Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
Welcome to Life on Mars! A podcast about technology, entrepreneurship and innovation from MarsBased. You will listen to stories of the best founders, investors, experts and celebrities from all around the galaxy every two weeks.
Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
10 years without shortcuts or investors: the MarsBased keynote reveal
After 10 years building MarsBased as a fully remote, bootstrapped, and values-driven tech company, we’re finally sharing the full story. This keynote, recorded for our 10th anniversary, is a reflection on everything we've learned about building sustainable software, nurturing company culture, and growing a business without external investors, shortcuts or growth hacks.
We talk about how we made remote work function from day one, why we chose to bootstrap instead of seeking venture capital, and how ethical decision-making has shaped every part of our journey. You'll also hear our philosophy on writing clean, maintainable code, and how long-term thinking has guided the way we run the company: slowly, intentionally, and with purpose.
🚀 We are martians. And this is how we built MarsBased.
🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/
Hello everybody, welcome to Life on Mars. I'm Alex, ceo and founder of MarsBased, and in this episode I bring you a talk I gave one year ago at the 10th anniversary of MarsBased and in that occasion I spoke for about an hour and a half on stage covering almost everything I've learned, or I had learned, for about 10 years running a company that, and Startup Grind, because we're celebrating the 10th anniversary of both initiatives. We gathered 300 people 300 of our friends, former clients, current clients, former employees and other people that we like in the industry, the podcast guests or the people we hosted at Startup Grind, some of our partners and sponsors and a lot of people in the industry. It was very moving to see all the people from the stage and to celebrate the 10th anniversary, and that is very special because an event that I got to celebrate with my co-founders, tavi and Jordi, with my family, with the entire team of MarsFaced, and we had a really, really great time.
Speaker 1:The talk might be a little bit long and if our friend David at the helm of marketing, has managed to reduce or to eliminate the audiovisual problems we had at the beginning of the talk, where the mics didn't work, beginning of the talk where the mics didn't work. You know you're in for a real treat here A lot of wisdom nuggets, a lot of blunt opinions and towards the end I get a little bit emotional. So I think that all in all, this is really good content. I hope that's interesting for a lot of you. Then you can take some advice for your companies as well.
Speaker 2:And here's to 10 more years of running Marsbase and sharing our learnings with our audience, community and friends. So let's go. Thank you so.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the 10th anniversary party of Startup Brain Barcelona and MarsBase. This is a very special event. It is so special that if this was a Startup Brain event, I would say welcome to Startup Brain. But this is not the event. I would also go on and talk about the values of Startup Brain. This is something that I started doing 10 years ago and I keep very close to my heart, because Startup Brain have some values that resonate with me. It's giving or taking. It's making friends before making contacts. It's helping others before helping yourself. Essentially, I always believed that. That's why I think Starbriand and I have a varied action. I would go on in a regular event and I would say, look, and we got some sponsors, because events don't happen without the response. And I would say, hey, where's the CMS people? They're probably not here yet because they're lawyers, they work in 2008,. But if you're here, raise your hand. If you work at CMS, you see, still not here, but they have been supporting people for five or six years already.
Speaker 1:First off, you know there's got this bunch of companies over here that are really, really nice Banktrack, for instance. Raise your hand, lasse, where are you? That guy over there, norwegian guy, but he's great. He runs Bank, bank track. This company hits close to my heart because I'm an active investor in this company and they are a company to manage your personal and business finance and so they're still pre-seed, early stage. All contacts are welcome. I know they've got. They leave some leaflets over here. You get some discount and, most of all, you get to collaborate with a company. You get to shape it. They're really small of a team. The product's great, the technology is superb and so please give it up for Lassen, his team at BankTrack. It's going to be a lot of applause tonight, so you better fucking get used to it.
Speaker 1:There's Attico, attico. Where are you Over there? No roll-ups. How are you going to find no hat? How are you going to have? Yes, okay, usually there's kind of like orange hats, yellow hats, black hat. Come on, anyways, attico Workspaces. We on, anyways, attico Workspaces. They're active clients of Attico Workspaces. We have been collaborating for many, many years.
Speaker 1:Nayara is a super strong advocate for the startup brand values. As a matter of fact, she runs startup brand in Madrid since a few months ago. They're still generous. They gave us a promotion for 50% off of the first two months at Attico Workspaces, so please give it up for Nayara and the team.
Speaker 1:Dennis, where are you All? Right, dennis is not here, but the ODHC is a company that helps you get access to financial data via APIs. It's a company that just want to have contacts. They don't need investor. They're so powerful, they don't need anything else. They're so cool. They want to talk to interesting people, use cases, maybe for a future investment. Please give it up for them as well.
Speaker 1:We've got only three to go. Go, come on, we can do it. Where are you over there? First time sponsoring.
