Toyota Grabs Tech Talent by Hiring Entire Jaybridge Staff
09 Mars 2016 - 9:50PM
Dow Jones News
Toyota Motor Corp., looking for an edge in the auto industry's
race for tech talent, has hired the staff of an entire company that
was making autonomous agriculture and mining equipment.
The move reflects a trend among auto makers and other industry
participants, including fast-growing startups, to build their
talent pools by taking over small and specialized companies, or
raiding a companies workforce. In some cases, the acquisitions
aren't seen as hostile.
Toyota announced Wednesday that it hired all of Jaybridge
Robotics' 16 employees, including software and hardware engineers.
In a release, Jaybridge's Chief Executive Jeremy Brown welcomed the
move, saying it will help the Japanese auto giant "reduce the
nearly 1.25 million traffic fatalities each year," rather than keep
the company's efforts narrowly focused on industrial
applications.
It is unclear if Jaybridge, a Cambridge-based company spun out
of Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work at the Toyota
Research Institute, will continue to operate. Toyota didn't buy the
company, but instead hired everyone in it.
Toyota last year pledged to invest $1 billion into artificial
intelligence, with a big focus on autonomous vehicles. The company
hired Gill Pratt, a former MIT professor and program manager at the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to run the group. With
the mass hiring, the Toyota Research Institute now has 40 employees
and is loaded with people from MIT and Stanford University.
The Jaybridge group "brings decades of experience developing,
testing, and supporting autonomous vehicle products which perfectly
complements the world-class research team at TRI," Mr. Pratt said
in a statement.
Last year, Uber Technologies Inc. hired 40 scientists,
engineers and professors from Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh, in what is becoming more common as companies fight for
a rare skill set.
Competition for talent in robotics and software engineering,
particularly geared toward vehicle autonomy, is so fierce that it
has led to recruiting battles in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, the
chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc., used his Twitter account and
2 million followers to recruit for his autonomous vehicle
program.
General Motors Co., in December, bought the assets of a
ride-sharing company, Sidecar, and hired 20 of its employees to
work in its Silicon Valley office.
Andrew Moore, the dean of Carnegie Mellon University's School of
Computer Science, said the college was sent scrambling after the
Uber mass-hire in 2015, but the exposure to its top-level programs
paid big dividends a year later.
Enrollment in the school's computer science program rose 35% in
the fall of 2015 compared with the previous year, and its robotics
program grew 30%. The school hired 17 new faculty members.
Mr. Moore said the school has had to adjust its employment
agreements to allow professors to leave for business ventures with
hopes of them returning after a few years.
"There is definitely a world-wide battle for talent," said Mr.
Moore, who was a Google Inc. engineering vice president prior to
his CMU appointment. "In the computer science world right now,
administrators and leadership are becoming more like recruiters for
high-powered sports teams or executives."
Write to Mike Ramsey at michael.ramsey@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 09, 2016 15:35 ET (20:35 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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