Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased

Let's talk about politics. Politics and tech, or politics in tech, to be more precise. James Bloodworth worked undercover at Amazon, Uber and other companies with shady business ethics for six months to write Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. He also wrote The Myth of Meritocracy, so we invited him over to speak about both books, the systemic problems the tech industry is perpetuating and how social mobility is just not working and only the sons and daughters of rich folks are getting the top jobs in the industry. Accompanied by our friend Josh Feldberg, we discussed for over an hour how we seem to be going backwards when it comes to workers rights in part "thanks" to the tech giants like Amazon, Facebook or Uber, who are thriving businesses at the expense of their employees' rights, driving costs (and thus salaries) further down every year and revoking worker rights our ancestors fought for not that long ago such as minimum wage or an eight-hour work day. That was a hell of a long sentence, by the way. If you are interested in James' story, how the tech giants profit from these despicable tactics, social mobility, meritocracy and unionising in the tech industry, then this chapter is for you.

In this episode, we talk to one of our favourite tech experts, former CTO @ Zynga and currently VP of Customer Interaction Technologies at Amazon, Dorion Carroll. Dorion has been working on the development side of things for decades in the US, in companies like Oracle, Electronic Arts, Technorati, Postini, Zynga and more. For all these companies, he's been always advocating for keeping the house clean when it comes to technology. We discussed how to sunset old apps, how to deal with legacy systems, putting budgets against financials for new tech projects and the concept of tech hygiene. We also talked about how to pitch finance departments and/or CEOs big investments into technology, like a big refactor, a change of technology or a complete rework of the architecture of the platform. Dorion has also got one of the best beards in the industry. Period.

As developers, we learn by doing, and this is why we decided to interview one of our favourite podcasters: Chad Pytel, CEO and co-founder of thoughtbot, and host of the Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots podcast. Thoughtbot has over 100 employees and was founded in 2003. Their main business is development consulting, and of course they've been a huge inspiration for us in terms of culture and the way they go about work. They launched a bunch of podcasts in 2012, so they know what they're talking about. We discussed with Chad how to start a podcast, how to keep it running for so many years, his tricks for interviewing people and how they've evolved their podcasts over the years to reinvent themselves and avoid burnout and loss of motivation. Can Martians and Robots get along well? Find out for yourselves by listening to this episode!

Founding your startup and spearheading it as the CEO is far from being an easy journey. But it might be even tougher to know when it's the right moment to stop being the CEO of your own company. Some might even ask themselves "why should someone do that?". We sat down with David Okuniev, one of the two co-founders and former ex-co-CEOs (is that even a word?) to discuss how they did it at Typeform: how did they take this decision, who took it, how long did the replacement period go for, who was the replacement, what effect did it have on company culture and how they managed rumours going around the company - and a lot more! David rarely takes interviews, and this was the first one in about two years, so enjoy it!

Howard Love is the CEO and founder of LoveToKnow Media, a US-based business that helps their users find the most useful information about a wide range of topics. LoveToKnow was founded over 15 years ago, and Howard has created more than ten companies and invested in over 50 of them. Howard has assembled a team of over 50 people in different countries, in a remote-friendly company buying and selling high-traffic portals focused on quality content, and therefore the range of products, technologies and methodologies in the company is so broad that they require only high-class product people. In this episode, we talked about this very particular kind of business and how Howard manages to hire world-class product people in today's competitive landscape.

In this episode, Mailtrack's CEO Eduardo Manchón explains how he is hacking his way up from being a simple Chrome add-on to a full-fledged email tracking company with a most profitable business, bleeding-edge technology and tips on growth-hacking.

Going back a couple years, we recover this interview from one of our first Martian Tech Talk events, with our friend Jordi Miró, who had just quit his job at RakutenTV (formerly known as WuakiTV before the acquisition by the Rakuten group) and was creating his new company, Lernin Games. For this new venture, Jordi had to go back to coding, so we talked about how to pick the right technologies for a company, both in startups and in big corporations, how to deal with legacy code, how to build teams of developers and keep them engaged through different technological cycles, pair programming, Ruby on Rails, native mobile apps vs hybrid and more.

Affected by COVID-19, everyone has been forced to go remote, so we thought we'd bring one of our best friends in the industry and a person that has been working remotely for as long as he can remember: Sergio Gago (EVP @ Naviga Global).