Speaker 1:She's been coming to some events. Hello, mark, you're not late, don't worry. Don't worry, no bad blood. One of my best friends say hi to Mark tomorrow. Wants to personally coach. Don't worry, no bad blood. One of my best friends, say hi to Mark. I'd like to see tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Marike wants to personally coach some of you. I don't think you can take them all, can you Some a few of them. Leadership you know she can be a coach in your personal day-to-day and business training and she has got an active promotion for the first people who sign up for this, who go there, talk to her in the networking and claim this opportunity. These one-on-one sessions are going to change your life. Please give it up for her so you can tell I'm running out of voice. It's a great moment before a 40-minute presentation, but I'll try to do my best.
Speaker 1:Bucaneros, henry, where are you? It's probably busy over there. Over there, second time sponsoring the event, we're going to have very interesting drinks tonight for the networking part, so not what you're used to. I'm not going to spoil it, but this gentleman over here is providing the drinks for the event and also he truly embodies the values of Startup Grind, so please give it up for him as well. He's looking for investors, by the way, he's looking for investors. He runs a canning company in the beverages sector. So looking for investors. If you got some spare money just kidding, if you're a professional investor, of course, or you know a lot of investors, go talk to him. And last but not least, les Moons. I know they're not here and the CEO can't be here, but this one's very special. Our first event 10 years ago was with them. Our first event 10 years ago was with them. They've been supporting this event for 146 editions in 10 years. They're part of the catering, so please give it up for Las Moons Amazing Thank you.
Speaker 1:If this was a regular event, I would say and now come over, just move to the front, there's space over here. And now there will be, you know, an open mic session. I would be interviewing somebody and I would say something like and this event is probably sponsored by my company, but I don't talk about my company in the event. But tonight it's not this day. Tonight I'll be sharing my entrepreneurial trip for 10 years because we have been organizing this event from MarsBase, our company. We got the entire team of MarsBase this year tonight. Raise your hand, martians over there. And you know why? It's because I realized I never talk about Mars Space and I get tired of people asking but what does Mars Space do? Why don't you talk? Because you know, frankly, there's a lot of events in the city and people organizing events from a company. They do a shit job. They sell their services, they sell the product and it ends up transpiring in the content of the event and then it's not a good event. Clearly they want to sell you something. I don't want to sell you anything. You're broke. You're entrepreneurs. That's why you attend startup events. You can't pay us, possibly Just kidding, but this is my style, first timers. I'm sorry in advance, but yeah, just to give a glimpse. Like this is a different event. I will be talking at the company, not because we want to sell in the true spirit Art of Grind. I want to share what we've learned, what I've learned in 10 years running a company and also in 10 years organizing the Startup Brain event, 10 years of being an angel investor, things that, thanks to Mars Base, I have been able to become, and I hope this is useful. Normally, you learn from other entrepreneurs, but over the years, people are like when are we going to learn from you? Well, you're lucky or unlucky if you didn't know it, but you're going to learn from me tonight, hopefully. Probably you'll take away some important things. Long story short, I'm not going to bore you a lot there. We've got a phenomenal website designed by Lasse, by the way, who's our designer Ten years ago, with two gentlemen over there. I'm going to be talking about them now in a minute.
Speaker 1:We created a company, a consultancy, an agency, call it what you want Companies outsource to us. Usually it's bigger companies. We started with startups, of course. Now we've been working for stuff like FC Barcelona, hewlett Packard, ford and stuff like that. You've got a team of 20 all around here, but we've never had an office, so we meet only three, four times a year, and this is one of these days. That's why they are here. They're here for 10 years, you know. Over 10 years we've grown to be a full team, remotely, no office, working from some really big brands from Spain, from Portugal, doing over 2 million in annual revenue, clients all over the world.
Speaker 1:And one of the important things is we're not a startup. So why the fuck am I here talking to you? Right, precisely, startups get all the credit, and I think these kind of companies agencies, bootstrap companies this means companies with no outside investment. We have no debt, no loans, no banks, no venture capital. Our company is alive because we know how to sell and we have clients Come over there because you're accumulating at the entrance, there's a lot of space over here and so, but how did it start? Right, how did this company start? I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of the whole thing. And then, after this, so you know, there's the catering networking. Don't worry, I know I am separating you from the beer and the food. I know I can take the pressure. So clearly, you know a company, as I said, started in 2014.
Speaker 1:Coincided, when I was launching the company and I was like, okay, we got to do something. I got a not respectable past working for Deloitte I'm sorry about that Clearly not our sponsor, but Jordi Chavi and I have known each other since middle school Jordi, from elementary school and we were tired from working from our old bosses and I know there's one or two here, so don't get me wrong. You're great people, that's why you're still here. We're good friends. But we didn't like the companies. We were about to quit and we said why don't we create this kind of company ourselves? We're about to quit and we said why don't we create this kind of company ourselves? Two years we kept the job and we were working for some projects that, luckily for us, they didn't see the light of day. One of them is this Bolivar. Not even going to go into detail. The other one was a digital cookbook manager called cookingme.
