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'I didn’t decide to be born, but if I could, that would have been my biggest decision!'

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DQI Bureau
New Update

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.

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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.

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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.

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