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| Profile |
Fearful Symmetry
Louise Kramer
02/01/2007
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What struck Michael Cline first when he encountered tigers in the wild was
that the pair of big cats he came upon in Bandhavgarh, a small national park in
India, were completely unintimidated. What would strike him later was their
rarity.
 | | ALAN RABINOWITZ (left), director of science and exploration at the Wildlife
Conservation Society, Michael Cline (center) and scientist Luke Hunter collar a
leopard in 2005. Cline took on tiger preservation as a cause after hearing
Rabinowitz describe the plight of the big cats. |
In the 16 years since then, Cline, a 46-year-old venture capitalist,
has traveled on numerous tiger-sighting expeditions around the globe. Yet every
time, he comes back disappointed. The world’s tiger population has been
declining for at least the past 100 years as hunters pursue the cats to sell to
purveyors of traditional Chinese medical remedies and loggers destroy much of
their natural habitat. Today, the World Wildlife Fund estimates that only 5,000
to 7,000 tigers still live in the wild—fewer than live in captivity.
Reversing the decline of the tiger has become a passion that keeps Cline up
at night and consumes about one-fifth of his time. While he continues his
professional pursuits, he applies his self-described “nerdy skills” as a
business developer to the nonprofit world of conservation.
Cline also
supports the cause financially. He made a pledge of $5 million over the next 10
years to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), home to many of the world’s
top big cat scientists, for an ambitious new program called Tigers Forever. He
says he is likely to give more in the future. The funds pay for the work of
scientists and conservationists at WCS, the Bronx-based nonprofit that runs the
Bronx Zoo and works on tiger conservation in Asia.
Cline’s ability to
support these efforts is the fruit of his work—first as managing partner of
venture capital firm General Atlantic Partners, and now as founder of a private
equity firm, Accretive Technology Partners, which has funded four companies and
is working on a fifth. One company he helped launch, Xchanging, is now a $1
billion outsourcing firm.
But the tiger problem cannot be solved with money
alone, Cline says. The problem requires visionary thinking, a long-range plan
and commitments from the various stakeholders, including government officials,
scientists, local businesspeople and animal lovers. In describing his
strategies, Cline often uses terms more familiar to entrepreneurs than to
zoologists.
| “Philanthropists can use the skills they learn in business to help on
specific initiatives. It can be really productive.” |
“Philanthropists can use the skills they learn in business to
help on specific initiatives. It can be really productive,” Cline says. His own
credentials include an MBA from Harvard and a stint as an associate at
consulting firm McKinsey early in his career. Cline predicts more of his
charity-minded contemporaries will start rolling up their sleeves to contribute
business expertise to their pet causes when they realize that funding alone is
not achieving the type of results in their philanthropic pursuits that they
expect from their business investments.
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