Speaker 1:And then we realized, okay, yeah, clearly we know how to design shit, we know how to develop shit, but we don't know how to sell it. We don't know how to raise funds, we don't know how to network. We were coming from consultancies like Atos or Deloitte, right? And I said why don't we have other people do this stuff and we help them taking only the development part, right? True, but you need a team, right.
Speaker 1:Let me introduce you to my co-founders. Usually, when they tell me, when they ask me, as an angel investor, what is your preferred composition of a team, I always say one tech guy, one guy good in business and operations, then somebody who can sell. Right, let's start with the CTO Chavi, teenage years. Don't worry, my picture is the worst, so this is the best one. Clearly, cto in the making. You know pizza, video games, heavy metal, hoodie and all that. Jordi is going to kill me for the next picture. Then you got somebody counting the coins. You know, jordi has been taking charge of the.
Speaker 1:If he was not in the company, the company wouldn't exist. He checks the money in the bank, right, xavi? And I don't do it. We know jack shit about finance and this is really important. I'm going to go about this. And then you need somebody, like a fucking clown like me, um, but then again, I got your attention right. That works. So one year before so 11 years ago actually, we did this.
Speaker 1:I sent an email. This is the first email ever of Mark Spaced. 2013 and March 2014. A really common mistake among entrepreneurs, which is I'm not ready to launch, oh, the website is not ready, the logo is not ready, this is not ready, nothing is fucking ready ever. Right, for one year, we kept our jobs and we didn't do other than choosing Trello over Basecamp, creating a nice Google Drive and stuff like that, but we didn't go out and sell. We didn't go out and create the company. There was all analysis, no action, analysis, paralysis. It's the worst thing. Get started First. Learning of today. Right, it took one fucking year between this email and the first and the incorporation of the company. Okay, as I said, we are not good at having contacts, we're not entrepreneurs, but we knew how to build good software. So that was kind of like how it looked like for us.
Speaker 1:And there was a moment of change. We started while working our previous companies, but one day 25th so more or less in the 15th of December of 2013, I quit my job completely. I decided to go all in. I said, fuck it, I'm moving to the US. I went to San Francisco, burned all my savings, had to freelance for terrible companies to pay for the Airbnb, which was fucking expensive, and Chameleon Jordan incorporated a little bit later.
Speaker 1:But this move, kind of like, created the need, right. It's like, okay, if I don't find clients, I will not be able to eat right, and so we needed to have money to pay for something right. By the way, I know there's a few people for whom I've worked in the past. I've seen Harlan over there. I think there's Mark over there Forever grateful for teaching me how to do things. But also in those companies we learn how not to do things Big companies with terrible business ethics, like Deloitte and other big consultancies, so extremely grateful.
Speaker 1:As a matter of fact, while we kept the job, we couldn't because we had exclusivity in our contracts. So we were doing Google meets Hangouts with these masks on because we needed some stuff on the blog. How do we put pictures of ourselves? How do we show that we're working? Look, for one year it was like this. I know it sounds ridiculous. It was 2014. People were using hashtags on social media and that was our first website. But in March 2014, this is the picture we incorporated the company. Why? Because I found the first client in the US $700 website that only 200 were paid Right terrible mistake.
Speaker 1:But because we had the client, we wanted to do things legally from day one. In spite of doing things legally since day one, pretty unlike other startups in the world, we're still alive and kicking right. So we lost money with that client. Actually, right From there, we're like, okay, we got 3,000 euros in in the bank. Until this money runs out, we'll try it. We got three months, we're not taking any money, but you know, fucking autonomous and stuff like takes a lot of money and notaries, lawyers and all of these other people in the chain of value. Our money was rapidly decreasing. Or like, okay, urgency, urgency. Okay, urgency, urgency. In spite of all of that, we're here celebrating 10 years with what I said.
Speaker 1:There's 10 lessons for you tonight. First one we learned in the first year is the rules are for the 80% of the people. When we started, the ABC of entrepreneurship was create a startup, go to an incubator, go to an accelerator, raise some funds, find mentors, create a board and shit like that. You can't be the same profile, you can have one founder only, and stuff like that. We defied all of this right.
Speaker 1:People are like this is not going to work. Obviously it's not going to work. You're remote. You don't have an office. You're more expensive than the competition. You only do Ruby, which is fucking niche. You don't do mobile in 2014,. Really it's not going to work. Well, in your face it's worked, but actually what I'm saying is it worked. If you follow everybody else's, you will go to where they ended, but you will not go anywhere else. Rules are 48% right.
Speaker 1:Look, I know these books are probably not popular anymore, but they helped us to create the company just for one reason they taught us to think about things, to reconsider, to reevaluate. I was like office. Why do you need an office Meetings Email? They taught us to think about things, to reconsider, to reevaluate. I was like office. Why do you need an office Meetings Email? Do you really need that? Not saying these are toxic things. It's like you probably don't need them. There's a lot of things that you don't need, but a lot of people are like create a company, I'll get an ERP and a CRM and and a co-working space is like you don't need all of that. Right? And because we read all of that, you know we defied some rules.
