034 - Interview with Àlex at itnig!

08/02/21 • 17 min

For this episode, we'd like to share a small interview with Àlex, our CEO, at an investors pitch event hosted by our friends at itnig.
This time around, Àlex is the guest, while Bernat Farrero (Co-founder of itnig), interviewed him in the middle of the pitching event with startups for the Itnig Fund One, where Àlex is a partner (for the full disclosure).
Bernat improvised a fireside chat with Àlex to talk about his multiple initiatives, covering:

How we work at MarsBased
Why we have ARR as a services-based company
Economics of a company like MarsBased
What is Startup Grind Barcelona and how it is managed from MarsBased
Why haven't we gone into product
Why we don't have churn either in clients or employees
Àlex's adventures in angel investing

If you want to see Àlex sweating bullets when asked about financials*, you ought to see this episode.
* Thank god we've got Jordi to make sure that the company is financially viable.
🎬 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/

How we work at MarsBased
Why we have ARR as a services-based company
Economics of a company like MarsBased
What is Startup Grind Barcelona and how it is managed from MarsBased
Why haven't we gone into product
Why we don't have churn either in clients or employees
Àlex's adventures in angel investing

Support the show

🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

Previous Episode

033 - How tech can prevent sexual harassment at work, with Eleanor Manley (CTO @ Metta Space)

Studies show that over 50% of people have experienced sexual harassment at work, and even a bigger amount of people have witnessed it.
We can't operate in business without acknowledging this and doing our small contribution to addressing this situation, irrespective of our team size.
That's why we decided to bring on Eleanor Manley, CTO and co-founder of Metta Space, a deeptech company with the goal to completely eradicate sexual harassment at work. They do so using NLP (Natural Language Processing) and big data.
We discussed how sexual harassment happens at work and the cultural differences between countries and cultural backgrounds, and also how being non-native in a given language brings people to pick the wrong words and how this can be solved with technology.
From the technology standpoint, we cover their techstack, how they are training and cleaning their dataset (trained with Reddit data 😱), NLP, Python, text and chat processing and moderation and censorship in technology.
Watch Àlex in full serious mode, tip-toeing on very muddy waters and being very concious about his word choice to avoid getting into trouble!
🎬 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/

Next Episode

035 - Choosing technologies and technical co-founders, with Dorion Carroll (CTO/CIO @ Zynga)

We're repurposing an old (but still rings true today!) fireside chat we hosted at IronHack Barcelona in March 2017 with our good friend Dorion Carroll.
Dorion had just quit his role as CTO/CIO at Zynga and was about to join Amazon as VP of Customer Engagement Technologies. All the while, he spent some time travelling, and visited us in Barcelona.
Actually, you have heard Dorion before in this podcast, in episode #7 How to keep the house clean: sunsetting legacy systems and tech hygiene.
The audio recording is pretty terrible - our sincere apologies for that - but the content is very good and we think that every aspiring entrepreneur should listen to this conversation where the following topics are discussed: