Speaker 1: In recent years, one of the most powerful people in
Speaker 1: the financial and technology worlds has been Ruth Parratt. She
Speaker 1: served as chief financial officer for Morgan Stanley and then
Speaker 1: the chief financial officer for Google and Alphabet. She now
Speaker 1: serves as president and Chief Investment Officer for Alphabet. I
Speaker 1: sat down with her recently in Davos to talk about
Speaker 1: what she's going to do in her new position and
Speaker 1: how she's going to invest more than one hundred billion
Speaker 1: dollars that Alphabet now has. So we're very pleased to
Speaker 1: have Ruth Parratt here. Ruth, as you may know, has
Speaker 1: recently been promoted. She for almost the last decade has
Speaker 1: been the CFO of Google and Alphabet, and now she
Speaker 1: still has that title, but she's now also the president
Speaker 1: and chief Investment officer for Alphabet.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 3: I am, And it's great to be here with you.
Speaker 1: So you have three jobs, CFO, President, you get three
Speaker 1: salaries for that.
Speaker 4: I think I'm doing okay, okay, So.
Speaker 1: Everybody wants to talk to you here because you've got
Speaker 1: a lot of money. You've got over one hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars of cash to invest, so people want to see you.
Speaker 1: Why do you come to Davos because people are just
Speaker 1: going to be bombarding you give me money for this
Speaker 1: or that. Is it really worth the effort to slept
Speaker 1: all the way here or are you happy to come
Speaker 1: here and you actually meet people you actually want to see?
Speaker 4: Well, I've actually been coming here since I ran tech
Speaker 4: banking at Morgan Stanley back in the nineties and was
Speaker 4: hunting for fees, and so I think it's sort.
Speaker 3: Of become one stop shopping. You make the trip and.
Speaker 4: Then you get to see people from Asia and Africa,
Speaker 4: Middle East, Europe, so it's just that one stop shop.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about your background now that you mentioned it.
Speaker 1: Where did you grow up?
Speaker 3: I grew up. I was born in England, mostly grew.
Speaker 1: Up in California, California. Your father was a professor at
Speaker 1: Stanford or something like that.
Speaker 3: My father actually was a Holocaust refugee.
Speaker 4: So my father escaped from Vienna right after Krystal Knock
Speaker 4: and made it to Palestine high school education.
Speaker 3: He ended up in enrolling in the.
Speaker 4: British Army, fought in the Balla Bella Laman and in
Speaker 4: the army taught himself physics because he figured if he
Speaker 4: survived he needed something that somebody valued after the war
Speaker 4: that actually that work, that plan worked. He ended up
Speaker 4: getting to England, where I was born, and then eventually
Speaker 4: got to the United States, who was sponsored by Senator Kennedy.
Speaker 4: So he spent his whole career at Harvard and then
Speaker 4: at Stamford. So I mostly grew up in.
Speaker 1: California, California, Okay, So you're in Stanford for a nice area,
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. Why would you want to go to a
Speaker 1: business school at Wharton? Why did you go across the
Speaker 1: country to go to business school? And why did you
Speaker 1: want to go to business school to begin with? Why
Speaker 1: not be a physicist like your father?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 4: I loved Wharton, so I'm not going to give you that.
Speaker 4: You know, I thought I was going to end up
Speaker 4: being First of all, I I got married. My husband
Speaker 4: was a lawyer on Wall Street, so I was commuting.
Speaker 4: But I thought that I would go into investment. I
Speaker 4: thought I'd go into consulting, and then I took this
Speaker 4: amazing merger's accounting class, kind of geeky, and decided I
Speaker 4: was going to go into mergers and acquisitions.
Speaker 3: So ended up on the East Coast.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So she ultimately became the CFO of Morgan Stanley. Okay,
Speaker 1: and many people thought you might go in the government someday,
Speaker 1: and you actually could have been the CEO of Morgan Stanley.
Speaker 1: Why would you leave the important world of finance for
Speaker 1: something less significant like technology?
Speaker 2: Why would you do that?
