david: this is my kitchen table and it's also my filing system. over much of the past three decades, i have been an investor. the highest calling of mankind i

have often thought was private equity. and then i started interviewing. i've learned from doing my interviews, how leaders make it to the top. >> i asked him how much he wanted, he said 250, i said fine, i did not negotiate with him, i did no due dilligence. david: i have something i'd like to sell. you don't feel inadequate because you are only the second wealthiest man in the world, is that right? in recent years, one of the most powerful people in the financial and technology world has been ruth porat. she served as chief financial officer of morgan stanley and then as chief financial officer for google and alphabet. she now serves as president and chief investment officer for alphabet. i sat down with her recently in davos to talk about what she's going to do in her new position and how she will invest more than $100 billion that alphabet now has. so, we are very pleased to have ruth porat here. ruth, as you may know, has recently been promoted.

she has, for almost the last decade, been the cfo of google and alphabet. now she still has that title, but she is now also the president and chief investment officer for alphabet. is that right? ruth: that is right. and it is great to be here with you. david: you have three jobs. do you get three salaries for that? ruth: i think i'm doing ok. david: everybody wants to talk to you here because you have a lot of money, you have over $100 billion of cash to invest. so people want to see you. why do you come to davos? people will be bombarding you, give me money for this or that. is it worth the effort to schlep all the way here? are you happy to come here and meet people you want to see? ruth: i have been coming here since i ran tech banking at morgan stanley back in the 1990's and was hunting for fees. it has become one-stop shopping. you make the trip and you get to see people from asia, africa, middle east, europe. it's a one-stop shop.

david: let's talk about your background, now that you mentioned it. where did you grow up? ruth: i was born in england and mostly grew up in california. david: california. your father was a professor at stanford? ruth: my father was actually a holocaust refugee. my father escaped from vienna right after kristallnacht and made it to palestine. he had no high school education. he ended up enrolling in the british army, he thought and taught himself physics because he figured if he survived, he needed something that somebody valued. after the war, that plan worked, he ended up getting to england, where i was born. eventually, he got to the united states and was sponsored by senator kennedy. so he spent his whole career at harvard and stanford, so i mostly grew up in california. david: so you are in stanford, very nice area, silicon valley. why would you want to go to business school at wharton? why did you go across the country to go to business school, and why did you go to business school to begin with?

why not be a physicist like your father? ruth: i love wharton, so i won't give you that. you know, i thought i was going to end up -- i got married, my husband was a lawyer on wall street, so i was commuting. i thought i would go into consulting, then i took this amazing mergers accounting class, kind of geeky, and decided to go into mergers and acquisitions. so, ended up on the east coast. david: you ultimately became the cfo of morgan stanley and many people thought you might go into government and you could have been the ceo of morgan stanley. why would you leave the important world of finance for something less significant, like technology? why would you do that? [laughter] ruth: you know, kind of right time, right place. when i was the cfo of morgan stanley, i started january 1, 2010 in acquisition when james gorman took over as ceo. and i think he's an all-star ceo. absolutely amazing, great partner. and when we started, it was 2010, so after the financial crisis, but morgan stanley was still very challenged.

moody's was going to downgrade the bank at one point. it was kind of shaky. and i think that he and we together -- the team led this extraordinary recovery and it got to the point in 2015 where i was ready for the next chapter. and i got this call. google, it seemed ok. so, made that move. david: before we get to google, you were at morgan stanley when the great financial crisis of 2007, 2008 occurred. it is said that people thought morgan stanley and goldman sachs and everyone else was going to go under. were you living through that and did you think morgan stanley would make it at that time? ruth: there were days i did not. it was bad. so i was running financial institutions banking at the time. the most meaningful part of my career was when hank called and said, i need advice, i need some bankers here. so i led a team that worked on fannie freddie and then aig, those were very, very challenging days.

