Preferred Networks stands out among Japan’s mostly mediocre start-ups through its partnerships and ability to attract people with vision and ambition. Most of the country’s brightest graduates in science and technology subjects tend not to be entrepreneurial, and are more likely to take safer big corporate jobs than participate in new businesses. But in recent years, many of Japan’s formerly world-leading big corporates have been flagging, and this gave Preferred Networks the spark it needed to get off the ground in 2011. The firm was started by two young graduates, Toru Nishikawa and Daisuke Okanohara, who had already shown rare ability at writing software for image analysis. Their idea was to develop deep learning for robotics and the IoT, which…