[laughter] one of the most powerful women in the Business World is ruth porat. She started as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, rose to be the cfo, and was recruited away to be the cfo of google and now the cfo of alphabet. In that role, she has the normans influence at the company and has done a terrific job of making sure their Balance Sheet works well and that they are much better organized in the financial sense. I have no doubt she will be a power at alphabet for some time unless the next president of the United States says i would like her to be secretary of treasury. She would be a terrific candidate for the position. During this period of time google has done quite well , and alphabet has done well. Your stock is up 20 and i should say, from the time you became cfo, the stock is up over 200 and market cap over 200 . Then quite well under your leadership. But i am curious, are more people looking at doing searches now during this covid19 time than ever before or are people not spending as much time searching . Ruth no, people are spending a lot of time searching. We have trillions of searches every year, precovid, postcovid. It is really the nature of searches that changed. Early in the crisis people really migrated to shifting for information about the disease, what they needed to know, all information about covid. You then saw people shift to, ok, how am i going to live my life in the covid world. More how to searches. How do i clock . Meditation . Wellness. Now youre seeing people move back into more commercial activities. And i think one of the big surges that we saw was, how can i help in my community . How can i help others . It is quite inspiring to see through search, how people are feeling about the world. David so, most of your employees are still working remotely, is that correct . Ruth we moved everybody to remote from home, all 120,000, of us, but as people are opening up, we are starting to move people back in. In taiwan, we are 70 . In europe, we are bringing some people back. But fundamentally, we moved everyone to work from home. David has this ever worried you . These people but you are technically very savvy. Ruth when we started the move to working from home, it did seem daunting at first. I am responsible for our crisis response, and we put together a really strong governance about how do we get people to move to work from home. We were in sync daily. That worked really well. What we were concerned about was, what the impact on what would be the impact on productivity and wellness . Our chief medical officer very early in the crisis said more people would be affected by Mental Health issues than the physical disease itself, so we focused on those two. That was important. The other thing is, google is really about our people and delivery for people in communities because of our compute capacity. One of the things we didnt have worry about was our ability to deal with the surge in online activity, and that was because of all the investments over the years and all of the testing of what could happen in a crisis scenario. It is an important point, solve theu cant riskmanagement issue in the middle of a crisis you need to , solve it ahead of and that one. Worked. David Many Companies are saying, now that i have learned my people can work from home, maybe i do not need these people in the office or i do not need all these people. Is that your view . Or you do not need them in the office . Ruth we believe when people are together, that is a critical element of collaboration. Collaboration helps support innovation collaboration within teams and collaboration across teams. Collaboration and serendipity, so we do look forward to having in the office. What were looking at is the productivity left you get it people have the opportunity to work from home seven days be in , the office, particularly when the rest of the team or teams are in the office. You can save commute time because you are solving what people want in their personal life, it is actually going to result in a better outcome. What that means for real estate, we are still figuring out. David early on, google was well known for, among other things, you got free food. What about working from home . Do you give them free food by delivery somehow . How do they compensate for that . Ruth we are not doing that, but a lot of people focus on food when really, what were trying to create and have been trying to create is this on, is this fun quirky, magical campus. It is about more than the free food than the experience on campus. When we moved everybody from home, we moved connecting the community to a virtual delivery. For food, as an example, you can do a oneonone session with a chef, a cooking class, we took fitness classes and moved them to virtual fitness classes and even some goofy ones like yoga with your dog. David what have you learned about yourself during this time . Ruth one of the things that was actually gratifying, if i can broaden that question, is what i saw at google and what i saw in my colleagues. This has obviously been an extraordinarily stressful time. We feel irresponsibility because so many people are counting on us for quality information, the ability to stay connected, and what i saw was people step up in a meaningful way. People working 20 47, aroundtheclock. That was inspiring. It has been an extraordinary time. What i learned about myself is, one of the positive elements of sheltering in place and having my kids who graduated from college now back with us for a limited a of time, and that has been remarkable, i thoroughly enjoyed that. David some people say that the googles of the world, google, facebook, microsoft, apple, amazon are too powerful. That they have so much power in our economy that it is not healthy. You have been at congressional hearings recently where