Speaker 1:Three similar profiles. We're three geeks, three white men, obviously, but three geeks of similar profiles. We had no office, we were too expensive, niche technologists, all of these things I mentioned, right, and it looks like a recipe for failure. We haven't done any of this in all of these years. I was going to write. Also no lawyers, but maybe CMS gets. We didn't use them until pre later on, right? In spite of all of that, the company's doing okay.
Speaker 1:You don't need all of this. This is a pretty good learning. It's like there's a lot you don't need, right, and look, sometimes the clients are not right. There's another thing there's a lot you don't need right and look, sometimes the clients are not right. There's another thing there's a lot of sayings, there's a lot of mantras, right, like, oh, go big or go home, or, you know, feel fast, feel. Often the client is not always right.
Speaker 1:Look, we've got a form on the website for clients to request projects and one of the projects is like look at this, I please you very much to invent five dimension. I please you that this. Invent white people. It's like I don't want to invent white people. We got already too many of them. But you know the clients one of the things we also defied this Raise your hand if you're an active Mars Base client or past, past Mars-based client. There's a bunch of over here. Yeah, I mean over there.
Speaker 1:Look, how many times have we told you like this is not a good idea. Other companies are like yes, sir, yes, sir, sure, we'll do everything. You say. Like sometimes you're wrong. Like motherfucker misspelled my surname. How am I going to take this person seriously?
Speaker 1:Anyways, in the second year we learned something essential. We learned how do companies die? Most companies die because they don't sell enough. Actually, let me correct that. All companies die because they don't sell enough. A lot of companies will say we ran out of investment. I had a fight with my co-founder. I did this, I did that. No, you don't sell enough. Why? I mentioned the coin stink of Jordi, a co-founder, ceo. It's so essential. One of the things we've done every year perfectly is accumulate cash in the bank, and I know crypto bros are going to say you're losing money. You know cash in the bank. Wow, are you in the 19th century? I know the company is still afloat. Where's yours Right After the crash? Just get, I mean.
Speaker 1:You know there's a lot of people saying, oh, my company is going so well. I interviewed so many people at Star Grand. You can't even imagine whose companies are now dead, right, or that I've met over the years and they're always giving interviews, podcasts and all that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm doing well, doing well, and then the next day in the newspaper it's like this company disappears or they're in a financial scandal. Right, we work hard to have most projects in green. Every project has to turn a profit. You know, we got an internal set of KPIs. We really believe in this.
Speaker 1:A lot of companies get lost in the nonsense of raising funds, raising funds, raising funds and eventually maybe they're going to figure out about sales. You know there are different approaches. I'm not saying some are wrong. Some are definitely wrong. I'm not saying all of them are, but if you don't have money in the bank, if you live hand to mouth, how are you going to act when clients don't pay you, when there's a financial crisis, when Silicon Valley Bank defaults, you know, and when a client is like, oh, I'm not going to be able to pay these months, I will pay in three months time, Okay, most companies are not able to do that, you know. Also, that's what we learned in the second year. It was the best profit ever for the company. We sold like crazy. We launched Startup Ryan in English. We launched a Slack community for entrepreneurs, something with it but, most importantly, we raised a lot of money in the bank, right?
Speaker 1:I don't like to promote capitalist people I'm not a fan of that but this saying it's really true, like a check is a commitment, everything else is a conversation, right? If we had to believe every person that said like, oh no, can you start the project today, don't worry, the contract will be fine tomorrow. No, the payment will go through next week we wouldn't be here today. Sometimes we have to take very difficult decisions Stop working for a fine tomorrow. No, the payment will go through next week. We wouldn't be here today. Sometimes we had to take very difficult decisions stop working for a client and sometimes we didn't, and we lost a ton of money, right? So like, for instance, I'll see what's here. I don't even know what's coming. I'm improvising.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have been a very conscious effort of selling, selling, selling. You'll see a lot of pictures of us selling, maybe not selling giving. That's very different. Teaching at Ironhack 2014. Speaking at Startup Brian in Madrid in 2019. Look how fat I was In the newsletter of our university in 2016. Or something like that At Mobile World Congress two, three weeks ago with my co-founders and a potential sponsor, at some random corporate event, at another event and at another corporate event here I don't even know most of these events anymore and what shows is like you got to go out.
Speaker 1:You got to get out of the cave. How many companies get stuck in the co-working space? They don't go to talk to clients or meet people or give talks, appear in podcasts and stuff like that. This is essential. This is, you know, chavi, presenting one of our very first projects, the Barcelona Startup. That kind of like gave us the fame in 2014 because we worked for the Barcelona City Hall.
