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 alphabet. She has enormous influence and has done a great job in making certain their Balance Sheet works well and they really are better organized. I have no doubt she is going to be a power at alphabet, unless the next president says i would like her to be secretary of treasury. She will be a terrific candidate for that position. During this 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 . Done quite well under your leadership. Im curious, are more people looking at doing searches during this covid19 time than ever before or are people not spending as much time searching . Ruth people are spending a lot of time searching. We have trillions of searches every year. It is the nature of searches that change. 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, how am i going to live my life . More how to searches. What do i do in cooking, what do i do for meditation . Now youre seeing people move back into more commercial activities. One of the big searches we saw was how can i help in my community . How can i help others . It is always quite inspiring to see, through search, how people are feeling about the world. David most employees are working remotely is that correct . Ruth we moved everybody to remote from home, all 120,000, but we are starting to move people back in. In taiwan, we are 70 . In europe, we are bringing some people back, we are fundamentally moving everyone to work from home. David has this ever worried you . Ruth it did seem daunting at first. I am responsible for our Crisis Response and put together a 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 what 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. We focused on that and i think that was important. Google is really about our people and delivery for people in communities because of our compute capacity. We did not have to worry about our ability to deal with this surge in Online Activity because of the investments for many years and all of the testing for what could happen in a crisis scenario. I think it is an important point because you cannot solve the Risk Management issue in the middle of a crisis. You need to solve it ahead of time. And that 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 it is great innovation. Collaboration supports innovation, collaboration within teams and across teams. Collaboration and serendipity, so we do look forward to having people back in the office. What we are looking at is the productivity lift you get if people work from home some days, be in the office, particularly when the rest of the team or teams are in the office, and you can save commute time because you are solving what people want in their personal life, it is 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 getting free food. What about working from home . Do you give them free food by delivery somehow . How did they compensate for that . Ruth we are not doing that, but a lot of people focus on food when what we are trying to create, have been trying to create, is this fun, quirky, magical campus. It is about more than the free food. It is the experience on campus. What we did when we moved everybody home is we moved a lot of these connecting the community to a virtual delivery. For 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 gratifying, if i can broaden that question, is what i saw at google and what i saw in my colleagues. This is been an extraordinarily stressful time. We feel this responsibility 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. That was inspiring. It has been an extraordinary time. What i learned about myself is one of the positive elements of this has been sheltering in place and having my kids, who graduated from college, now back with us for a limited time. That has been remarkable. My husband and i have thoroughly enjoyed that. David some people say 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. At congressional hearings recently, your ceo testified. What is your response to the view that the Technology Companies are becoming so dominant it is not healthy . Ruth we are very mindful of the fact that with the scale of these companies comes scrutiny and it is incumbent on 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 intense competition in the u. S. , competitors outside the u. S. , and Many Companies and individuals would not be able to operate the way they did without support and benefit from technology. It is a fair question and we are engaged constructively here and around the globe with regulators. 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 . [laughter] when i got to google there was 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 and can we actually try to dimension that analytically . Put together the data that led to a conversation about beginning a Share Repurchase program. It started small, but we have increased it five times in the last number of years. The last one we did in the Second Quarter, a 28 billion authorization, and so it has been a journey. We have been increasing the return capital. I spent a big chunk of my career covering firms like carlisle private equity firm so i do appreciate an efficient capital structure and this is trying to get the balance. David is it hard to break into the Technology World as a woman or the financial world . Ruth i think they are pretty similar. The difference is it is a more collaborative environment in tech i would say. Wall street can be pretty rough. David let us talk about your background, how you came to be the cfo of google, alphabet, and before that, Morgan Stanley. 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 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. He decided to teach himself physics while in the army. He used to tell his kids his fellow soldiers would tease him and say, you will die before you can use these physics. 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, that is where i was born, and was given a position at harvard. The only two places he worked was harvard and stanford. We moved to Silicon 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 be a lawyer like you. David you were smart not to do that, but you did go toward an to wharton for an mba . 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 you went to Morgan Stanley was it 50 women . Ruth far from it. It was 1987, sort of the stone age for any sort of sense of what was the role of women in banking. I think the general attitude was that those of us who were there would get married, have kids, and leave. We did not have the stamina. I love Morgan Stanley. I think Morgan Stanley was the best of the best, but that was the ethos on wall street. A couple of years into my career i was working on a deal and 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. The thing that was inspiring and critical in my career was that there were so many extraordinary men who really helped open doors. And they really bet on me. I did not know at the time 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 one of the 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 became aig. I that it was extraordinary to use skills i developed at Morgan Stanley for the country. That is one of the most meaningful times. David you are doing that as an employee . Ruth i was. David Morgan Stanley went through crisis at that time. Im sure you remember it. Morgan stanley was close to not being able to survive, and then a japanese investor said, we will put in money. That was three times the stock price you are trading at and people were not sure if mitsubishi would show up. Were you ever in doubt . Ruth that was a terrifying time. The series of events was 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 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. That is 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 somebody called you up, i do not know who it was, was it a headhunter, somebody from google saying we would like you to consider the cfo . Were you surprised at that offer because you are a wall street person not a Technology Person . Ruth it was 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 larry, sergei, steve jobs. Eric schmidt. I left the Board Meeting and went to sit down and talk about life, generally, and he started probing what would i want to do . My comment to him was, i did not know. I would like another chapter, but i would not leave Morgan Stanley to be a cfo anywhere else. For two hours he kept coming back to that strong assertion, and at the end of two hours he said, ok, you would not leave to be cfo, correct . I am adamant. 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. I did not believe it. I left his home and did not actually believe it was real or that it would happen and within a couple of hours he 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 want you to be the cfo . Ruth i had worked on the google ipo and had interactions through the stanford board. We had a broad conversation, fascinating as larry pages 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 . 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. If the question were brought as to who was tougher, wall street or tech, you know, both 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. I think they are actually pretty similar. It is a more collaborative environment in tech i would say. Wall street could 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. David so, 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. Do you say we have got to change things and people say we do not need to change, or 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 . One of the extraordinary things at google is we have smart and inquisitive people. As i laid out whatever issue it is, anchored in data it engaged in the conversations. So i actually did not 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, 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 . The hardest thing has been producing our films and series because that is very much on set and physical. We are working on that. But 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. When you have built a culture as we have, everybody pitches in and figures out what they need to do. An example would be our animation group. I had nothing to do with it, cannot take the credit. But they moved hundreds of workstations out of the office into the home over a weekend and have been able to continue to produce great animated films and series from the house, in a way that was remarkable, and not centrally directed. David many ceos say offcamera they are not going to be hiring back everybody that they once had, they realize they can get by with fewer people, and they do not need as much office space because people are happy to work from home. Will that be true in your case . The viruses been so tragic for people with the economy, for unemployment, and certainly hotels and other businesses like that are down. Fortunately as an internet business, we are actually up, so we continue to hire all the way through this crisis. And we are adding New Buildings still. So we are incredibly fortunate. David alphabet is the parent company, you are the cfo of that and also google. Google was the Search Engine and that is still massively profitable by anybodys standard i assume. It is profitable, right . Ruth still doing all right. David what about Cloud Computing . You are number three but catching up to the number one, amazon, and number two, microsoft. Is that an important Growth Engine . Ruth it is a sizable market in early innings. The opportunity for businesses to migrate to the cloud provides them with extraordinary added capabilities. They are looking to us for security and Data Analytics and ai, that is what we are able to do with customers. You have really seen the important migration to the cloud. So we are investing meaningfully in it. We do see it as a sizable opportunity. David one of your ar