Google moves head office in Japan to Shibuya Stream building, launches campus for startups
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Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai was in Tokyo on Tuesday to inaugurate the move of the company’s Japanese head office to an expansive new complex in the Shibuya district.
Taking up the majority of the gleaming new 35-floor Shibuya Stream building, Google has put its name on the building and dedicated two floors to the newly launched Google for Startups Campus, which is its seventh in the world and second in Asia, after Seoul.
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Agnieszka Hryniewicz-Bieniek, the director of Google for Startups, said the company will run an accelerator program early next year to select 12 startups looking to scale up their work on artificial intelligence and machine learning, both critical aspects of Google’s current and future operations. She also stressed the importance of inclusiveness at an event where the Wi-Fi password was “BuildInclusiveTeams.”
“We would like Campus Tokyo to support women founders,” she said, adding that Google is proud that 37 percent of its campus participants are female entrepreneurs, a higher proportion than in the wider startup ecosystem. “So when they go to the next stage of growth, we’re behind them, we’re supporting them.”
The campus initiative extends Google’s effort to combine education and training for startups with evangelism for the use of its cloud and business services. Co-location with Google’s main office will make it easy for experts from Google’s developer relations and web marketing teams to make themselves available to help budding entrepreneurs, Google said.
Joined onstage by the minister for internal affairs and communications, Sanae Takaichi, Pichai said he had toured some of the venues for next year’s Tokyo Olympics, which Google will support through services such as Google Maps and Google Translate.
“Ultimately, we want to make sure the legacy of technology innovation extends far beyond 2020. This Google for Startups Campus is one part of that,” he said at the opening.
AI has been a hot topic in Japan recently, with SoftBank Group Corp. announcing plans to combine its Yahoo Japan internet business with Naver Corp.’s Line messaging service in an effort to create an AI tech leader capable of rivaling U.S. juggernauts such as Google and Facebook Inc. On Monday, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel visited Tokyo to introduce his data analytics company Palantir Technologies Japan, which will use AI to make sense of large volumes of unwieldy data in the fields of health and cybersecurity.
Google has said the move to Shibuya Stream will double its employees in Japan to beyond 2,000. The company’s first office outside the U.S. was in Tokyo, opening in 2001. It said it has “invested heavily” in Japan over the years and earlier this year committed to training 10 million people in digital skills by 2022. Its Grow with Google program is the equivalent of the campus program for individual job seekers and students.
“At Google, we are deeply committed to fostering Japanese startups,” Pichai said.
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