Varun Agarwal, CFA va2238@caa.columbia.edu
Work samples & resume

Varun Agarwal, CFA

Investment operations, risk analytics, and applied AI.

Fifteen years building investment operations infrastructure for institutional capital across endowments, foundations, and hedge funds — now shipping AI-driven workflows that let one person do what used to take a team.

A brief on investment operations

The investment-ops bench of 2031 looks nothing like the one of 2021. The conductor is one person; the orchestra is software. Notes on what changes — and what doesn't.

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On the record · nine years before the wave
LinkedIn · August 2016

No man is better than a machine, and no machine is better than a man with a machine.

— Paul Tudor Jones, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2016

“I strongly believe this quote will define our remaining lifetimes.” — Varun Agarwal, posted to LinkedIn · 9 years ago

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Live demos

Blue Maple Foundation — Analytics Demos

Investment-ops dashboards a foundation office actually uses.

Six production-style dashboards covering the operational backbone of a foundation investment office: deal flow, performance attribution, public & private reconciliation, alt-asset document ingestion, and sign-off controls. Every filter, sort, and drill-down is wired up.

  • Performance — multi-portfolio attribution & benchmarking
  • Canoe — alt-asset document ingestion & classification
  • Dealflow — pipeline, scoring, and stage analytics
  • Public & Private Recon — cash, position, and NAV reconciliation
  • Sign-offs — controls evidence and approval workflow
Explore the demos
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VA

Resume — Varun Agarwal

Full interactive CV. 15+ years institutional risk & analytics.

Detailed work history across Harvard Management, Johns Hopkins, UBC IM, and The Nature Conservancy. Now building AI-driven workflows on Claude.

  • $21B+ institutional capital risk-managed
  • Columbia MS Finance; CFA & CTP
  • Python, statistics, and the alpha strategies AI is reshaping
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★ New · Featured story
C.

Conductor — a graphic novella

30 panels. 10-minute read. How I stopped building pipes and started building pipers.

The narrative version of the resume — Persepolis-style B&W comic tracing the journey from a 2006 neural-network thesis at PEC University to a fevered week in March 2025 that re-opened a door I'd shelved for almost two decades. Same password as the resume.

  • Act I · Origins — PEC '06 → finance '08
  • Act II · The Pneumonia Week — March 2025, 10 panels
  • Act III · What I Built — prototype to Investment Research CRM
  • Act IV · The Real Problem — out-of-pocket conviction
  • Act V · 2031 — the analyst as conductor
Read the novella — enter password →
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Investment Research CRM

Semantic search & Q&A across thousands of manager meetings.

AI-built CRM for an investment office — runs locally, every claim cites a source PDF. Claude API + FastAPI + SQLite + FTS5. The headline “+1” AI project of 6+1.

  • Hybrid full-text + embedding semantic search
  • Natural-language Q&A with paragraph-level citations
  • Cross-meeting theme & sentiment extraction
  • Local-first — PDFs never leave the user's machine
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