Best Life on Mars episode of November

From CTO to CEO, after a career at Apple

In this episode of Life on Mars, we sit down with Elisenda Bou-Balust, founder of Cala, to explore her remarkable journey, from completing a PhD and launching small ventures to becoming a CTO, selling a startup to Apple, and ultimately building an AI company dedicated to fighting misinformation.

Eli opens up about navigating impostor syndrome and gender bias in technical leadership roles, her transition from external provider to co-founder and CTO, and what it’s really like to go through fundraising rounds and acquisition talks with a big tech company. She also shares why she chose to leave the comfort and stability of Apple to launch Cala, a company on a mission to transform the Internet into verifiable knowledge.

If you’re interested in the CTO career path, the real role of the technical side in fundraising, M&A and due diligence, and how to use AI to combat misinformation, you’re going to love this episode.

Bonus episode

In this bonus episode of Road to CTO, we sit down with Dorion Carroll, a veteran with 35 years of tech leadership experience, former CTO at Zynga, VP at Amazon, and one of the most insightful engineering leaders in the industry.

From scaling engineering teams from 280 to 3,600 people, to navigating billion-dollar decisions, to understanding what truly defines a great CTO, Dorion shares the lessons, stories, and frameworks that shaped his extraordinary career.

If you're an aspiring CTO, an engineering manager, or simply passionate about how world-class tech organisations operate behind the scenes, this episode is a true masterclass.

Introducing GPTApps,

our new AI-powered brand

GPTApps represents a significant step forward in how we approach innovation at MarsBased. Rather than treating AI as a standalone capability, we’re weaving it into the way we design, build, and ship digital products.

Through GPTApps, we’re focusing on creating practical, production-ready AI solutions that solve real operational challenges, from workflow automation to smarter decision-making tools, always with the same attention to quality and reliability that defines our work.

Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing case studies, insights, and resources that highlight what we’re learning as we develop new AI-powered products with our clients. Our goal is to make AI accessible, actionable, and genuinely useful across organisations of all sizes.

This is just the beginning, and we’re excited for everything that’s coming next with GPTApps.

Cloudflare outage

Earlier this month, Cloudflare experienced a major global outage that took thousands of websites offline. Ours didn’t.

A while ago, we made the decision to reduce our dependency on a single provider after a regional block in Spain affected our traffic. We rebuilt part of our stack using Render and ImageKit, and this month, that decision proved its value. When Cloudflare went down, MarsBased stayed online.

We’ve published a blog post breaking down what happened and how we approached resilience in our architecture.

EU to end cookie pop-ups with browser level consent by 2026

After the Cloudflare outage highlighted how fragile the web can be, Europe is tackling another long-standing issue: cookie consent pop-ups. The EU plans to eliminate cookie banners by 2026, shifting consent to browser-level settings so users set their preferences once, instead of clicking “accept all” everywhere.

The reform aims to remove intrusive pop-ups, reduce compliance burdens, especially for smaller businesses, and curb dark patterns that push unwanted tracking. If successful, this browser-first model could reshape global privacy standards, much like GDPR, and reinforce that the web should be usable, trustworthy, and respectful of people’s time and data.