and coming out of it, we did fannie freddie and then we did aig, put them into conservatorship. when i got to morgan stanley, john mack was ceo at the time. he said, you are in charge of liquidity. figure out liquidity. and, of course, days before what very much was running out of liquidity, there was no way to get liquidity. in fact, one day we were trying to figure out what to do, i was on the trading floor and i thought, can we maybe sell the chairs? i thought it might be a solution. it's supposed to be funny, but it was really scary at the time. it was hard. but we did this whole series of different teams and it worked. nufg came in, they were an incredible partner, it became a fed regulated bank. there were very scary times at a lot of important lessons. david: you got that deal done. then presumably some headhunter called you and said, you should be the cfo of google. how did you tell john mack or

james gorman you would leave to be this cfo of a tech company? was that easy to do? ruth: so, 2015, morgan stanley was in a really good spot. i was with bill campbell, an iconic leader in silicon valley. he has been written about as the trillion dollar coach, steve jobs, larry, sundar, so, it's a privilege to sit with him. at the time i said, i'm ready for the next chapter, but the one thing i am not going to do is be cfo again. we spent two hours in his living room. at the end he said, i heard you clearly, not cfo. and i said, exactly. he said, i've got the best idea, cfo of google. and of course, i immediately said, well, i hadn't thought of that one, that one is interesting. david: did you tell him you could not work with private equity people as closely as you had been? ruth: i know, sometimes in hardship in life is worthwhile. david: are we going to have driverless cars in our lifetime? ruth: you can hail one in san francisco, get where you want to go, and it's pretty remarkable.

♪

david: so what's it like moving from the east coast, where everything is finance and money, to the west coast, where everything is technology? did you fit in right away and did you really know how to use the computer things that they give you to use? [laughter] ruth: so, it was pretty fun. there were plenty of times where i would sit around in meetings and literally, i would be googling terms. and at one meeting, larry page actually caught me googling terms and he pointed that out to other people in the room. which was a little embarrassing, but i figured there were things i could do that they couldn't do. so, it was a learning curve. and my dad always -- he taught me at a young age a term that i have used constantly with my teams. he said, in his lab at stanford, if a physicist could not define a quark in under 30 seconds, they did not know what they were talking about. i use the quark test all the time. if someone is rambling on and cannot get to the point, they fail the test. my finance team knows this test. at google i'm working with amazing computer scientists, so

they never fail the quark test, they can explain things clearly. david: but did you understand what they were talking about from the beginning or to do have a special tutor that's talking technology? ruth: well i ran it, so i had a sneak preview. david: for people who are not experts on google and google search, larry page developed the page system, i guess it was called, and it was unique. but when he came to get the initial money in silicon valley, people said, there are plenty of search engines out here. there are 12 or 13 search engine companies. people did not think it was anything unique. what turned out to be so unique about the page system that it made google such a powerful company? ruth: i remember those days because i was a person who said, why do you need the eighth search engine? i was at morgan stanley at the time in 1998 running banking and our research analyst, mary meeker, an iconic analyst, pulled her team together and said, let's do a test. let's look at all the search

engines, let's do queries and see speed and relevance of response. and i think she may have started with that eight search engine question as well, but it quickly rose to the top. that has been the ethos all along. we still, to this day, have more than 100 product innovations every quarter. the whole idea is continue challenging ourselves about how to make the product better, more relevant, faster. and what's extraordinary sitting where we are today is how search has evolved. so, back then, it was 10 blue links. whoever is old enough in this room to remember 10 blue links, that's what it was. and it went to image search, voice search, and now multi-modal search. if i want your tie, i could take a picture of your tie and i can lens it and find a place to buy your tie. this whole evolution of search just keeps extending the runway. so it's very different today than it was. david: let's suppose i do a google search on something i should not do a google search on --

ruth: not that you ever do. david: i wouldn't do that, but theoretically, can somebody from google look up what i have searched? ruth: no. david: you cannot. ruth: absolutely not. you are protected. david: even if the government comes along? ruth: we do not look at what you search. david: the company for a long time was called google and google used to be spelled differently. why did they spell google that way as opposed to the way it was originally spelled, which was "el"? did they not know it was spelled differently? ruth: there are a couple of stories around this. one of the stories i think is true and fun is one of the early venture checks wrote it that way, so they went with it. david: ok. so why did -- google is a brand-name that is working well. the company is making a lot of money. but why did you need to go to alphabet and who came up with that name? ruth: larry and sergey had a vision about the next iteration.

