Ruth Porat, the stalwart chief financial officer of Alphabet and Google, is no stranger to a crisis. She began her career at Morgan Stanley in 1987, a mere seven weeks before Black Monday—the largest single-day decline in trading history at the time. “At that moment, I was concerned that maybe my career was over before it even started,” she recalls.
Far from it. Porat is one of the rare corporate executives to have transcended the upper echelons of Wall Street to the highest ranks of Silicon Valley.