your ea ceo testified. What is your response to the view that the Technology Companies are becoming so dominant in our economy that it is not healthy . Ruth we are very mindful of the fact that with the scale of this Company Comes scrutiny, and it is incumbent upon us to engage with regulators and help them understand what it is we are doing that is of benefit, how are we providing Better Services at lower cost, which is really indicative of the competitive nature of the world in which we operate. We have got intense competition within the u. S. , intense ,ompetitors outside the u. S. And i think this covid experience, Many Companies and individuals would not have been able to operate the way they did without the support and benefit technology. But its a fair question and we are engaged constructively here and around the globe with regulators on it. David you have more than 100 billion in cash on your Balance Sheet, which is a lot of cash. Why do you need all that cash . Why not just dividend it out or are you going to use it for investments . Ruth at the end of the Second Quarter we actually had 120 billion, but who is counting . So, you are right. When i got to google, there has been a longstanding view that it was helpful to have cash because of the optionality it provided. I think the question i posed was, how much is too much, and how much is too little . Can we actually try and dimension that analytically and put together the data that led to a conversation about beginning a Share Repurchase program. It started small, but we have now increased it five times the last number of years. The last one we just did in the Second Quarter was a 28 billion authorization. So it has been a journey. We have been increasing the return of capital. I spent a big chunk of my career covering firms like carlisle private equity firm so i do appreciate what an efficient capital structure looks like, and this is just trying to get the balance. David is it hard to break into the Technology World as a woman , or is it harder to break into the financial world is a woman . Ruth i think theyre actually quite similar. What is different is the more collaborative environment. I would say. In wall street, it can be pretty tough. David lets talk about your background for a moment, how you came to be cfo of google, alphabet, and before that, Morgan Stanley. So where did you grow up . , ruth i was born in england, mostly grew up in Silicon Valley. My father was a holocaust survivor, a refugee. He escaped from vienna after kristallnacht. David when he was a teenager . Ruth he was 16. He had no high school education, no college education. He escaped to palestine and and as soon as he could enlisted in the british army, fought under montgomery, and his view was the only way to find peace in a Peaceful Place was to have a skill people needed. So he decided to teach himself physics while in the army. He used to always tell his kids that his fellow soldiers would tease him and say, you will die before you can use these this physics. In his answer was always, if i die, i want to die an educated man. After the war, he was one of the lucky ones. He was given a place at the university of manchester. He got a masters degree, a phd, thats where i was born. And then he was given a position at harvard. The only two places he worked was harvard and stanford. Moved eventually to Falcon Valley and that is where i grew up. David you went to stanford undergrad . Ruth i did. David did you major in finance . Ruth i majored in economics and international relations. I thought i would go off and be a lawyer just like you. David ok. You were smart not to do that. Wharton,did go to you got an mba from wharton. Ruth yes. David then you went to wall street . Ruth i went from stanford to the school of economics to wharton. I took a fascinating course with a great teacher and he opened my eyes to this thing called wall street, mergers, and acquisitions. I went from being convinced that i was doing my thing to being convinced i wanted to do was mergers. David when he went ultimately to Morgan Stanley, was a 50 women . Ruth far from it. When i started at Morgan Stanley, it was 1987, so it was sort of the stone age for any sort of sense of what was the role of women in banking. In fact, i think the general attitude was that those of us who were there would get married, have kids and leave. We didnt have the stamina, it was just a question of time. And i loved Morgan Stanley. I think Morgan Stanley was the best of the best, but that was sort of the ethos on wall street. Intoct, a couple of years my career, i was working on a deal and i was out with a partner and a client. I was pregnant with our first child, and the partner actually turned to the client and said, ruth may come back after the first child, but no way after the second. Fortunately, the client liked me a lot more than he liked this partner and basically told him he was an idiot, but that made an impression on me. And the thing that was inspiring and helpful and critical in my career was that there were so many extraordinary men who really bet on me, helped open doors. I didnt know at the time that those were sponsors, but that is what they were. David you became the cfo and at some point, you are one of the most important people in Morgan Stanley. The u. S. Government calls up and says, why dont you work at the Treasury Department . A very senior position. Did you seriously consider doing that . Ruth well, one of my most meaningful parts of my career was in 2008 when secretary paulson asked me to lead a team to help him with the booming housing crisis and spent the entire period working on fannie mae and freddie mac and that evolved into work at aig. I thought it was extraordinary to be able to use skills are morganed for decades at stanley to be able to help the country. That is one