Deep Cove Crier November 2017

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From Italy with love

Deep Cove high school student chronicles her year studying abroad and living la dolce vita

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Smooth moves in Maplewood

Read about a celebrity sighting and a record-breaking real estate listing in Chatter Around the Cove

November 2017

9900 Circulation East of the Seymour River

Pioneering female techie sees the future by MARIA SPITALE-LEISK Charla Pereira has made her way up the rungs at Microsoft through hard work and by being a people person. What music is blasting in your ears these days? What device did you use while binge watching Netflix last weekend? It’s Pereira’s mission to find out. Her senior role at Microsoft focuses on defining the future of entertainment and media consumption. While she has been courted by other tech giants – including Apple – Pereira has found her place at Microsoft. It’s where she can make her mark in the tech arena which, attests Pereira, is hard for a woman. The virtual world may be Pereira’s playground these days, but it was inside a cave-like library space at Burrard View Elementary in the Cove where she first fell in love with computers. “I had a Commodore 64, my mom bought that,” says Pereira, meandering through Microsoft Canada’s colourful office in downtown Vancouver, mid-week in late October. Pereira sports an affable personality which matches her comfortable outfit complete with a billowy scarf. Standing inside a bustling tech innovation office, Pereira’s face lights up when asked about her formative years. It was the 1980s and Pereira felt like the only kid in class taking an omnivorous interest in computers. The machines still hadn’t become prolific yet when Pereira reached post-secondary, which meant she manually had to learn graphic design. When she graduated from the Art Institute of Seattle, Pereira was the first person from the program to put her portfolio on a computer. It was around 1997 and Pereira had traded some graphic design work in exchange for help from a programmer to build her online portfolio. “And that got a lot of the startups and dot-coms interested in me,” says Pereira. “I think the fact they saw that I could take my 2D design that’s on paper, this tangible thing, and put it onto a screen.” Microsoft, says Pereira, entered into a

bidding war with a tech startup over her. Plot twist: Pereira turned down Microsoft’s advances, “because the startup had this amazing energy.” The internet was just figuring itself out and so was Pereira, who was in her early 20s at the time. Her boss at the startup was one of the only African American CEOs in the dotcom world back then, which meant plenty of famous African Americans were clients. Pereira recalls being at a meeting with Jackie Jackson of Jackson 5 fame, with Chaka Khan walking in behind him. “And I’m like, ‘What’s going on with this world?’” says Pereira with a laugh. She worked closely with the Jacksons on branding some computer games and fell in love with the first family of pop music. Pereira felt like she was on top of the world. Then the dot-com world crashed. After going out on her own for a while, Pereira went to work for Microsoft at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. “I feel like I’m lucky to be here,” says Pereira, who has been with the tech giant for a decade and now works in the Vancouver office.

Deep Cove native Charla Pereira is moving up the ranks at Microsoft as a creative senior design lead, crediting her formative years in the serene Cove area for her imaginative streak. PHOTO PAUL MCGRATH

“And that got a lot of the startups and dot-coms interested in me.”

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Spread over two floors, Pereira’s tech playground is 4.25 acres. Ping pong and foosball tables furnish the sprawling office which has an on-site café for staff. Angular office walls splashed in vibrant colours make for interesting architecture and inspire creativity. On those walls are white boards, white boards everywhere – just in case someone invents the next revolutionary app on their way back from the bathroom. Pereira had a hand in developing Microsoft’s mixed reality HoloLens see Pereira page 3

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