N.P. "Narv" Narvekar, the chief executive officer responsible for managing Harvard University’s $56.9 billion endowment, has notified the university's board that he plans to retire after nearly a decade at the helm, according to people familiar with the matter.
Narvekar has not set a firm departure date. He has discussed a potential retirement window in late 2027 to provide time for an orderly succession process, though a formal search for his successor has not yet begun. Narvekar declined to comment on his plans.
When he was hired in 2016 from Columbia University’s investment office, Narvekar became the fourth chief executive of Harvard Management Co. in a ten-year period. He took charge of a $35.7 billion endowment that at the time was dealing with structural performance shortcomings that followed steep losses during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
During his tenure, Harvard’s investment office pursued a broad operational restructuring. The organization moved away from a model in which specialized internal teams managed roughly 40% of assets, adopting instead a generalist framework focused on outsourcing - a shift that now sees approximately 90% of the portfolio overseen by external asset managers.
That reconfiguration of oversight and asset management approaches accompanied active portfolio changes. Narvekar aggressively reduced positions in underperforming illiquid holdings at discounts and increased the endowment's allocations to private equity and venture capital - boosting those exposures by twofold. He also more than doubled the fund’s exposure to hedge funds, a move that contributed to the endowment’s outperformance during 2024.
The combination of restructuring and reallocation has improved Harvard’s relative performance among elite university endowments. Over the past three years the endowment produced an 8.1% annualized return, outpacing peers such as Yale and Princeton and ranking tied for fourth among a group of 12 comparable institutions, based on data from Markov Processes International.
The turnaround contrasts with the fund's situation in 2016, when Harvard reported a 10-year annualized return of 5.7% following losses sustained during the 2008-2009 downturn.
Enhanced performance and institutional positioning have helped the endowment secure allocations with prominent external managers, including Citadel and the D.E. Shaw Group, as well as direct investments in high-growth private companies such as Stripe and SpaceX.
Harvard’s endowment continues to play a central fiscal role for the university. Last year it generated more than one-third of Harvard’s $6.7 billion operating budget and functions as a financial buffer against reductions in federal research funding implemented by the Trump administration.
Context and next steps
The decision by Narvekar to signal retirement and a potential late-2027 departure sets in motion a period of succession planning for one of higher education’s largest institutional investors. With a formal search not yet launched, the university has flexibility on timing, but the endowment’s outsized contribution to Harvard’s operating budget and the portfolio’s recent structural changes mean the process is likely to attract scrutiny from stakeholders across higher education and the institutional asset management community.