4MM, including:What VCs to contact and whyHow many VCs they contacted and what percentages jumped to the subsequent stagesWhen to contact them and how to time the responsesHow to manage the entire pipeline and the different timings for each VCHow to negotiate your termsTime allocation as a CEO... and more!Join us in this episode and learn from one of the hottest companies in the market!Support the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

A few episodes back, we discussed the future of the music industry and the role of tech in digitising concert and festival experiences with the lead singer of our favourite Grind Death Metal Band, Benighted. Now, it's time to talk about business events.Meetups, conferences, fair trades, conventions... you name it. All of them have suffered a terrible 2020 because of the pandemic, and most have had to reinvent themselves in order to keep their community alive and their business model afloat.We have seen an enormous transformation sped up by the pandemic, where we've had to adopt the purely online model, via Zoom, YouTube streaming, Twitch and whatnot, while others have morphed into a podcast, or the luckier ones into a hybrid model with speakers in the same venue with no audience, only the online audience via streaming.A new world is unfolding, and we talked to Victoria Gago, from the European Blockchain Convention, about the future of events and how is technology helping to accelerate this transition. They organised a few editions of their conference offline, in Barcelona and Copenhagen, before turning into a purely-online event.In this episode, we learn from Victoria's experience running events (online and offline), what tech stack she uses, what are her fuckups and much more!Support the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Selling to big corporations is the holy grail of business. We all know that we need to do it, but no one teaches you how to do it. What's more: it seems that when others manage to succeed in it, they're not willing to share their recipe with the rest of us, mortals.We put together this episode to share a few things about selling to corporations from the perspective of a big company (ClearPeaks, a multinational BI consultancy headquartered in Barcelona), a mid-sized company (Prototyp, a development studio from Sweden) and MarsBased, a company of 15 people as of this writing.Gordon Cardiff (CEO @ ClearPeaks), Pontus Österberg (Co-founder of Prototyp) and Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit (CEO @ MarsBased) talk about their experience selling to big corporations and multinationals in their roles as CEOs/Founders of their respective companies, including first contacts, how to build a reputation and a network, how to approach the right person, how to craft a good sales proposal and more.For full transparency, Prototyp and ClearPeaks have been clients of MarsBased.Also for full transparency, that funny phone notification popping up randomly during the interview will bug you because you think it's coming from your phone. But it's not.Support the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

With all the hype about Tesla, NIO and electric vehicles slowly creeping into the mainstream, we thought it'd be good to bring one of the hottest startups in the industry right now into our podcast.That's why we invited Jeff Dunham (CTO @ Wallbox) to talk about... meetings! Yeah, that's right. Jeff is an expert on running meetings, self-organisation and maximising the outcomes of any kind of meeting you want to run in a company. He's deeply passionate about this subject, and we discussed with him for over an hour about:How to prepare meetingsHow to structure your weekly agendaRecurring meetings: yes or not?Allowing for serendipity in tight agendasDealing with tech teams at scaleHow to scale yourself as the company scalesDealing with crises and the unexpectedAsync vs sync modelsWe also cover the usual tech fuckups and other matters of extraterrestrial interest, but we promise we will bring him back to talk about electric vehicles soon. First, you all need to learn how to organise your agenda and to run your meetings from Jeff!Support the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Musicians and bands are also entrepreneurs. Perhaps, one of the oldest forms of entrepreneurship we know, yet they often are overlooked in the business scene, as if music weren't a business or an industry.That's why we brought our good friend Julien Truchan, frontman and co-founder of the brutal death metal band Benighted, straight outta Lyon, France.That's right, we brought a real musician to talk us about the ins & outs of the music scene: how this pandemic is transforming the industry, how Spotify broke out in the previous economic crisis, parallelisms between running a band and a company, how to deal with a co-founder quitting the band, what technologies do bands use and what concepts and formats can the adopt to innovate in such trying times.Julien Truchan is the charismatic and charming leader of this extreme metal band, who balances his musicianship with his job as psychiatric nurse and his love for rugby.Random trivia: in this podcast, Àlex uses the word "cognizant" for the first time ever in his life.Rock on 🤘🏼Support the show🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/