Background
Luis Talavera is a citizen of the world, if ever there was one. A Mexican,
educated in the United States, Talavera lives in France and runs companies in
Europe and India. Talavera’s first job was at Unisys. He was at Microsoft for
a decade and was Director of R&D at SoftImage (makers of SoftImage 3D and
SoftImage TS), then a Microsoft subsidiary.
His tenure at Microsoft includes work on Windows 3.0, 3.1 and Win 95. Plus,
Outlook Express was his baby. Since then he was associated with various ventures
of former Microsoft colleague and friend Pradeep Singh. When Pradeep hived off
Talisma from Aditi, Luis joined in as an angel investor and now co-manages the
company’s development team.
Challenges at Work
Operating in the Indian software product space is challenging. Doing it from
Paris is even more so.The company is currently working on some dot releases of
its Version 4 while the next big release is expected to come by the end of the
year.
Talavera’s job is to ensure that the company has the right product roadmap
and the right vision for the product moving forward. With three VPs of
engineering reporting to the board, he conducts most of his interaction with the
development team in India on chat.. "In fact that is the substantive part
of my work. Though I come down here periodically, about 80% of the time I spend
with Talisma is on chat", he says. Another challenge has been restarting
the customer pipeline that just emptied after the dotcom bubble burst.
Best decision
He says, "I didn’t decide to be born, but if I could, that pretty
much would have been it! The decisions that I made in my life were the ones that
I felt were right. No one big decision, but lots of small but important
ones."
Professional faux pass
One that was–when he almost left Microsoft for Apple, but finally didn’t.
But he feels he did something almost as terrible as–moved out from Silicon
Valley when he left Microsoft.
While working at Talisma is rewarding as is his involvement with various
other technology companies in Europe, he believes life would have been very
different if he hadn’t moved out from what is after all, the software
developers’ heaven.