Meet the Canadian who’s building a company for Toyota

TOKYO — Toyota's Woven Planet self-driving vehicle unit may be brimming with computer engineers, programmers and software whizzes all toiling away on the cars of tomorrow.

But what it didn't have, until recently, is someone dedicated to making a business of it all.

Enter Sinead Kaiya, Woven Planet's newly appointed COO.

The software industry veteran was just tapped to order Woven Planet's cost center of futuristic R&D projects into an organization with all the trappings of a true corporate culture, from structured human resources and legal departments to purchasing and finance divisions.

The way Kaiya sees it, when a fledgling company such as Woven takes off, it usually focuses so much on building its products that it can neglect to also build the company itself.

"The CEO will realize they're actually building two things: I'm building a product, but I'm also building a company," Kaiya said in an interview. "I need a product owner for my company."

The Toyota venture's to-do list includes setting up financial systems, business policies, intellectual property protocols, proper corporate governance and a rewarding employee experience.

"All of these very fundamental pieces of building a company eventually need an owner," Kaiya said. "So I call myself almost the product owner of building the company."

Woven Planet was just formed in January, but it has big ambitions for rapid expansion and new revenue streams.

Toyota executives see Woven Planet's growth as central to the automaker's future success.

Kaiya said Woven Planet's most important product in the near term will be Arene, the vehicle software operating system it is developing to be released around 2025. Woven Planet's mission is to first serve Toyota, then to sell such products across the industry.

"Our primary goal is, first and foremost, to make Toyota successful," Kaiya said. But in 10 years' time, she envisions even grander achievements.

"I hope to see Woven as a strong, globally recognized software company that has not only made Toyota extremely successful but has managed to scale our products and our platform, even beyond Toyota."

Kaiya's appointment also reinforces Woven Planet's international profile and personality.

The Canadian COO joins American CEO James Kuffner at the helm of a nontraditional Japanese company based in a downtown Tokyo high-rise. Woven Planet patterns itself after nimble Silicon Valley startups, not the staid but storied old-school giants that underpin Japan Inc.

At Woven, English is the working language, a rarity for any company in Japan, let alone a subsidiary of Toyota — arguably the bluest of Japanese blue chips.

Kaiya, who started July 1 at the fast-growing Toyota subsidiary, was recruited from German software giant SAP, where she held a number of positions in various postings in North America, Europe and Asia. Among her roles was chief of staff for the CEO office and, most recently, head of innovation strategy and R&D for SAP's Asia, Pacific and Japan operations.

Despite more than a decade in the software business, Kaiya is not an engineer or programmer by training. She holds degrees in visual design and Japanese.

But that, she insists, was good training for a mindset focused on organizing and structuring a new company. Language and design, she notes, are fundamentally about taking something unstructured, such as graphics or words, and systematizing them. Her experience as the chief of staff at SAP, she said, was all about bringing order from chaos.

And besides, when it comes to software, there actually is more to it than meets the eye.

"Software is very much an art, as it is a science," she said. "There are hardcore technical skills that are needed. But the secret sauce, or the real ingredient, in software development is people."