![]() ![]() “‘You will become a pawn of American foreign policy, and you will ruin your life.’”Īfter working briefly at the von Trapps’ Vermont farm as the baroness’s assistant, Ms. von Trapp, who was visiting San Francisco, urged her not to go. Cloherty decided to join.īut she soon reconsidered after meeting Baroness Maria von Trapp, the matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers made famous in “The Sound of Music.” Ms. ![]() The Peace Corps was forming around the time she was to graduate, and Ms. Cloherty attended San Francisco College for Women (a Catholic school that is now part of the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco) on a scholarship, earning a bachelor’s degree in Spanish literature and classical Greek in 1963. She was left with lingering effects of frostbite for more than 50 years.Īfter graduating from high school, Ms. An avid reader and self-described “superb” student, she was also a good athlete and a tinkerer who used instructions clipped from Shredded Wheat packages to make a waterproof matchstick holder, a reflector oven and a tent from a military-surplus parachute.Īs a 12-year-old, she recalled, she was on a ski outing with two friends, carrying homemade camping gear, when an avalanche stranded the girls for two days. But there was plenty to keep one occupied, she said. Cloherty’s telling, the family was poor, and life in the mountains could be rugged. Her father had jobs there as a logger and in construction her mother was a real estate agent and a librarian. When she was about 5, she said, the family moved to Pollock Pines, Calif., a hamlet a half-hour south of Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada. “Mind you, we were only 3, 4 and 5 years old, so we hit the track early,” Ms. Her maternal grandmother, she said, while caring for young Pat and her siblings, would, with “her bottle of gin,” take them to the local horse tracks to wager on races. Cloherty recalled how she first learned about making a bet. In the Venture Capital Association interview, Ms. Her parents worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad during World War II and ran a dry cleaning shop in the city after the war ended. Cloherty since the 1970s, said in an interview that her friend “was the most curious person I ever met.” Shalala, the former secretary of health and human services, congresswoman and University of Miami president who had known Ms. “She had a unique ability to lead people,” he said.ĭonna E. Patricof attributed her success in large part to what he called her “Pied Piper quality.” Cloherty became chief executive of the investment fund’s general partner, Delta Private Equity Partners, overseeing the financing of more than 50 Russian companies - including the country’s first mortgage bank, first credit card-issuing bank and first bottled water company - and then selling most of them for what she described as substantial returns. ![]() Two years later, she moved to Russia for what was to be a six-month stay. Russia Investment Fund, whose mission was to invest American capital in Russia’s movement toward a market-based economy. ![]() Cloherty’s career began in 1995, when President Bill Clinton appointed her to the board of the U.S. Cloherty left the Patricof firm, later renamed Apax Partners, for about a decade, first to become deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration in Washington from 1977 to 1978, and then to operate an investment firm with Daniel Tessler, whom she married in 1977. “I’ve been a girl scout my entire life, from which I learned that you try to leave the campsite better than you found it,” she said. In a 2013 interview with a Columbia University Teachers College publication, she said that although she was not in “the save-the-world biz,” she made a point of backing people trying to do good things. Tessera Technologies, which made protective packaging for computer chips and PPL Therapeutics, the Scottish firm that gave the world Dolly the cloned sheep. Cloherty was particularly drawn to investing in biotechnology firms and others in the high-tech sector, including Agouron Pharmaceuticals, a producer of protease inhibitors used for treating H.I.V. The firm grew into a multibillion-dollar international business, and she eventually became its co-chair and president. Ventures, which took early positions in Apple, Office Depot and the company later known as AOL. “She said she had no background in finance,” he recalled in a phone interview. Patricof believed she would excel at answering venture capitalism’s fundamental question: Which business ideas are worth betting on? ![]()
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