Harvard Is Trying to Smooth Things Over With Silicon Valley

Some of the venture-capital executives who invest money for Harvard had pushed the endowment’s executives to try to get the university to address their concerns about what they viewed as Harvard’s weak response to the attacks and to antisemitism under former Harvard President Claudine Gay.

Executives at Harvard Management Company, the nation’s largest college endowment, met with firms including Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz. They also met with Elad Gil, an Israeli-born investor, and Patrick Collison, the chief executive of payments company Stripe; both are influential in Silicon Valley and have been among those who have been more outspoken to Harvard’s endowment. Harvard is a direct investor in Stripe.

Private-equity executive Paul Finnegan, the endowment’s chair and a member of the 12-person Harvard Corporation that governs the university, also attended some meetings. It is unusual for Finnegan to join endowment executives on manager visits.

“HMC is fortunate to have strong, longstanding relationships with many investment managers who care deeply about higher education," Harvard endowment spokesman Patrick McKiernan said in a statement. “It is important to engage with our partners and share with them all of the ways that Harvard is actively working to ensure student safety and protect freedom of speech."

Gay declined to comment through a Harvard spokesman. In her resignation letter earlier this month, she wrote in part that her commitment to “confronting hate" was a “bedrock value" integral to who she is.

The pressure by some of Harvard’s money managers, which hasn’t previously been reported, adds another dynamic to the tumult that has enveloped elite universities since the attacks on Israel. The uproar was led by big donors such as Apollo’s Marc Rowan and Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman, rather than by investors hired by the schools to manage their money.

Harvard’s effort also shows the importance of venture capital to the endowment. Harvard has long lagged behind peer endowments in its exposure to venture, which has hurt its returns. The endowment has ratcheted up its venture exposure under Chief Executive N.P. “Narv" Narvekar, who arrived in late 2016, but it wants to further increase that exposure. Demand for spots in the most prominent funds regularly outstrips availability.

Many leading venture capitalists have criticized what they see as a pro-Palestinian bias in academia. The industry also counts several prominent Israeli-born investors and has poured billions of dollars into Israeli startups.

There was some internal discussion at the endowment about whether the university could lose its spot in future venture funds. Several people familiar with Harvard’s tour said it wasn’t driven by worries about Harvard losing allocations but by a desire to partner with its managers and answer questions about what was happening at the university.

Harvard executives in meetings last week said that the endowment isn’t political and doesn’t play a role in choosing Harvard’s president, said people familiar with the matter.

Executives also addressed frustration among some managers that Gay’s initial statement responding to the Hamas attacks had been too weak. That statement didn’t explicitly condemn Hamas or distance Harvard from a statement by student groups laying blame for Hamas’s violence on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians over decades. A follow-up statement condemned “the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas" and said student groups don’t speak for Harvard. Finnegan said that Gay had sought input from the deans of Harvard’s various schools and that the process had weakened the statement, signed by Gay and the school’s leadership.

Gay’s resignation has eased the concerns of some managers.

Finnegan in some meetings also said the university was aware of the criticism that its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives had gone too far in recent years and that some students and professors felt they had to censor their views. Harvard was considering whether changes were needed to ensure academic freedom and freedom of speech, he said.

Narvekar, investment chief Rick Slocum and John Shue, a managing director who focuses on private investments, represented the endowment in many of the meetings.

Endowment executives also have been engaging with venture and other managers outside of the tour. Slocum has been in touch with Josh Kushner of Thrive Capital in New York, who has been among the more outspoken venture managers to Harvard’s endowment about Israel and antisemitism. Kushner is the brother of Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

Narvekar was hired from Columbia University to help turn around Harvard’s endowment. He was Harvard’s fourth endowment chief executive in a decade, not counting interim heads.

He and Slocum quickly made sweeping changes. They shuttered most of the endowment’s internal trading activities, wrote down by $1 billion its investments in timber and other natural resources, and outsourced money management to external managers. One of Narvekar’s priorities has been to make Harvard attractive to selective funds.

Harvard’s endowment has gained an average 8.2% a year over the past 10 fiscal years ended June 30, and 9.1% the past five years. Both are the second-worst records in the Ivy League for those periods. Narvekar has written that the endowment missed out on big gains in venture capital.

Write to Juliet Chung at Juliet.Chung@wsj.com and Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com