of the most meaningful times. David you were doing that as an employee . Ruth i was. David Morgan Stanley also went through a crisis at the time, i am sure you remember, where Morgan Stanley was close to not being able to survive, and then a japanese investor said, we will put in money. Turns out that money was at three times the stock price that you were trading at and people werent sure if the company mitsubishi would show up. ,where you ever in doubt that mitsubishi would show up with that money . Ruth that was a terrifying period of time. The series of events was that the Lehman Brothers famous weekend followed by a call from the Federal Reserve saying we collectively had worked on the wrong thing, we needed to focus on aig, and asked me to get back down to the Federal Reserve that sunday evening. They said aig would be out of money by wednesday. In fact, it was tuesday when they were out of money. Thats was the point at which Morgan Stanley was running into its own severe liquidity crisis. David Morgan Stanley prospered through this time, they survived, and you did quite well. Then some day, somebody called you up i dont know who it was was it a headhunter, somebody from google saying we would like you to consider the cfo. Or you surprised at that offer because you were a wall street person not a Technology Person . Ruth that was actually a very different path to the question. I was on the stanford board and had the opportunity to spend some time with Bill Campbell who was an iconic coach to so many people, to larry, to surrogate, to eric schmidt, to steve jobs. I left the Board Meeting and went to his home to sit down and talk about life generally. And he started probing on what next, what would i want to do . My comment was, i didnt know. At some point i would want another chapter, but one thing i knew for certain was that i wouldnt leave Morgan Stanley as cfo to be chief Financial Officer anywhere else. And for two hours he kept coming back to that strong assertion, and at the end of two hours he said, ok, you wouldnt leave to be a chief Financial Officer anywhere else, correct . I was adamant, correct. He said you should be the cfo of , google. Of course, the two of us burst into laughter and i said, that one i would do. [laughs] i didnt believe it. I left his home and i didnt actually believe it, if it was real or if it would really happen. Hours hecouple of called and said, go over to larry pages house and spend some time with him. See if this works. David you went to see larry page and he said, guess what . I just heard about you and what you to be the cfo . Ruth i had worked on the google ipo and had interactions through the stanford board. We spent two hours. It was this broad conversation staff meeting as larry page always is. I left, again not believing it would happen, but luckily things , came together. David is it harder to break into the Technology World as a woman or the financial world . Was it harder breaking into the financial world as a woman or breaking into the financial world as a junior . Ruth when i broke into the financial world i was a junior. I think it is harder when you are a junior than someone who is credentialed. But if the question of which one is tougher, wall street or tech, both of them have evolved since those days of the boys club. On wall street, that were so painful. I think there is a much greater awareness that it is not just the right thing to do to have diversity in senior ranks throughout an organization, but it leads to better outcomes. So i think that they are actually pretty similar. The difference is that it is a more collaborative environment. In tech, i would say. At wall street, it can be pretty rough. David the more testosterone filled place is wall street or Silicon Valley . Ruth there is a lot of testosterone, enough to go around. There,so, when you get you are a fairly buttoneddown cfo of stanley, precise and so forth. Google is a less precise place when you get there, right . They are making so much money, you do not have to worry about every dollar i guess. So did you say, weve got to change things and people said we dont want to change, we are doing well, or do people say, yes, we want to change . Ruth throughout my career my view has been if you actually anchor your points in data, it becomes very easy to engage people in what is the issue and what is the proper path forward . And one of the extraordinary things at googles rachel very inquisitivery people. As i laid out whatever issue is, anchored in data, it engaged the conversation. I actually didnt find it to be discordant, in fact i was really impressed with the view of yes, throw in the new idea, let us understand what and why. It has been a journey. David what is the secret to having it all . Ruth the most important thing is to find a mix in life that works for you. David so i assume your coming to us from your bedroom because you are like many people working from home because of covid . Yes, this is actually like bedroom. Yes, we are locked down and working out of the home. David youre a Technology Company so people would presume youre good at adapting. Did it turn out to be harder than you thought or easier . R best thing for us has been producing our films and series, muchse that is very onset and a difficult realm. What i would say it is a hallmark of the culture to be very adaptive. No one waits for me to tell them what to do. And when he have built a culture like we have, everybody pitches in and figures out what to do. For example with our animation group, i had nothing to do with credit, butke the they moved hundreds of workstations out of the office into the home over the weekend, and they have been able to produce animated series from the house in a way that was remarkable and not centrally directed. David many ceos with whom i have talked say offcamera tha