Speaker 4: You know, kind of right time, right place, Like when
Speaker 4: I was the CFO of Morgan Stanley. I started in
Speaker 4: that position January first, twenty ten, when James Gorman took
Speaker 4: over as CEO, and I think he's an all star CEO,
Speaker 4: absolutely amazing, great partner. And when we started, it was
Speaker 4: twenty ten, so after the financial crisis, but Morgan Stanley
Speaker 4: was still very challenged. You know, Moody's was going to
Speaker 4: downgrade the bank at one point. It was it was
Speaker 4: kind of shaky.
Speaker 3: And I think that he and.
Speaker 4: We, together the team, led this extraordinary kind of recovery
Speaker 4: and it got to the point in twenty fifteen where
Speaker 4: I was ready for the next chapter, and then I
Speaker 4: got this call.
Speaker 3: Right of Google. It seemed okay, so all right, wade that.
Speaker 1: Move before we get the good Well, you were at
Speaker 1: Morgan's Stanley when the great meltdown, the Great Financial Crisis
Speaker 1: of seven o eight occurred, and it is said that
Speaker 1: people thought that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and everybody
Speaker 1: else was going to go under. Were you living through
Speaker 1: that and did you actually think Morgan Stanley was going
Speaker 1: to make it at that time?
Speaker 3: There were days I did not. It was bad.
Speaker 4: So I was running financial institutions banking at the time,
Speaker 4: and probably the most meaningful part of my career was
Speaker 4: when Hank Paulson called and said, I need advice. I
Speaker 4: need some bankers here, and so I went and led
Speaker 4: a team that worked on Fanny Freddy and then AIG
Speaker 4: and those were very, very challenging days.
Speaker 3: And coming out of it at the we.
Speaker 4: Did Fanny Freddy and then we did AIG, put them
Speaker 4: into conservatorship, and I had some Morgan Stanley. John mackwa
Speaker 4: CEO at the time, and he said, okay, you're in
Speaker 4: charge of liquidity, figure out liquidity. And of course days
Speaker 4: before what very much was running out of liquidity, there
Speaker 4: was no way to get liquidity. In fact, one day
Speaker 4: we were trying to figure out what to do when
Speaker 4: I was on the trading floor and I'm like, can
Speaker 4: we maybe sell the chairs?
Speaker 3: There were Herman Miller chairs.
Speaker 4: I thought that might be a solution that was supposed
Speaker 4: to be funny, but it was actually.
Speaker 3: Really scary at the time, and so no, it was hard.
Speaker 4: But we did this whole series of different teams and
Speaker 4: it worked. You know, MUFG came in, they were an
Speaker 4: incredible partner. The government came in, we became a Fed
Speaker 4: regulated bank. But there were some very scary times and
Speaker 4: a lot of important lessons.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you got that deal done.
Speaker 1: Then presumably some headhunter called you up and said you
Speaker 1: should be the CFO of Google And did you how
Speaker 1: did you tell John Mack or James Gorman you were
Speaker 1: going to leave to be the CFO of a tech company?
Speaker 2: Was that easy to do?
Speaker 4: So twenty fifteen, Morgan Stanley was in a really good spot.
Speaker 4: I happened to be with Bill Campbell, an and iconic
Speaker 4: leader in Silicon Valley. He's been written about as the
Speaker 4: trillion dollar coach. He coached Steve Jobs, Larry Sergei, Sundar Eric.
Speaker 3: So it's a privileged with them.
Speaker 4: And at the time I said, you know, I'm ready
Speaker 4: for the next chapter, but the one thing I'm not
Speaker 4: going to do is be CFO again. We spent two
Speaker 4: hours in his living room and at the end, he said, okay,
Speaker 4: I heard you clearly not CFO, And I said exactly,
Speaker 4: and he said, okay.
Speaker 3: So the best I've got the best idea for CFO of.
Speaker 4: Google, And of course I immediately said, well, I hadn't
Speaker 4: thought of that one.
Speaker 3: That one is interesting.
Speaker 1: But did you tell him this would mean you wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to work with private equity people as closely
Speaker 1: as you had been.
Speaker 3: You know, somewhat. Times hardship in life is worthwhile.
Speaker 1: So what's it like moving from the East Coast, where
Speaker 1: everything is finance and money, to the West Coast, where
Speaker 1: everything is technology.
