Earn Your Luck: Google’s Ruth Porat on the Employee Habit That Drives Her Nuts
The president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google shares her foolproof B.S. detector and why big tech can be like playing with fire.
When Ruth Porat was 6 years old, her physicist father would come home from his job at the Stanford Accelerator Laboratory and the two would tinker for hours in the garage, soldering radios and adding machines. Perhaps he had a hunch that putting his daughter at ease around gadgets would one day set her up for a good job.
How about a massive job? Today, as the chief investment officer and president of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, Porat oversees global corporate investments as well as Alphabet’s “other bets,” including Waymo self-driving cars and the drone-delivery startup Wing. During her decadelong tenure, the company’s market capitalization has soared from $384 billion to nearly $3 trillion.
Porat is known for the clarity of her vision and intent, despite her leadership role at a company that includes a dizzying array of products, such as Google Search and Cloud, YouTube, Android and Chrome. To maximize her team’s output, she pushes her teams to stop focusing on the branches—“Look at the whole tree.”
Before arriving in Silicon Valley, Porat hacked her way through the jungles of Wall Street. Starting in the mergers and acquisitions department at Morgan Stanley months before the crash of 1987, she went on to co-head tech investment banking during the early, heady days of the internet. These smart risks opened new doors and eventually led to her running the financial institutions group (a position, she says, that she had initially assumed would be “so boring”).
How does Porat explain her rise? “My record of making things work and delivering so people wanted to take a risk on me.” It’s just one of the reasons leaders in the private and public sector have placed her in central roles—and often in the hottest of hot seats.