Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased

Ever wondered how a tech company rides the tumultuous waves of an industry in flux? Journey with us, as Àlex, founder of MarsBased, shares his company's evolution in managing a surge from one to two contracts a year to a whopping 10 short-term contracts. Get an inside look at the challenges, triumphs, and the newfound dynamism this pivot has injected into the company operations.

Unsure about the effects of the pandemi...

In this episode, our good friend in and out of business, Josh Feldberg, interviews Àlex to discuss many topics for a good hour and a half.

Two friends discussing business, where the podcast host, Àlex, becomes the interviewee in a long, free-flowing and casual conversation across all topics, ranging from usage of social media and discussing politics there, to considering selling the business, passing through having side pr...

The story of MarsBased can't be told without a city in particular: San Francisco.

Even though MarsBased started up in Barcelona, where the three co-founders are from and where most of the events pre-incorporation happened, San Francisco played a pivotal role.

In late 2013, Àlex quit his corporate job and left for a three month trip to SF to soak up as much technology, innovation and entrepreneurship as possib...

We hosted Job van der Voort, CEO @ Remote, to discuss the status of remote work (obviously) but also derivates of this: employee benefits, async work, leadership, our day-to-day as CEOs of tech companies, services vs product and more.

Prior to founding Remote, Job served as the VP of Product at Gitlab, one of our reference companies when it comes to remote work, and now he's scaled his own venture to over 1000 employe...

We have talked a lot about no-code back in the day, and far from being the technology that would render developers obsolete and take our jobs, it's become somewhat of a complement for quick experiments and lightweight MVPs.

Now, in light of the recent happenings with AI, we're sort of seeing the same narrative around AI replacing developers and taking our jobs and eventually destroying life on Earth as we know it...

One of the downsides of running an agency, or a services-based company per se, is that you don't get media coverage. Only the biggest ones get some coverage but for us, small agencies, it's nearly impossible: we don't do B2C, we don't have products consumed by large chunks of population, most of our work is behind NDAs and also we don't raise funds.

The reality is that agencies are largely profitab...

A couple of weeks ago, shit hit the fan. A bank run on Silicon Valley Bank had to be intervened because hundreds of companies pulled their funds out of this popular bank.

The US 16th largest bank, very popular among tech companies and startups, had to be sold because it became insolvent due to a series of bad decisions and their accumulated derivates.

We bring in our good friend Victor Horcasitas, CEO at Metropoli...

We're excited to share this episode with you in which we talk to Kat O'Brien (Chief Partnerships Officer at ClimateTrade) about all things partnerships.

Kat has been operating in the partnerships and marketing sector of both startups and corporates in the last years - as a matter of fact, we met when she was CMO at Polaroo, a former client of MarsBased - and, to be honest, we have never discussed this topic on th...

We bring in one of our references in UI/UX, Fabio Basile, to discuss freelancing in this sector. About time we discussed building a portfolio (with all the restrictions we can find as an agency: unlaunched projects, NDAs, etc.), choosing the right freelancer/agency for your project, red flags in clients AND in providers and much more.

Of course, we also discussed AI, because if not, we wouldn't be in 2023.

Jo...

Kicking off the new year in great fashion with a solo episode of Àlex (CEO) doing a recap of our historic 2022 and some of the landmarks we've accomplished as a company and a look into 2023, with some hints regarding what we will research as a company and new technologies we will be tinkering with.

This episode is short and easy to digest, which comes in handy after two weeks of big and heavy meals. You're welcom...

This week, we didn't have a guest speaker either, so we decided to record a solo episode.

Àlex has addressed the team in an internal basecamp post to let us know that the company is very stable and that we're signing very long contracts with clients. That in mind, he gave us three things the company is doing to ensure more stability during this downturn of the market, where literally almost every company out ther...

One day you're a developer, like all the rest, and then you're not one of them anymore. That's what happens when you go up the management ladder in technical teams.

You still want to code and be cool, but you have to be focused on business, fundraising, managing people, putting processes into place and talking to partners and the leadership team or even the board. Definitely, not what a developer has to do.<...

We had our friend Mark from AWS calling in from Websummit last year, we also had Jorge Jaramillo recording his podcast episode in a camper van, and now it's the time for someone to record from his car!

Jonas Rinde, serial entrepreneur in the Nordic region of Europe, and current CEO of Nomono, shares with us a masterclass of calculating risks and taking decisions at critical times, mixing his experience in extreme spor...

Breaking news: Factorial raised 123.5MM in a series C funding round led by Atomico and Tiger Global, and Kantox has sold to BNP Paribas for 120MM.

Both companies are built with Ruby on Rails, which might sound as irrelevant, but it's also great news for the technology and for its ecosystem.

In this episode, Àlex rambles on for 20 minutes about how these companies are showing the potential of B2B in Barcelona ...