Speaker 2: Did you fit in right away?
Speaker 1: And did you really know how to use all the
Speaker 1: computer things that they give you to use?
Speaker 3: So it was it was It was pretty fun.
Speaker 4: There were plenty of times where I would sit around
Speaker 4: in meetings and literally I would be googling terms, And
Speaker 4: at one meeting, Larry Page actually caught me googling terms
Speaker 4: and he kind of pointed that out to other people
Speaker 4: in the room, which was a little embarrassing. But I
Speaker 4: figured there were some things that I could do that
Speaker 4: they can do, and so it was a learning curve
Speaker 4: and my dad always he taught me at a young age,
Speaker 4: a term that I've used constantly with my teams. He
Speaker 4: said in his lab at Stanford, if a physicist could
Speaker 4: not define a quark in under thirty seconds, they didn't
Speaker 4: know what they were talking about, And so I used
Speaker 4: the quark test all the time. If somebody's rambling on
Speaker 4: and on and they can't get to the point, they
Speaker 4: probably don't know what they're talking about. They failed the
Speaker 4: quart test. My finance team knows this core test, and
Speaker 4: at Google I'm working with amazing computer scientists, so they
Speaker 4: never fail the cork test. They can explain things really clearly,
Speaker 4: which shoots you up the learning curve.
Speaker 1: But did you understand what they were talking about from
Speaker 1: the beginning, or did you have a special tutor that's
Speaker 1: taking technology for deedails I had.
Speaker 4: Actually run tech Banking into Google Public, so I had
Speaker 4: a little sneak preview.
Speaker 1: So today for people who are not experts on Google
Speaker 1: and Google Search, Larry Page really developed the page system
Speaker 1: I guess was called, and it was unique. But when
Speaker 1: he came to get the initial money in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: people said, well, there's plenty of search engines out here.
Speaker 1: They're like twelve or thirteen search engine companies, and so
Speaker 1: people didn't think it was anything so unique.
Speaker 2: What turned out to be.
Speaker 1: So unique about the page system that it made Google
Speaker 1: such a powerful company.
Speaker 4: I actually remember those days because I was one of
Speaker 4: the people who said, why do we need It was
Speaker 4: actually the eighth search engine? Why do you need the
Speaker 4: eight search engine? And I was at Morgan Stanley at
Speaker 4: the time nineteen ninety eight running banking, and our research analyst,
Speaker 4: Mary Meeker and iconic analyst, pulled her team together and said,
Speaker 4: you know what, Let's do a test. Let's look at
Speaker 4: all the search engines. Let's do queries and see speed
Speaker 4: and relevance of response. And I think she may have
Speaker 4: started with that eight search engine question as well, but
Speaker 4: it quickly rose to the top.
Speaker 3: And that has been the ethos all along.
Speaker 4: We still to this day have more than one hundred
Speaker 4: product innovations every quarter. The whole idea is continue challenging
Speaker 4: ourselves about how to make the product better, more relevant, faster.
Speaker 4: And what's extraordinary sitting where we are today is how
Speaker 4: searches evolve. So back then it was ten blue links.
Speaker 4: Whoever's old enough in this room to remember ten blue links,
Speaker 4: That's what it was.
Speaker 3: And then it went to.
Speaker 4: Image search, voice search, and now multimodal search. If I
Speaker 4: want your tie, I can take a picture of your tie,
Speaker 4: and then I can just I can lens it, and
Speaker 4: I can find a place to buy your tie. So
Speaker 4: this whole evolution of search just keeps extending the runway
Speaker 4: for a search.
Speaker 3: So it's very different obviously today than it was.
Speaker 1: I suppose I do a Google search on something. Maybe
Speaker 1: I shouldn't be doing a Google search on or.
Speaker 3: Something not that you ever do.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't do that, but I just theoretically can somebody
Speaker 1: from Google, an officer like you look up what I've searched.
Speaker 4: No, you cannot, absolutely, yeah, protected right or protected.
Speaker 2: Even if the government comes along.
