CFO Shore To Depart in September, Continuing String of Shake-Ups

UPDATED: August 12, 2014, at 9:28 a.m.

Dan S. Shore, Harvard’s chief financial officer, will leave his post at the end of September, making him the latest in a string of high-ranking financial administrators leaving the University this year.

Massachusetts Hall, the home of Harvard's central administration, is pictured.

University President Drew G. Faust told top administrators of the news in an email Monday morning. She wrote that Shore will be joining OnShape Inc., a technology start-up in Cambridge, as its CFO.

The news follows former University Treasurer James F. Rothenberg ’68 exit on July 1, as well as the announcement that Harvard Management Company CEO Jane L. Mendillo will leave later this year.

Faust wrote in her email that a search to replace Shore would begin soon.

OnShape CEO John McEleney said he has been in discussion with Shore since the beginning of the year, when a mutual friend introduced them. McEleney said that though Shore was weighing his next career move as early as six or eight months ago, the conversations between them were not initially about Shore joining the company.

“He was thinking about other options in terms of where he wanted to move his career,” McEleney said, adding later “We weren't looking for a CFO—we weren't looking for him.”

Shore joined Harvard in 2003 as the director of budgets and financial planning and took over as CFO for Elizabeth Mora in 2007, after her abrupt departure. Before coming to Harvard, Shore worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company and as a corporate attorney at Nutter, McClennen & Fish.

Shore’s tenure included the 2008-2009 financial crisis, during which Harvard’s endowment plummeted by nearly a third of its value, forcing cutbacks and hiring freezes across the University. The endowment, which has rebounded slowly in recent years, has yet to fully recover from the crisis.

“Through a time of unusual challenge and change in the economics of higher education, including the 2008-09 global financial crisis and its aftermath, Dan has served Harvard with extraordinary incisiveness and an unrelenting devotion to assuring the university’s long-term financial well-being,” Faust wrote.

The news of his departure comes at an unusual time for the University, which will soon enter the second year of the public phase of the potentially record-setting Harvard Campaign.

OnShape, which was founded in 2012, is currently engineering cloud-based computer-aided design software. With the help of three venture capital firms, OnShape has raised $64 million and employs about 50 people, according to McEleney.

Shore holds a A.B. from Duke University, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from the University of Virginia.

Other recent shifts within Harvard Management Company include the departure of Lane MacDonald ’88-’89, who served as managing director of private equity at HMC for just three months before stepping down this February.  Mark McKenna, who spearheaded HMC’s event-driven strategy, and Apoovra A. Koticha, a managing director in international fixed income and one of HMC’s highest-paid money managers, also both left earlier this summer, according to Bloomberg.

—Check TheCrimson.com for updates.

—Staff writer Tyler S. Olkowski can be reached at tyler.olkowski@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @OlkowskiTyler.