It’s no surprise that the Wharton alumni network is well-represented throughout Google and Alphabet, as these four C-suite executives and employment data on recent grads show.
Ruth Porat WG87
Title: Alphabet CFO
Tenure: 5 years
Insight: Speaking at a Wharton Tarnopol Dean’s Lecture Series panel titled “10 Years After the Financial Crisis,” the former Morgan Stanley CFO said the lessons learned in 2008 are valuable in her current role: “It’s not just that it was a moment in time and we’ve moved on — I view them as relevant today, and they’re very much a part of how I think about the way we run our business.”
Eileen Naughton C79 WG87
Title: Google Vice President, People Operations
Tenure: 14 years
Insight: Naughton delivered this stat at a Think with Google presentation in 2015: YouTube views and Google searches delivered 134,000 “audience signals” per second — and that was before wearables and smart tech added even more consumer data to the mix. (In February, Naughton announced she was stepping down to relocate to New York and take on a new role with the company.)
Caesar Sengupta WG06
Title: Google GM and Vice President, Payments and Next Billion Users
Tenure: 14 years
Insight: Sengupta heads the Next Billion Users initiative and has detailed Google’s Cache checking-account service, reportedly debuting this year. He described working for Pichai since 2007 and his ascent to the C-suite to Buzzfeed News: “Sundar was attracting very loyal people and they all really liked him and really liked each other. And they built this culture where you didn’t have to worry about politics. Sundar abstracted all the large company stuff away from you, and you could just focus on doing good work.”
Prasad Setty WG99
Title: Google Vice President, People Operations (People Analytics, Benefits, Compensation, and Performance Management)
Tenure: 13 years
Insight: In a conversation with Wharton Work/Life Integration director Stew Friedman, Setty said that Google managers were given an option to share their own performance scores with their teams. Many came back and asked to share with everyone at the company: “Transparency is one of our core cultural values. We think that if we give people freedom, they will amaze us. That means we need to give them lots of information so they can make good decisions.”
Published as “Alumni Leadership” and “Google’s Wharton Network” in the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of Wharton Magazine.
