Profile
Fearful Symmetry
Louise Kramer
02/01/2007

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.

Burning Bright
Last year, Cline did just that. He took time away from his office in Manhattan and his wife and five children in Greenwich, Conn., to attend a five-day meeting staged by WCS in Nagarhole National Park in Karnataka, India. The organization has worked there for the past 20 years in an effort to save tigers. The big cat population has grown by 400 percent at the site, says Cline, tapping an encyclopedic command of tiger statistics.

The philanthropist wants to see that kind of success repeated at all wild tiger preserves. One of the challenges is getting researchers to explore new approaches. For example, Cline says that most tiger experts are so entrenched in the issues that they miss a glaring hole in their work: They do not have accurate tiger counts. “Believe it or not, they never had the objective to measure the problem in terms of the populations,” he adds. Moreover, Cline says that there is little collaboration among tiger projects in different countries.

This insight became the basis for Tigers Forever. The organization—Cline came up with the name—brings a business approach to hard science. Another big cat enthusiast and supporter of WCS, Tom Kaplan, a former hedge fund manager and mining industry investor, has donated $5 million to the effort. WCS allocates $2 million to $2.5 million per year to the work. “Ours is an overlay to really make it effective,” Cline says.

Cline believes philanthropists must take a long view, lest a project become sidetracked reacting to short-term crises. His donation is intended to be allocated over the next decade as first-stage funding for the very specific work of tiger counting. He is also seeking support from other tiger philanthropists to make sure their funds are all being used toward the same goal. “I am the catalyst for getting the money going,” he says.

Alan Rabinowitz, a leading big cat expert and executive director of the science and exploration program at WCS, says he has never seen this kind of interest from a funder. “Sometimes we get wealthy people who are retired who want to give up their job and come in the field with us, but not someone like Michael who is still completely engaged in his own world,” he says. Of their recent meeting in India, Rabinowitz explains: “This wasn’t going out sightseeing. It was sitting in a meeting all day long every day, and being 100 percent engaged in strategizing for our programs.”

Cline has loved animals since he was a boy growing up far from the jungle in a middle-class family in what he describes as a “nothing town” 28 miles north of New York. He began traveling the world to take pictures of tigers and other big game as a bachelor pursuit. His real commitment to the big cats began a decade ago after he attended a lecture on the sorry plight of tigers given by Rabinowitz at the Bronx Zoo. Cline was so impressed by Rabinowitz’s passion and intelligence that he sought to work with him in some way. Today, they talk tigers several times a week.

Cline’s home in Greenwich shows little evidence of his passion for tigers and trips to the jungle, save for a photo of him on an elephant that he keeps behind the desk in his study. He jokes that his wife made him put all his mementoes in the basement to keep the house looking nice. As his children run up to him for hugs and attention after school, it is difficult to imagine how Cline can devote so much time and energy to his philanthropy. “I think about how I have to raise x million dollars, and that I’ve got to get help in a bunch of areas,” he says. “It would be much easier to be retired, go to a couple of board meetings, tell them to raise more funds for tigers, and then go home. But that is not who I am.”

Louise Kramer is a freelance writer based in New York.