Speaker 1:But there will be times in which clients will leave you this big of a fucking hole. You know it happened in our second year. We lost a big client, left us 80,000 debt. Happened in our fifth year. Sorry. In our first year, somebody owed us 25 grand. Second year, 80. In the year number five, something similar. It's stupid. It's going to happen. It kills companies, right? So sell, sell, sell all the fucking time. As a matter of fact, as I mentioned, like some startups that I've interviewed, I've interviewed over 200 startups in the last 10 years. I could say, well, above 20 to 40 are dead, they don't exist anymore. Right, should be higher. Some of them are like in zombie state, about to die, something like that. They will languish, but there's a lot of them in the graveyard. Right, good intentions.
Speaker 1:And in 2016, we learned something else we sold so much, we hired a lot of people, but we didn't go into the crazy hiring hired 25 people, didn't work and all of that. But we thought, oh, we need projects, just start getting projects. And twice as many people means twice as much money. Yeah, also twice as many problems and not enough profit. And this is very important. This is not an equation, right? We increased the team in 2016. We even decided, oh, we're urgent, urgently, we need to hire somebody.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we didn't do the right hiring. We had to hire abroad, we didn't know the implications, regulations, payments and stuff like that, and then, as a result, we had to sell more because some client defaulted and they didn't pay. So we did some weird experiments. I fucked up massively in 2016. And basically, I blew up all the profit in the company. So, I'm sorry, xavi and Jordi, we didn't have profit because I fucked up that year, I know, but yeah, we always kept pushing from sales, then we had too many projects, then we pushed hiring. It's hard. It's a balance. That's your job as a founder. You got to figure it out right. It was the worst year in profit. However, we did interesting stuff that worked well. We launched a new website, we started curating Startup Digest and we started organizing attending conferences as a company. So we were always trying new things right.
Speaker 1:Come over, I know you love the staircase. This is amazing, but you get a very good HR. How are you doing? There's a space over here if you want. And then in 2017, we're like okay, this is pretty fucking hard. You know we're already tired. Year number three no figure In 2017 is where the remote loneliness started.
Speaker 1:It takes between 12 to 24 months working remotely to start feeling, if you are not used to it, to kind of like feel it we lost a couple people. You know Some people started having problems decrease of productivity and whatnot. It's hard. You know we advocate for remote. I know there's Bernardo over here who doesn't like remote that much and we have these very interesting exchanges all the time but like, we're good for remote, but we know it comes with a price and you got to pay that price and we happily pay the price.
Speaker 1:It's not for everybody. We cannot hire. If we want it. We couldn't hire you. Why? Because probably you're not made for remote. I can't hire some of my best friends, excellent professionals, or people that are excellent professionals, because they don't know how to work remotely. And this is hard, it's a skill, you know. It's hard as a manager because you don't see when they have problems. They can hide, they can simply non-block onto the video calls. It is very hard. It's very hard to find somebody who's like in the office. They would be like, you know, hanging their head or something like that. You don't see that remotely. It is very fucking hard. Unless you create a company that you open up about these kinds of things, you will not have these very difficult conversations with your employees. In spite of that, it was a really good year. You know. We also started organizing a conference for Startup Brain, which was massively profitable, great for the ecosystem, and one of our employees, oriol, had very amazing ideas like well, remote is hard, we don't see each other very often. Why don't we go on a company retreat? And this was a game changer.
Speaker 1:And then comes the fourth year, in 2018. And we started, like some of our clients started blowing up for whatever reason, right, and we learned that sales is hard. You know we lost our client again, you know, because they defaulted. Another company that merged with another one and all of a sudden they leave you. You know unpaid bills and stuff like that. But we realized that for four years we haven't raised prices to our clients. And these are very fucking difficult conversation as a matter of fact. I'm just going to stop it here. But timing the sales are hard. That's why you have to have reserves in the bank. If you go to sell to big fucking corporate, it takes forever. Procurement, sales and contact diverse teams, get five sign-offs from different people. App selling is hard. You've sold somebody to a price and conditions, not very likely that you will change it unless you're really really good and what you provide is really painful for them. Right, managing expectations. We learned like this Also learned that the ups and downs on the founders not only on employees, of course, but on the founders are really hard as well. We have to manage like this. Luckily, that year we rebranded, we started offering more technologies, we started building startup brand in Andorra. We are always trying new things every year. That's why I'm highlighting it here, because we've done.
Speaker 1:Maybe I am a little bit dispersed, I know Jordi tells me that all the time. I'm like dude, why don't we do less stuff? Well, some of it it sticks, you know it works, and some others don't, I know. But you know, all of these kind of reinvention over the years seems to pay off. Sometimes when it pays off, it really pays off. You know, you can be like this cat and and try to to estimate and you have your big plan and and this is going to work, and I've got these clients over here and then no, I know, I just want to. I love cats and I wanted to. I don't do presentations without a cat gift. That's it. Um, who said woo, awesome, yeah, give it up for Katz. Everybody give it up for Katz, I love it. You made me so happy. Well, there's this other thing. This is really important. This doesn't apply to everybody. I know this is controversial, but you can turn your clients into friends and I'm really proud to say that we have managed to accomplish this this year.
