Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased

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 we 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.

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.

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 the 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 an hybrid model with speakers in a 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!

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.

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 meetings How to structure your weekly agenda Recurring meetings: yes or not? Allowing for serendipity in tight agendas How to scale yourself as the company scales Dealing with crises and the unexpected Async vs sync models We 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!

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 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 🤘🏼

Pieter created Sketch about 13 years ago as a remote-working company. In fact, he never met his co-founder until the day they launched the first version of the software, almost three years later. Now, Sketch sits at 120 people scattered across the globe, as an example of an all-remote company with a bright future ahead. Entirely self-funded for many years, they raised a Series A round with Benchmark Capital to help them grow and conquer new heights as a company. In this episode, we talk about bootstrapping, decision making when you're two co-founders, the struggles running an all-remote company, changes in the culture as you scale and as you receive investment, relationship with a board you didn't have before, and Àlex struggles to pronounce Pieter's full name correctly.

SaaS is becoming messy. Companies tend to hoard them unvoluntarily just because they're cheap and easy to sign up for, so it's easy to subscribe and forget. Have we reached the point of SaaS fatigue? Difficult to say, as there are several actors within companies signing up for SaaS, so we might not know everything we signed up for unless we're in the finance department and audit them thoroughly. In fact, as a company, we also need to control not only what we sign up for, but what our team uses individually. Sometimes SaaS infiltrates companies through individual B2C usage, like it happened with Dropbox many years ago, or Mailtrack in sales teams. Brad van Leeuwen, COO and co-founder of Cledara, a SaaS that helps businesses to manage all of their SaaS subscriptions, explains in this episode how to keep expenses under control, how to control accesses and regulate governance within companies and most importantly, how to pronounce his surname. We also learnt how to build SaaS by asking feedback to your clients and keeping a healthy balance between all clients' requests and your own roadmap in a sensible way.

No-code, low-code, less-code, zero-code... you name it! There's a trend of building applications - and even companies - without having to actually code anything, thus enabling less-technical people to assemble prototypes and MVPs to test their ideas for free and without technical chops. But... what's all the fuss about it? When should we use no-code, or for whom's it the right approach? Is there a moment when you should stop using it? What profiles know how to deal with these tools? Ben Tossell is CEO and founder of Markerpad, a platform for no-code projects that has built one of the biggest communities around this movement. So big, it's now launched a fund, to invest in no-code tools. Follow us in this conversation with Ben to dispel some myths and talk about the present and future of no-code.

A few years back, the industry of developer bootcamps emerged and went boom. Tonnes of new developers were manufactured to be poured into tech ecosystems around the world and help startups and tech companies scale up their development teams. This solved the problem of needing more developers in an ever-growing industry, demanding more and more professionals than there were available, but most of these bootcamps focus solely on getting them started. It's been a while since the first cohorts were started, and now, some of their people are getting senior positions as senior developers, tech leads or even CTOs in smaller startups. In this episode, we discuss with Startups advocate at AWS, Rob de Feo, about how to build a career in the development industry: learning from people above you, seeking counsel, learning constantly, do's and don'ts and much more.