Speaker 4: We do not look at what you search. Can go
Speaker 4: into incognitumo, but we do not look at what you search.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So the company a long time was spelled was called Google,
Speaker 1: and Google used to be spelled differently. Why did they
Speaker 1: spell Google that way as opposed their way it was
Speaker 1: originally spelled, which was e L. Did they not know
Speaker 1: that was spelled differently?
Speaker 3: Well, there are a couple of stories around this.
Speaker 4: So one of the stories that I think is true
Speaker 4: and fun is that one of the early venture checks
Speaker 4: actually wrote it that way, so they went with it.
Speaker 1: Okay, so why did Google is the brand name that's
Speaker 1: working very well, companies making a lot of money and
Speaker 1: so forth, But why did you need to go to alphabet?
Speaker 2: And who came up with that name?
Speaker 4: So Larry and Sergei had a vision about kind of
Speaker 4: the next iteration, and there were a lot of different
Speaker 4: things that they were investing in, the whole spirit of
Speaker 4: which is you want to make sure you're investing for
Speaker 4: long term, investing for the future. And in the earliest days,
Speaker 4: what they did is they created something called X. It
Speaker 4: was the moonshot factory within Google Google X, and it
Speaker 4: gave birth to things like Gmail, I mean made it
Speaker 4: was really relevant for all of the type of innovation
Speaker 4: that came out of Google. And by twenty fifteen, their
Speaker 4: view was, we want to be able to avoid distraction
Speaker 4: on Google. Let Google do what it's going to do
Speaker 4: and create another set of businesses that the founders could
Speaker 4: focus on and really nurture growth outside of it. And
Speaker 4: so the word is you would know better than anyone
Speaker 4: is alphabets, and so you put the two together, and
Speaker 4: that was the goal.
Speaker 2: So it used to be.
Speaker 1: When Google was started, you had what was called twenty
Speaker 1: percent time, So for twenty percent of your time, you
Speaker 1: could do.
Speaker 2: Whatever you wanted.
Speaker 1: Theoretically it might be helpful at a company, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to be necessarily, so you still have twenty
Speaker 1: percent time or they go away.
Speaker 4: Well, it was actually a little more structured than that.
Speaker 4: The goal was if you had some great engineering idea
Speaker 4: and you wanted to launch a new product, you could
Speaker 4: do it in one of two ways.
Speaker 3: You could leave or you could be told.
Speaker 4: You know what, in twenty percent of your time, why
Speaker 4: don't you go experiment with this and see if.
Speaker 3: You can grow it.
Speaker 4: So rather than having great ideas constantly leaving, the view
Speaker 4: as let's nurture the talent, let's give people these growth opportunities,
Speaker 4: let's give it a go. And so that's what the
Speaker 4: twenty percent time was.
Speaker 1: Any twenty percent time product ever get to the market.
Speaker 4: Well, a Gmail is not an inconsequential billions of users.
Speaker 4: Google Brain came out of that. It's our core part
Speaker 4: of our AI business, and then we've continued to evolve it,
Speaker 4: so it moved over to become ax.
Speaker 3: Weymo came out of it.
Speaker 4: So there's quite quite a bit and quite a bit
Speaker 4: of features and applications.
Speaker 2: Think of waymo. Are we going to have driverless cars
Speaker 2: in our lifetime?
Speaker 4: Well, I welcome everybody to come to San Francisco because
Speaker 4: you can actually hail a way Moo in San Francisco,
Speaker 4: hop in it and get where you want to go.
Speaker 3: And it's pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2: Have you done that?
Speaker 3: Absolutely brilliant safe.
Speaker 4: It's so safe that the most fascinating part is within
Speaker 4: about fifteen seconds people are bored because it's so safe there,
Speaker 4: like they.
Speaker 2: Realize, you know, we don't need a helmet or in
Speaker 2: the nuget's safe?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: Do you need a helmet with many drivers on the road.
Speaker 1: So for a young woman that's watching this or a
Speaker 1: young man, and what are the recommendations you'd have to
Speaker 1: get ahead? And the finance world technology we're is it
Speaker 1: be smarter than other people, be nicer than the other people,
Speaker 1: be harder working.
Speaker 2: What is it that takes to be successful?