Speaker 1:Before I go into very emotional moving pictures, you know we adopted React in the company. We started our product, which, spoiler alert failed miserably, but at least we tried. But I'm happy to say, you know, when a client asks for reference as to whether how we work, we get emails like this all the time. You know, hi, sarah, nice to meet you. Yeah, I work with them. I would hire them for all the other companies they have. Hi, sarah, hi, sarah. Well, spoiler, sarah hired us last week and so and this happens all the time why? Because we're not a sales machine. We make friendships with our clients. We're there and I know this sounds very fluffy, but you know, look at this.
Speaker 1:People from where's Jose? Jose, raise your hand, where are you Over there? One of our first clients nine years ago, and you know they come over. He came from Euskadi all the way, like, oh, I'm going to be there. You know, can I come to the event? I'll be there. This is amazing. Like, oh, I'm going to be there. Can you come to the event? I'll be there. This is amazing. Other people wouldn't do that. People in Barcelona of course, you're here, but not only them. People at Eclair I saw John over here. Where are you? Don't worry, you'll get your applause. You'll get your applause.
Speaker 1:People from Mailtrack I took them to Silicon Valley for a week to help them as a part of a project. I'm like, fuck it, I'm going to go to Silicon Valley with you guys. I'll show you around. We're very good friends. People from Everis, you know, probably not our favorite company, but they invited us to their Christmas dinner. You don't invite a provider to Christmas dinner, I don't know. It's kind of weird. We do it because we're all friends, but the company is because we have these kind of relationships and this matters a lot. Why? Because a lot of people you know there's a person in the ecosystem who's hired us for five different companies.
Speaker 1:And then the very bad year for society and I'm going to be clear about this 2020, you know what happens right 2020, pandemic and all of that. But it was really hard for people and I could say like it was probably one of the best years in business for Marspace. But that's not everything. We had stuff. Everybody gets stuff, like mental health. That was the year we started talking about it and, precisely because some people open up in the company, we created a safe space for the rest of the people and that mattered a lot. Somebody told me look, in 10 years time, 20 years time, people are going to remember how you treated them in very bad times like now, like the pandemic, and I was like, yeah, I could see how you know, in times my previous companies didn't do the stuff that we did right. And so 2020, you know, it was good. We learned that.
Speaker 1:Also, in times of need, I reach out to people. I called some of the speakers of Startup Prime. I called all the clients Do you want your money back? They said like no, we continue the project. The sponsors that we signed to Startup Prime do you want your money back? Because we're not going to be doing events for a while. And they're like no, keep the money. So, because we have built an amazing community at startup brand clients, sponsors and all that you know, I called some of them to ask for advice. Like we're first-time entrepreneurs, what do we have to do in this time of desperation? There's no business, you can't hire, you can, you can't travel what the fuck? And I call people who are like 20, 40, 50 years in business and they give me advice. Why? Because we're friends, people who built really good companies, and some example is Startup Brain. This is what you're seeing tonight, minus the interview that will not happen because there will be no interview tonight. We want to have more time with you.
Speaker 1:We've done, over 10 years, 145 startup brand events every month since 2014. We've never skipped a single fucking month. Talk about commitment. We've got 9,000 members. We did three startup brand conferences of about 1,000 people with really cool speakers. We've done our company 15 non-star brand events. We have a podcast. Some of the stats we've done is to show that we really invested in community.
Speaker 1:As a matter of fact, 10 years ago, I said I don't think any company will succeed in 10 years' time without a community behind them, and I'm super happy to be able to call people a lot of people in the audience. I know that in a time of need, I can ask favors and they will return them. I will return them, right. I've made so many friends over the years, thanks, and we made friends in the company. One guy advised us in 2017, a company wanted to buy us. I called one of the best entrepreneurs in Spain. I said can you help us with this? He's like, yeah, sure, let's get for lunch. We went four hours with him. He taught us everything about M&A. We decided not to sell the company, right, and I didn't even have a great relationship with that person at the beginning. Now I have invested in three of these companies.
Speaker 1:You know I do a lot of office hours. We produce a lot of content. I say I know. I say a lot of I because this is the entire marketing department of Mars based. Basically, this is what happens when you're bootstrapped. You cannot hire lots of people that then you might fire in times of not made. But we also fail a lot. I fucked up a lot. I take full responsibility of all the things, all the money I squander. Probably we're going to be squandering a lot of money tonight and we did yesterday, definitely because of me, but it pays off and when it comes back, it comes back tenfold. I was able to have one of the best conversations of my life 30 minutes with the founder of Shazam on stage in our second conference. That's weird. And then in 2021, things started to get better and, don't worry, we're approaching the end.
