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The company's regional Vice President Diego Dzodan told Reuters
the space in mid-town São Paulo, known as Estação Hack, will
bridge the gap in Brazil between a tech sector hungry for
skilled talent and an eager but untrained generation with time
on their hands.
"Imagine the opportunity," Dzodan said in an interview at
Facebook's Latin America headquarters. "You've got people
without a job, so they can't afford training. And yet there's so
much demand for positions that the market can't fill."
One in four Brazilians aged 18 to 24, most with more formal
education than their parents, were unemployed at the start of
the year, as the country's worst downturn on record stunted the
careers of a generation of young workers.
Facebook's 1,000-square-meter space on the bustling Avenida
Paulista is slated to open by December, offering free coding
courses, career guidance, entrepreneur training and digital
marketing workshops for 7,400 Brazilians in its first year.
Dzodan said Estação Hack or "Hack Station" would draw on lessons
from outreach projects like the Startup Garage in Paris, opened
by Facebook in January, but was tailored to Brazil. For example,
the Sao Paulo space offers workstations and mentoring for
entrepreneurs focused on projects with social impact.
The initiative is one of several in Sao Paulo where major firms
are making the most of a tech-savvy subculture — and a slump in
the commercial real estate market — to create branded spaces for
innovation in Latin America's biggest business hub.
In June 2016, Alphabet Inc opened the six-story Google Campus
Sao Paulo, a half dozen blocks south of the new Facebook space,
also offering mentoring for startups, training for entrepreneurs
and free community events.
Last week, Brazilian bank Itaú Unibanco Holding SA announced it
was quadrupling its Cubo co-working space for tech startups, a
joint investment with venture capital firm Redpoint eventures,
which moves to a 12-floor building in Sao Paulo's financial
district in June 2018.
Dzodan, who declined to say how much Facebook was spending on
its new space, said the impact would be measured in participants
rather than brick-and-mortar investments.
"The maximum impact will come from training and education," he
said. "The multiplier effect of that is much greater than
infrastructure."
(Reporting by Brad Haynes and Alberto Alerigi Jr.; Editing by
Andrew Hay)
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