Speaker 4: Well, there's no substitute for hard work, because the hard
Speaker 4: work actually gets you smarter enough the learning curve faster.
Speaker 4: So most certainly that's one of them. I think the
Speaker 4: other I've already said chart your career work for somebody
Speaker 4: who's going to take a risk on you and give
Speaker 4: you runway. But very importantly, we need to do that
Speaker 4: for someone. So at one point, when I was asked
Speaker 4: to run technology equity capital markets on the equity trading floor,
Speaker 4: a senior partner called me into his office and he said,
Speaker 4: I will be your I will be your air cover.
Speaker 4: All the guys that were going to sell you use
Speaker 4: these military terms. There a lot of military guys, but
Speaker 4: it was a good one. I will be your air cover.
Speaker 4: I think you will soar, but if you stumble, I'm
Speaker 4: here to be your air cover. I think everyone needs
Speaker 4: air cover, and I think we all need to.
Speaker 3: Be air cover.
Speaker 4: And the other is keep learning and keep growing. And
Speaker 4: when you're plateauing, my line was what's my highest and
Speaker 4: best use and don't do it on a specific timeline,
Speaker 4: but keep evolving and if you go to the right people,
Speaker 4: they'll keep opening doors and take those doors.
Speaker 3: And then finally, use your voice.
Speaker 1: You have a challenge that many people would like to
Speaker 1: have but they don't have, which is you've got over
Speaker 1: one hundred billion dollars of cash, and so are you
Speaker 1: going to invest that in private equity firms, or are
Speaker 1: you going to do new technology? What are you going
Speaker 1: to do with one hundred billion dollars more than one
Speaker 1: hundred billion dollars of cash? And you know, have you
Speaker 1: thought about that? You have people coming up to you
Speaker 1: all the time with great ideas for that cash.
Speaker 4: We do as you would imagine. So, look, we're continuing
Speaker 4: to invest in the business. There's a lot of extraordinary
Speaker 4: upside in the business. And then we do make investments
Speaker 4: and acquisitions, so do all of our peers. There's a
Speaker 4: lot that's exciting going on in the world, and so
Speaker 4: we're looking across the board. Starts within the business, then
Speaker 4: it goes to investments and acquisitions, then obviously return to
Speaker 4: capital through a not in consequential share repurchase program.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: Artificial intelligence has gotten a lot of publicity in the
Speaker 1: last year or so, and open ai has got an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of it, and they have an affiliation with
Speaker 1: another technology company.
Speaker 2: I can't remember the name of it. I've heard that
Speaker 2: another one.
Speaker 1: But do you have your own kind of open ai
Speaker 1: company or do you do it all internally? And what
Speaker 1: do you do to compete with open ai? And this
Speaker 1: other technology company.
Speaker 4: So we've had We've been infusing product at Google with
Speaker 4: AI for more than a decade. In fact, billions of
Speaker 4: people today are benefiting from AI across our products. It's
Speaker 4: benefiting what you see in search, in maps, and commerce
Speaker 4: and YouTube. You know, I just mentioned multimodal search, the
Speaker 4: ability to search with your camera, when you search for
Speaker 4: your kids and photos, that's AI. So AI has continued
Speaker 4: to be a way to enhance what the product experiences.
Speaker 4: And we've done that historically through two groups within Google.
Speaker 4: One Google Brain I already mentioned, and the other is
Speaker 4: deep Mind, an extraordinary acquisition back years ago led by
Speaker 4: an extraordinary entrepreneur, Demesistatus, And we've put the two together
Speaker 4: last year, which has been really exciting. And so we
Speaker 4: are building on that foundation that has been an experience
Speaker 4: for the last decade.
Speaker 1: What's the excitement of work in technology in the Silicon Valley?
Speaker 1: Is it even more exciting than working in finance? Or
Speaker 1: not quite as exciting?
Speaker 3: But okay, it's hard to believe it's more exciting, ed.
Speaker 4: I mean, we're living in the most extraordinary time with AI.
