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ONE of the United States’ largest banks, Morgan Stanley, is losing its chief financial officer to Google in the most visible example yet of the flow of talent from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.
Ruth Porat, Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer since 2010, has been one of the most powerful women in a financial industry that has struggled to promote and hold on to its female executives. She is going to Silicon Valley while it is facing its own issues about gender balance.
Porat is following in the steps of other big names from the bastions of East Coast power who have recently decamped to the ascendant technology industry on the West Coast. Former White House spokesman Jay Carney said last month that he was joining Amazon.com, and former Obama aide David Plouffe joined Uber last year.
But Silicon Valley has been drawing much of its most valuable new talent from Wall Street. A top banker at Goldman Sachs, Anthony J. Noto, moved west last year to become the chief financial officer at Twitter.
Less than a decade ago, Wall Street firms were the premier destination for young college graduates and talented executives. More recently, though, the financial industry has been struggling to keep growing as it faces a raft of new regulations and a lack of public confidence as a result of the financial crisis.
Silicon Valley, on the other hand, is experiencing a period of blockbuster growth that has created dozens of billion-dollar startups practically overnight.
“Smart people go to where they feel there is the most growth,” said Robert Reffkin, who left Goldman in 2012 after seven years to found a startup, Compass, that is focused on real estate.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a top source of young recruits, only 10 percent of undergraduates went into finance in 2014, compared with the 31 percent who took jobs on Wall Street in 2006, before the financial crisis. Software companies, meanwhile, hired 28 percent of MIT graduates in 2014, compared with 10 percent in 2006.(SD-Agencies)
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