and there were a lot of different things that they were investing in. the whole spirit of which is, you want to make sure you are investing for long term, investing for the future. and in the earliest days they created something called x, the moonshot factory within google. google x. and it gave birth to certain things like g-mail. it was really relevant for all of the innovation that came out of google. by 2015, their view was, we want to be able to avoid distraction on google, let google do what it's going to do, and create another set of businesses that the founders could focus on and really nurture growth outside of it. and so the word, as you would know better than anyone, is alphabets. so you put the two together and that was the goal. david: when google started you had 20% time. for 20% of the time you could do whatever you wanted, theoretically it might be helpful to the company, but it was not supposed to be necessarily. do you still have 20% time or did it go away? ruth: it was actually a little

more structured than that. the goal was if you had a great engineering idea and wanted to launch a new product, you could do it in one of two ways. you could leave, or you could be told, in 20% of your time, why don't you go experiment and see if you can grow it. so rather than having great ideas constantly leaving, the view is, let's nurture the talent and give growth opportunities. that's what the 20% time was. david: did any 20% time product ever get to the market? ruth: gmail is not inconsequential to billions of users. google brain came out of that. it continues to evolve so it moved over to become x. waymo came out of it. there are quite a bit and quite a bit of futures and applications. david: are we going to have driverless cars in our lifetime? ruth: i welcome everybody to come to san francisco because you can actually hail a waymo and get where you want to go. it's remarkable. david: have you done that?

ruth: absolutely. david: it's safe? ruth: it's so safe that within 15 seconds people are so bored. david: you don't need a helmet? ruth: you need a helmet with many drivers on the road. david: so for our young women ♪

david: you have a challenge that many people would like to have but they don't have. which is you have over $100 billion of cash. are you going to invest that in private equity firms, or are you going to put it in new technology? what will you do with more than $100 billion of cash and, have you thought about that? do you have people coming up to you all the time with great ideas for that cash? ruth: we do, as you would imagine. we are continuing to invest in

the business. there's a lot of extraordinary upside in the business. and we do make investments in acquisitions. so do all of our peers. there's a lot that's exciting going on in the world. and so we are looking across the board. it starts within the business, then it goes to investments and acquisitions, then obviously return of capital through a not inconsequential share re-purchase program. david: let's talk about artificial intelligence. artificial intelligence has gotten a lot of publicity in the last year or so. and openai has gotten an enormous amount of it. they have an affiliation with another technology company. i can't remember the name of it. ruth: i have heard that. david: another one. but do you have your own openai company, or do you do it all internally? what do you do to compete with openai and this other technology company? ruth: so, we have been infusing product to google with ai for more than a decade. in fact, billions of people today are benefiting from ai across our products.

it's benefiting what you see in search, in maps, in commerce, in youtube. i just mentioned multi-modal search, the ability to search with your camera. when you search for your kids in photos, that's ai. so ai has continued to be away to be a way to enhance what the product experience is. and we have done that historically through two groups within google. one is google brain, i already mentioned. the other is deep mind, an extraordinary acquisition led by an extraordinary entrepreneur. and we have put the two together last year, which has been really exciting. so, we are building on that foundation that has been an experience for the last decade. david: what's the excitement of working on technology in silicon valley? is it even more exciting than working in finance? ruth: it's hard to believe it's more exciting. we are living in the most extraordinary time with ai. bill gates just said that. i completely agree.

engineers who have been at google since inception are saying that this is the most exciting time in computer science in our lifetime. which always strikes me as profound because google has done ok. and what's extraordinary about it really goes to building on this decade of innovative work in ai. and so, where are we now? what we are doing is, we are addressing some of the most profound social challenges with ai in ways that are transformative. so, i will give you just a couple of examples. i think that one of the extraordinary places for all of us, and we have heard a lot about it here over lunch, is health care. part of the reason is, it's the ability with ai to aggregate so much data that you can actually have a level of diagnosis that is better than what specialists can do. so, one example, breast cancer. back in 2015, google had a breakthrough in detection, early detection of metastatic breast cancer.

one in seven women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. i was one of those. i've had breast cancer twice. so when i heard about this, i did the only rational thing, i called my oncologist and i said, is this really as important as i hope? he said, unequivocally. because only with ai can we democratize health care. it's the only way that oncologists everywhere, radiologists everywhere, all of the medical profession has the ability to leverage the insight that ai will give you through scans, reviewing a million scans. we are doing the same in other forms of cancer. we are doing it with something called diabetic retinopathy. blindness caused through diabetes, which can be prevented if diagnosed early enough. and so, i think that when you look at the impact -- this is what motivates our engineers. we're seeing it in health care,

we're seeing it in education. we see it with food scarcity. you can improve crop yields by looking at pest issues in farming. we are looking at so many different ways that ai can make a difference on the most profound issues. one last one, because you asked if i'm excited about it, yes, it's better than finance, climate change. sos, crisis alerts, extraordinary. we've seen the impacts of fires and flooding, 250 million people a year affected by flooding. but with ai we can predict -- and are -- with seven days notice of where water flows will be to get people out of harm's way. so this is not science fiction. this is here today. david: on climate change, to be realistic about it, are there things ai can do to make us readily able to solve climate change? is that your point? do you think we can? ruth: well, there's both adaptation and mitigation. so, around climate change, we have a whole other set of efforts going on. so for example, one of the major

sources of emissions is what you see right out the window here, start/stop from cars. we have something called project dreamlike, which streamlines that so you don't have the start/stops. we have something else that looks at planes, major source of carbon footprint are contrails, what many of us think are the beautiful white plumes off the back. you can adjust flight patterns and reduce carbon footprints. it's happening today, it's not a hope-for science fiction. david: you have talked about your breast cancer, you've written about it. why did you go public about it? many women say they don't want it to be known that they might have breast cancer. maybe that is right or wrong. why were you willing to be public about it? ruth: it is a personal thing. when i was first diagnosed, i did not want to talk about it. i was at a bank, one of few women. i was bald. like, it's not what you want to talk about. but i got to the point where i realized, in this day and age, if you get the right care, these diseases are manageable. and the scariest part is not knowing. to me, it was important to actually make it clear, this is

manageable, you can get through it, and to actually be a resource for people. david: so, for many women, you are a role model. you have a successful career in finance and technology. you are on your first husband, right? ruth: yeah, still hanging on. hanging on. david: and you have three kids. and so, you have done it all, had it all. you have a successful career, successful marriage, three happy, healthy kids. can you tell us something that doesn't make us so jealous about you? [laughter] because you are -- everybody cannot be as good as you. make us feel that everything is not perfect for you, leaving aside the breast cancer, so everybody doesn't feel like they are not going to live up to your standards. ruth: oh man. i think that one of the most important lessons i learned early in my career, as a woman in banking, there were not many of us. it wasn't the easiest environment.

there were a lot of men i have now gently decided to call blockheads, but they were worse than blockheads, and they made it difficult. and you learn to be resilient. the one thing is, i was going to outlast them, and that would be the joy that came from it. and fortunately, there are obviously a lot of extraordinary men at morgan stanley. there were not enough senior women in the day, and there are now. and so i learned to chart my career. i went to people who would take a risk on me. and i said, what's my highest and best use? and they opened doors that i did not know existed. to me, that is the most important. those hard days, bad lessons, i chalk them up to being lessons so i don't record them. david: what do you do when you are not working on technology, being a wife, being a mother, you're a tennis player, you're a golfer. what do you do for relaxation? do you have time for relaxation?

ruth: i kind of merge things because there is nothing more joyful than going on hikes with my kids or bike rides with my kids. so it's a lot of that. david: are your parents alive now? ruth: they are not. david: and did they live to see your success before they passed away? ruth: they did. my mom, actually when i was a young kid, said -- she was a psychologist and said, what's really important for women is, have your own identity and career outside of the home. she told me that when i was eight, my little sister was six. for some reason she thought that's the time to send that message. i'm grateful to her. david: did your father every say, this is better than being a physicist? ruth: my dad was remarkable. the tail end of that story about his journey from no high school education to a phd and a career at stanford is, he said, education is your passport for freedom. and so, the only point he impressed on us over and over was, really focus on education, keep opening doors and take risks.

if he did not take the risks he took to get himself out of austria, to teach himself physics, he would not have made it. and he was so grateful to get to the united states. so if there was anything else, it would be to get the life he never expected to have and to have a family. ♪ if i was back at the beginning, i would choose snhu all over again. if you're on the fence about getting your degree at snhu, you can do it. at snhu, having the support that i had, really helped me understand what i can accomplish. after i graduated, i started a new job. my degree has opened new doors that i truly didn't know existed. all it takes is one simple step and it can change your life. start your future today at snhu.edu.

- after military service, you bring a lot backe. to civilian life. leadership skills. technical ability. and a drive to serve in new ways. syracuse university's d'aniello institute for veterans and military families has empowered more than 200,000 veterans to serve their communities and their careers. from professional certifications, to job training, to help navigating programs and services, we give veterans access to support from anywhere in the world.

♪

joumanna: welcome to the qatar economic