Speaker 4: Bill Gates just said that I completely agree. Engineers who've
Speaker 4: been at Google since inception are saying that this is
Speaker 4: the most exciting time in computer science in our lifetime,
Speaker 4: which always strikes me as profound because Google's done okay,
Speaker 4: And what's extraordinary about it really goes to building on
Speaker 4: this decade of innovative work in AI. And so where
Speaker 4: are we now.
Speaker 3: We're at the What we're doing.
Speaker 4: Is we're addressing some of the most profound social challenge
Speaker 4: is with AI in ways that are transformative. So to
Speaker 4: give you an a couple of examples, I think that
Speaker 4: one of the extraordinary places for all of us, and
Speaker 4: we've heard a lot about it.
Speaker 3: Here over lunch, is healthcare. And part of the reason is.
Speaker 4: It's the ability with AI to aggregate so much data
Speaker 4: that you can actually have a level of diagnosis that
Speaker 4: is better than what specialists can do. So one example
Speaker 4: breast cancer. Back in twenty fifteen, Google had a breakthrough
Speaker 4: in detection early detection of metastatic breast cancer. One in
Speaker 4: seven women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. I was
Speaker 4: one of those. I've had breast cancer twice, so when
Speaker 4: I heard about this, I did the only rational thing.
Speaker 4: I called my oncologist at Memorial Slung Kettering, and I
Speaker 4: said is this really as important as I hope? And
Speaker 4: he said unequivocally, because only with AI can we democratize healthcare.
Speaker 4: It's the only way that oncologists everywhere, radiologists everywhere, all
Speaker 4: of the medical profession has the ability to leverage the
Speaker 4: insight that AI will give you through scans, reviewing a
Speaker 4: million scans. We're doing the same in other forms of cancer.
Speaker 4: We're doing it with something called diabetic retinopathy blindness cause
Speaker 4: through diabetes, which can be prevented if diagnosed early enough.
Speaker 4: And so I think that when you look at the
Speaker 4: impact of a this is what motivates our engineers. We're
Speaker 4: seeing in healthcare, we're seeing in education, We're seeing it.
Speaker 3: With food scarcity.
Speaker 4: You can improve crop yields by looking at pest issues,
Speaker 4: in forming. We're looking at so many different ways that
Speaker 4: AI can make a difference on the most profound issues.
Speaker 4: One last one, because it's you asked, am I excited
Speaker 4: about it? Yes, It's better than even finance, climate change,
Speaker 4: you know, SOS crisis alerts extraordinary. We've seen the impact
Speaker 4: of buyers and flooding, two hundred and fifty million people
Speaker 4: a year affected by flooding. But with AI, we can
Speaker 4: predict and r with seven days. Notice where the waterflows
Speaker 4: will be to get people out of harm's way. So
Speaker 4: this is not science fiction. This is here today.
Speaker 2: On climate change to be realistic about it.
Speaker 1: These are things that you think that AI can really
Speaker 1: make us make more readily, make us able to solve
Speaker 1: climate change. Is at your point you think we can.
Speaker 3: Well, there's both adaptation and mitigation.
Speaker 4: So around climate change we have a whole other set
Speaker 4: of efforts going on. So, for example, one of the
Speaker 4: major sources of emissions is what you see right out
Speaker 4: the window here start stop from cars. We have something
Speaker 4: called Project green Light which streamlines that so you don't
Speaker 4: have the start stops. We have something else that looks
Speaker 4: at planes. Major source of carbon footprint are contrails, what
Speaker 4: many of us think are the beautiful white plumes off
Speaker 4: the back. You can adjust flight patterns and reduce carbon footprint.
Speaker 4: So the short answer is yes, and it's happening today.
Speaker 4: It's not a hope for science fiction.
Speaker 1: You've been public about your breast cancer. You've talked about it,
Speaker 1: written about it, and so worth why did you go
Speaker 1: public about it? Many women say they don't want it
Speaker 1: to be known that they might have breast cancer. Maybe
Speaker 1: that's right or wrong, But why were you so willing
Speaker 1: to be public about it?
Speaker 4: It is a really personal thing. And when I was
Speaker 4: first diagnosed, I didn't want to talk about it. I
Speaker 4: was at a bank one a few women. You know,
Speaker 4: I was bald, and it's like, it's not what you want.
Speaker 3: To talk about.