Speaker 1:One of the things that we learned is like things we learned 10 years ago might not hold up anymore. I was like you know, are we doing the right thing with remote? We adopted asynchronous work because everybody else was doing remote, so we didn't have an edge in heart. I was like oh, maybe we have to work async, maybe we have to rethink our technologies, maybe we have to open an office Every year, every quarter and sometimes some things monthly. We review a lot of stuff in the company.
Speaker 1:Why Do you know the myth of the boiling frog Boiling frog? For those who don't know it, there's a saying that says if you put a frog inside a pot, you warm the water, warm it up. Eventually it gets used to it and it dies. It doesn't leap out. How many people believe this is true? Raise your hands, don't worry, I'll not judge you, don't worry, come on. Usually it's 60%. Come on, I'm not going to shame you publicly. It's false. People repeat this all the time because they heard it somewhere. They have never spent a single minute thinking is this actually true? And we do this with many, many things in our life, many things. That's why, in our company, frequently we reevaluate obvious things like salaries. I know this is pretty fucking obvious.
Speaker 1:Okay, but our model, our technologies, working remotely we're reverting asynchronous work. We tried for two years, didn't work. We're like fuck it, we don't need it anymore, right? Our prices, our employee benefits, stuff like that, things, everything is subject to review every term or every year in the company, why Sometimes you're accumulating a lot of stuff that you don't need. In technology, in coding, there's something called the technical debt, which is the baggage that you accumulate for having been in business for so long, it's like, but you probably don't need it anymore, but it keeps the things working and you never go back to it. There's business debt as well. Right, you should go revisit it very, very often. In 2021, we signed the best project, the best event a year in the company and I know it's not nice to say, because people were suffering a lot and so but it goes to show that maybe, when you do things right and you hold very close relationships with people, they will hold to this relationship. You know other things that we hear very often with people. They will hold to this relationship. You know other things that we hear very often and, believe me, they're not right. Maybe they are in some conditions. Maybe they were right once Rails doesn't scale.
Speaker 1:Okay, how many of you are using Stripe? Raise your hand. Your company uses Stripe Shopify. Raise your hand. Github. Raise your hand. Linkedin. Raise your hand. Github. Raise your hand. Linkedin. Raise your hand.
Speaker 1:All these companies are built using Ruby on Rails. It fucking scales, but people hear it somewhere. Remote workers don't work. I worked for 10 years in an office. Believe me, people didn't fucking work in that office. I could see everybody else's screens. Bootstrap businesses are not ambitious. Yeah, talk about automatic. They built WordPress. They power 45% of the internet websites. Hybrid mobile apps are slow. You know things. We adopt a lot of things that make sense and we don't reevaluate them right. It's like all the time you get to hear say, hear, say, hear, say. I'm tired of hearing. It's very good, like the process of unlearning stuff. It's essential. This is one of the best things we've done as a company over the years.
Speaker 1:And, coming very close to the end of the presentation, ladies and gentlemen, one concept that not enough people do in the industry, which is lift people as you climb. What does that mean? You know your company becomes a little bit successful. You pay better salaries, of course, to your employees, but how about the rest of the people that help you? How about the public infrastructure? How about the school that raised you as a kid and taught you? Most people don't go back to their school to talk, or their uni, or their high school and stuff like that. You got to lift people up as you climb because I was helped.
Speaker 1:When I arrived to the United States, some people opened doors, introduced me to potential clients and now it's my turn. I've been doing it for 10 years. A lot of people don't have this vision and believe you. 10 years. A lot of people don't have this vision and believe you. Believe me, it just fucking works all the time. Live as you climb. You know I take a lot of pride in what we do. Normally I never do these kind of presentations. I don't like talking about myself, I don't like talking about my company. It's taken 10 fucking years for me to talk about my company on stage in a Starbrand event.
Speaker 1:We help people to co-found companies. I personally invested in 37 startups. We have brought international companies to open, multinational companies to open an office in Barcelona. We attracted foreign investment. Right, we're paying it forward. If you're not familiar with the concept, google it up. Paying it forward means helping somebody selflessly so that maybe it comes back, maybe in the future, right, but it's altruistic and in the startup ecosystem wouldn't exist without people giving, giving and giving, sharing, creating community events.
Speaker 1:Of course, there are other free communities I mentioned. There's Bernat over there. I know you don't like attention, but they run not only the best podcast, they have co-working spaces, they have been investing in companies. They have a fund. They believe in community. We need more players like them in the ecosystem. We'll be 10 times better if we had more Bernats and people like that. People at Attico they create community. And people like that. People at Attico they create community. People love their working spaces, love their events. Right, we need more people like that helping without expecting anything in return, and in 2023, I realized that.
Speaker 1:You know I've explained pretty much everything. Like that's all I wanted you to learn, but still there are quite a lot of assholes in the ecosystem. We all know one or two names. Not gonna drop them, obviously, leave it up to you, but what I say by that is, like you know, sometimes we're too driven with our own mission that we don't stop and think if what we are doing is hurting other people. You know. So be nice to people, help others. Pay coffee to aspiring entrepreneurs. If you're an investor, don't let the entrepreneur pay for the fucking coffee. Come on, that happens too often. Be nice, pay your taxes. Give back to your community. Don't break the law. We don't need more Globos. We've got enough with one of it right.
Speaker 1:And so, because I don't want to be an asshole, I want to give the last five minutes of the presentation to the people that helped me. And you know, for 10 years doing startup right, I couldn't have done it without a phenomenal team and I get all the credit because I am on stage. I'm like alex from star brain, alex from mars base, who's posting the. You get me every day on your linkedin because I post shit every day on linkedin. I know it works. Um, these people don't get the credit early enough and they put in the work.
Speaker 1:So please, big, big, big fucking applause for the sub-ranked team. Remember the thing about getting used to fucking applauses. There's a lot of them now. Our team at Mars Base. Please give it up for them. Thank you. Look how strong I mean as an owner of a small company. It means the world to you when somebody picks your company instead of something bigger. You know all of them could be working for Spotify or Google or LinkedIn or stuff like that. They're with us. That means a lot, and also one of the things I did this week, and I'm not going to play it because, I mean, it's 23 fucking minutes long.
Speaker 1:This is only for our team, clients and friends of the company, former employees there's a bunch of them here and people who love the company. They send videos from all over the world in five different languages saying thank you and you know we couldn't have built this without relationships like Jose, nine years uninterruptedly hiring us. Some others are on and off because the startups go up and down. Some their startup failed, they hired us for another business and some came last year. We got two people over here, roger and Pau from Plaza, one of our last clients from last year and we love you all. So thank you, big applause, thank you, guys.
Speaker 1:Could be four minutes mentioning, you know, the companies I see in the audience we work for. There's a parking goal there's Nice, there's Eclair, there's Plaza. You know there's a lot of them Not going to spend because all this fucking light is blinding me, but a lot of them are here. It means the world to us that, even if we haven't worked since 2015, they're here or they sent a video, they took their time. And also I've got something special my good friend, derek Anderson, ceo of Startup Brain, one of the most well-known people in Silicon Valley. People respect him. He's been doing this shit for almost 15 years, helping people for absolutely no reason other than building community. He helped the company going startup brand over the pandemic. He's helped millions of entrepreneurs worldwide. And we sang Miley Cyrus in the karaoke. I know it looks like it's metal, it's not. We sang Wrecking Ball, one of my favorite songs, believe it or not, and he's got a message for us.
Speaker 2:Good evening everyone. My name is Derek Anderson. I'm one of the co-founders of Startup Grind and I want to wish you an incredible happy birthday celebration tonight in Barcelona. And I want to first give a huge thanks and shout out to Alex and the entire organizing team, who have built just an absolutely amazing and inspiring community in Barcelona over these past 10 years. Startup Grind's values are all about giving more than you take, helping others first and making friends, and whenever I think about who and where these values are best personified, Barcelona and this amazing group of people and all of you are immediately come to the top of my mind.
Speaker 2:I wish I could be there with you in person. Unfortunately, I'm stuck in California in the United States, but I hope you have a wonderful evening tonight. I hope you are all so proud of what you built. I hope you are able to celebrate it. Please go to the organizers and thank them. Give them a hug on behalf of me and our community around the world. We're so grateful to be part of what you're building. We're so grateful to have been able to watch this and see inspiring work that you've done and the community that you built together. Have a great night.
Speaker 1:What a terrible place to be stuck in California. I know he's watching this, by the way, but he always sends some funny remark about me, so the first time there hasn't been any, so thank you for that. So I wanted to give a big round of applause for the Startup Grind family, but also, and most importantly, for all the Startup Grind speakers in Barcelona, because there's 12 tonight in the audience. So thank you very much. And, last but not least, I'm talking people who have supported for 10 years. Of course, there's other people who have supported us. Some people I host a podcast with Somebody that sponsored an event, somebody who did this, maybe I have invested, somebody I shared beers over with and stuff like that, but it goes beyond that. There's a special and I think it's the last one. I hope it's the last one. I'm thirsty and hungry. There's a concept in technology and development and I know some people will be like that's not how it works. But there's a front end and a back end. Usually front end is making things look pretty, but the real work happens in the back end. I'm sorry, react people. I know. I know it's not exactly like this. Don't ruin my joke. So this is exactly what happens in our company. I get all the credit, but I have two amazing co-founders Come on stage.
Speaker 1:We celebrated nine years. I had to do so much shit last night. I didn't update. This is from last year. We celebrated last night. We had another cake, much more beautiful, super tasty, with 10 years, astronauts and stuff, but it was so tiring last night we had to try to confirm everything, all the last minute changes and accommodating each and every single request we had. So that's it. I mean I want to dedicate the last applause of the night to them. 10 years and we're still friends. You know, doesn't happen and that's it. So thank you very much for coming. Also, I lied, it was not the last applause of the night, so at least two more One for my family.
Speaker 2:And the last one for you, thank you.