Ruth Porat was the former chief financial officer at Morgan Stanley from January 2010 to May 2015. But her insatiable curiosity catalyzed a pivot to Silicon Valley, where she imposed financial discipline as Google’s CFO before reorienting Alphabet towards an AI-powered future. Porat drives investments with a survivor’s urgency after twice battling breast cancer, obsessing over how to leverage technology to democratize healthcare, combat climate change, and unlock humanity’s boundless potential.
Born in England to a family of scientists, Porat’s early life was defined by an emphasis on education. “My parents always said, ‘Learn, study, embrace the new, and work hard,'” she recalls. Those words became a mantra, propelling her through degrees at Stanford, the London School of Economics, and Wharton before launching her finance career at Morgan Stanley in 1987.
Navigating the Storms of Finance
Her banking career at Morgan Stanley proved a whirlwind initiation into the harsh gales of the financial crisis. Porat had barely settled into her analyst tenure before Black Monday’s cyclonic market plunge threatened to make a shipwreck of her fledgling endeavor. “At that moment, I was concerned maybe my career was over before it started,” she admits.
In retrospect, the tumult seems oddly preface to the relentless gales Porat would battle through. The unshakable poise she modeled in that baptism by fire redux in 2008, when Morgan Stanley entrusted her to lead its crisis advisory for the government’s bank bailouts.
Those skills were hard-won but ultimately foundational. “I learned the imperative of making crisp decisions at the right time, with the right team,” Porat recounts. A maxim borne of experiences that could have broken careers lesser forged. Instead, Porat rose to head Morgan Stanley as its chief financial officer.
A Leap of Faith to Google
When an opportunity with Google arose in 2015, it proved an irresistible lodestar. “I knew Google since its inception and was passionate about the company,” she explains. “So when the CFO role opened, I said yes on the spot.”
Her transition to Silicon Valley was eased by her prior tech-facing roles leading Morgan Stanley’s Internet investment banking. However, her Wall Street alumni learnings would prove vital against the sector’s disruptive seasons.
“If you don’t invest for long-term growth, you start sowing the seeds of decline,” Porat cautions, laying out her stratagem for vaulting Alphabet into tech’s vanguard. Under her financier’s scrutiny, the company has reoriented towards an investment thesis centered on AI-fueled innovation.
To the naked eye, Alphabet’s fascination with artificial intelligence may seem a shiny diversion from its rich stream of advertising revenues. For Porat, it’s an existential imperative – a self-perpetuating engine for identifying and unleashing technology’s boundless potential.
Harnessing AI for a Better Future
“AI is going to transform every industry,” she says. Her zeal for its world-resetting applications across health, education, climate, and more is so ardent as to be a doctrine. “My oncologist said we cannot democratize healthcare without AI,” Porat recounts. “Being able to provide world-class care broadly is an extraordinary game-changer.”
Such grand visions have been hard-won. Twice, Porat has braved the loneliest campaigns against breast cancer – battles that sharpened her seize-the-moment mindset.
The first diagnosis came in 2001, with Porat’s children just 5, 7, and 9 years old at the time. “It was terrifying,” she recounts of that harrowing period. Yet she faced it with the same stoic reset that defined her career, undergoing surgery and treatment while trying to minimize the disruption to her family.
In a way, the cancer experience recentered Porat’s priorities at a pivotal moment. “When I was in the hospital, I saw young women that my fear was, ‘Had they done what they wanted?'” she recalls. “It taught me – you don’t control the timeline as much as we’d like. Every day is precious.”
Porat channeled that lesson into a passionate adherence to work-life balance, which she characterizes as more of a ‘kaleidoscope’ in which personal and professional lives blend. She made a concerted effort to remain present for life’s milestone moments amid the breakneck pace of her finance career.
“My kids were very aware of what I did. If I were working on a big deal, we’d track the markets together as a game,” Porat explains. This approach deepened her children’s understanding of the significance of her work while allowing Porat to maintain that precious balance.
Resilience in Leadership
However, cancer revisited just three years after the initial diagnosis. But having re-prioritized her life, Porat was determined to plow forward with redoubled gusto. “I’m completely fine now and grateful for the amazing medical care,” she says. “But if it taught me anything, it’s to make sure you embrace every moment.”
That refusal to pause or respect limits is among Porat’s gravitational forces. A kinetic dynamism turbo-charged by impatience that even Earth’s dataflow glut can’t seem to slake.
Now guiding a resource chest as limitless as the mariner’s night sky, Porat senses her life’s calling has found its ultimate harbor. “New opportunities arise from crises,” she says. “With our team and resources, there’s no challenge we cannot take on.”