Speaker 4: But I got to the point where I realized, in
Speaker 4: this day and age, if you get the right care,
Speaker 4: actually these diseases are manageable, and the scariest part is
Speaker 4: not knowing. And so to me, it was important to
Speaker 4: actually make it clear this is manageable, you can.
Speaker 3: Get through it, and to actually be a resource for people.
Speaker 1: So for many women, you're a role model. You have
Speaker 1: a successful career in finance and technology. You were on
Speaker 1: your first husband.
Speaker 2: Right yeah, yeah, and hanging on hanging on right. So
Speaker 2: and you have three kids, and so you've done it all.
Speaker 1: You've had it all your you know, have a successful career,
Speaker 1: successful marriage, healthy, happy kids. Can you tell us something
Speaker 1: that doesn't make us so feel jealous about you? Because
Speaker 1: you're I mean here, you know everybody can't be as
Speaker 1: good as you, So make us feel that everything isn't
Speaker 1: perfect for you? Leaving aside the breast cancer, so that
Speaker 1: everybody else doesn't feel like they're not going to be
Speaker 1: able to live up to your standards.
Speaker 3: Oh man, other than other Thandians. Look, I think that.
Speaker 4: One of the most important lessons I learned early in
Speaker 4: my career. You know, as a woman in banking, there
Speaker 4: weren't many of us. It wasn't the easiest environment. There
Speaker 4: were a lot of men I've now gently decided to
Speaker 4: call blockheads, but you know, they were worse than blockheads,
Speaker 4: and they made it difficult, and you learned to be resilient.
Speaker 4: The one thing is I was going to outlast them,
Speaker 4: and that would be the joy that came from it.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, there are obviously a lot.
Speaker 4: Of extraordinary men at Morgan Stanley. There weren't enough senior
Speaker 4: women in the day, and there are more now. And
Speaker 4: so I learned to chart my career. I went to
Speaker 4: people who would take a risk on me, and I said,
Speaker 4: what's my highest and best use? And they opened doors
Speaker 4: that I didn't know existed. And to me, that's the
Speaker 4: most important is those hard day's bad lessons. I just
Speaker 4: chalk them up to being lessons, so I don't actually
Speaker 4: record them.
Speaker 1: So what do you do when you're not working on technology,
Speaker 1: being a wife, being a mother, You have a tennis player,
Speaker 1: or you're a golfer. What do you do for relaxation
Speaker 1: the content you have time for relaxation, Well, I.
Speaker 4: Kind of merge things because there's nothing more joyful to
Speaker 4: me than going on hikes with my kids or bike
Speaker 4: rides with my kids, and so it's you.
Speaker 3: Know, it's a lot of that.
Speaker 2: Are your parents alive now?
Speaker 3: They are not?
Speaker 1: And did they live to see your success before they
Speaker 1: passed away?
Speaker 3: They did.
Speaker 4: My mom, actually, when I was a young kid, said
Speaker 4: she was a psychologist, and she said what's really important
Speaker 4: for women is have your own identity and a career
Speaker 4: outside of them home.
Speaker 3: She told me that when I was eight, my little
Speaker 3: sister was six.
Speaker 4: For some reasons, he thought that's the time you need
Speaker 4: to send that message.
Speaker 3: So I'm grateful to her for that message.
Speaker 1: Your father did he ever say this is better than
Speaker 1: being a physicist what you're doing.
Speaker 3: My dad was pretty remarkable, you know.
Speaker 4: The tale end of that story about his journey from
Speaker 4: no high school education to a PhD in a career
Speaker 4: at Stanford is he said education is your passport for
Speaker 4: freedom and so the only point he impressed on us
Speaker 4: over and over was really focus on education, keep opening doors,
Speaker 4: and take risks. If he didn't take the risk he
Speaker 4: took to get himself out of Austria to teach himself physics,
Speaker 4: he wouldn't have made it. And he was so grateful
Speaker 4: to get to the United States. So if there's anything else,
Speaker 4: it was that the life that he never expected he
Speaker 4: would have, and then to have a family.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to hear more of my interviews. You
Speaker 1: can subscribe and download my podcast on Spotify, Apple, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen.