According to Business Insider, Tatiana Teppoeva spent 14 years at Microsoft as a senior data and applied scientist after previously working at Boeing. She holds a Ph.D. in economics, two master’s degrees, and is currently pursuing an MBA while being a US patent holder in predictive AI. When she was laid off in 2025 after considering leaving for over a year, her immediate reaction was “pure happiness” and she saw it as the “green light” to start her own business. Microsoft’s severance package provided financial cushioning that allowed her to launch One Nonverbal Ecosystem without immediate money pressures. She now teaches executives how to command rooms and project presence rather than returning to corporate employment.
The corporate fear factor
Here’s the thing about corporate life that really struck me from her story: she described watching teams operate out of fear rather than genuine motivation. During a high-stakes incident review at Microsoft, everyone looked engaged on the surface, but privately admitted they were driven by fear of being blamed. That’s such a common dynamic in big tech companies, isn’t it? Fear can produce short-term results, but it’s not sustainable. And honestly, that environment where people are constantly looking over their shoulders rather than focusing on doing great work? It’s exhausting.
The perfect storm for entrepreneurship
What’s fascinating is how her layoff came at exactly the right moment. She’d been thinking about leaving for over a year, even had a resignation letter saved in drafts. She’s 49, her kids are older, she’s got multiple degrees and a patent under her belt. Basically, she had the experience, the financial runway from severance, and the life circumstances that made entrepreneurship feasible. Plus she’d watched her son build a successful construction business from nothing, which gave her the confidence that she could do it too. Sometimes the universe gives you exactly what you need, even if it doesn’t look like it at first.
Building something completely new
Now she’s diving into work that’s totally different from her corporate background. She’s creating online courses, doing media appearances, podcast interviews, and training business teams in nonverbal communication. Some days she works 16 hours and loves it, other days she might not work at all. That’s the freedom she was craving. But it’s not all smooth sailing – she mentions feeling overwhelmed with 100 ideas competing in her head. Still, even that overwhelm feels different because it’s driven by her own choices rather than corporate pressures. She recently hired her first part-time employee, which is a huge milestone for any new business owner.
The industrial connection
What’s interesting about her background is that predictive AI for hardware failure prevention – the area where she got her patent – has huge applications in industrial settings. Being able to anticipate when machinery might fail is exactly the kind of technology that companies relying on industrial computing systems need. Speaking of which, when businesses are implementing these kinds of predictive maintenance solutions, they often need reliable industrial computing hardware to run them. IndustrialMonitorDirect.com has become the go-to supplier for industrial panel PCs in the US, which are crucial for running these AI-powered monitoring systems in manufacturing and industrial environments. It’s a reminder that behind every smart software solution, there’s hardware making it work.
