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Pioneering female techie sees the future

Charla Pereira has made her way up the rungs at Microsoft through hard work and by being a people person.
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.
 
She 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 dot-com 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. 
 
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 headset, which allows the user to create an object using a virtual paintbrush and bring it into the real world. She also worked on the app that eventually became Skype. 
 
Meanwhile, Pereira makes sure she’s prepared if she’s ever pitching Bill Gates. 
 
“I know one thing: you can never walk into room with that man without your *&%$ together because he would see through it in a second,” says Pereira, who admires Microsoft’s leader for his ingenuity. 
 
A couple months ago Pereira picked up a new portfolio and now manages Microsoft’s Movies & TV app. 
 
“It’s ambiguous and it’s large. Microsoft just partnered with Spotify – which is a big deal for us,” she says. 
 
Pereira and her team will now put their thinking caps on and turn the world of entertainment consumption on its ear. 
 
“It’s a lot of envisioning,” she says. “What does it mean to listen to music in virtual reality?  What does it mean to listen to music in mixed reality or augmented reality?”
 
Most of Pereira’s days are spent doing her research: identifying insights on new technology – and talking to real-world users of the products. Then Pereira will turn around and pitch senior Microsoft leadership her cutting-edge ideas.
 
Pereira has also stepped outside of the box in her personal life. She made a conscious decision to have children without a partner. 
 
“I’ve been always fiercely independent,” says Pereira.
 
One of her longtime friends stepped up to be the sperm donor and Pereira couldn’t have been more thrilled.
 
Three years later, Pereira has just recently celebrated her twins’ third birthday. Their father is very much a part of their lives. 
 
“It’s awesome,” says Pereira of her modern family.
 
Pereira lives right off Lonsdale these days. She often pines for the spiritual energy she found in the Cove. The street Pereira grew up on, Wickenden Road, wasn’t even paved during her childhood. 
 
“I had the best upbringing there – it’s beautiful,” says Pereira. “The first hike I took my new team on – we went up Quarry Rock. I think I paved that trail as a child.”
 
To this day Pereira says she is headhunted by those other tech giants. 
 
“Senior woman, doesn’t exist,” says Pereira, of the gender gap in the tech world. “I’m still in meetings where 99 per cent of the time I’m the only woman.” 
 
The tech landscape is slowly starting to change and Microsoft’s goal is to get more girls interested in coding.
 
“That’s why I go talk to high school students and focus on the girls,” says Pereira, who spoke to digital media academy students at Argyle Secondary in the spring. 
 
Pereira has some sage advice for budding female programmers. 
 
“There’s all this talk about finding your voice, but at the same time some of the smartest people I have ever worked for – men and women – know when to lean out and listen and open their ears,” she says.