Born: July 2nd, 1942
Died: September 23rd, 2022
Patricia M Cloherty, the American daughter of an emigrant Irish logger who was among the first women to thrive in the high-risk, high-reward field of venture capitalism and was a key financial supporter of fledgling companies in post-communist Russia, died on September 23rd at her home in Miami. She was 80.
The death was confirmed by her sister, Judith Cloherty Mendel.
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Cloherty was 27, had two master’s degrees from Columbia University (neither in finance) and had spent two years in the Peace Corps teaching Brazilian farm children to neuter pigs when, at a United Nations-related event in 1969, she met Alan Patricof, an investor who was opening a venture capital firm.
Patricof believed she would excel at answering venture capitalism’s fundamental question: which business ideas are worth betting on?
Impressed by her intelligence, he offered her a research analyst job despite her lack of experience in the field.
Patricof believed she would excel at answering venture capitalism’s fundamental question: which business ideas are worth betting on?
He was right. Within two years, Cloherty was a partner at Patricof & Co. Ventures, which took early positions in Apple, Office Depot and the company later known as AOL. The firm grew into a multibillion-dollar international business, and she eventually became its co-chair and president.
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 1977-78, and then to operate an investment firm with Daniel Tessler, whom she married in 1977.
Moved to Russia
The Russia chapter of Cloherty’s career began in 1995 when President Bill Clinton appointed her to the board of the US Russia Investment Fund, whose mission was to invest American capital in Russia’s movement toward a market-based economy. She became the fund’s chairwoman in 1998. Two years later, she moved to Russia for what was to be a six-month stay. It lasted 12 years.
Cloherty became CEO 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.
Patricia Mary Cloherty was born July 2nd, 1942, in San Francisco, the second of four children of John and Doris (Dawson) Cloherty. Her father had emigrated to the United States from Galway as a 13-year-old orphan. Her mother was from Victoria, British Columbia.
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
Her parents worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad during the second World War and ran a dry-cleaning shop in the city after the war ended.
In an interview, Cloherty recalled how she first learned about making a bet.
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.
“Mind you, we were only three, four and five years old, so we hit the track early,” Cloherty explained. “That’s my upbringing.”
When she was about five, she said, the family moved to Pollock Pines, California, a hamlet a half-hour south of Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada. Her father had jobs there as a logger and in construction; her mother was a real estate agent and a librarian. The couple also ran a soda fountain.
‘Superb’ student
In Cloherty’s telling, the family was poor, and life in the mountains could be rugged. But there was plenty to keep one occupied, she said. 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.
An avalanche stranded the girls for two days. She was left with lingering effects of frostbite for more than 50 years
As 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. She was left with lingering effects of frostbite for more than 50 years.
After graduating from high school, 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.
The Peace Corps was forming around the time she was to graduate, and Cloherty decided to join.
But she soon reconsidered after meeting Baroness Maria von Trapp, the matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers made famous in The Sound of Music. Von Trapp, who was visiting San Francisco, urged her not to go.
“She said, ‘You cannot do that,’” Cloherty recalled. “‘You will become a pawn of American foreign policy, and you will ruin your life.’”
After working briefly at the von Trapp’s Vermont farm as the baroness’ assistant, Cloherty joined the corps anyway. She was placed in a remote part of Brazil, where she trained farm families in animal husbandry and other agricultural skills.
A Ford Foundation fellowship financed her Columbia master’s degrees in education and international affairs.
‘Climbing reinvigorates me’
Before moving to Florida in 2017, Cloherty split her time between a Manhattan apartment and a house in Garrison, New York, in the Hudson Valley (and, for several years, an apartment in Moscow). After retiring in 2012, she continued to advise colleagues informally until a few months ago. Her pastimes included hiking, often with friends like Shalala, near her Garrison home and in more distant places such as the Himalayas and Mexico.
“The mountains put the artifice of everyday modern life into perspective,” Cloherty told The New York Times Magazine in 1988. “Climbing reinvigorates me.”
Asked in the Teachers College interview about her philosophy of business, she offered one maxim that she said applied equally to life in general.
“If you see something that appeals to you, never hesitate because of the risk,” she said. “Never put moneymaking before accomplishment of the goal.”
In addition to her sister, Cloherty is survived by a brother, Michael. Her marriage to Tessler ended in divorce.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.