Reed Jobs is stepping into the spotlight: The 31-year-old son of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs is starting a venture capital firm to invest in new cancer treatments. It’s an area that hits close to home, since his father, the iconic Apple co-founder, died from complications of pancreatic cancer in 2011.
“My father got diagnosed with cancer when I was 12,” Mr. Jobs said, and that led him to begin focusing on oncology, starting with a summer internship at Stanford when he was 15.
That path has inspired the creation of Yosemite, whose name alludes to the national park where his parents were married. The firm has raised $200 million from investors and institutions including the venture capitalist John Doerr, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University, and M.I.T.
Yosemite is a spinoff from Emerson Collective — the business and philanthropic organization founded by his mother — where Jobs has served as managing director for health.
Mr. Jobs will still be dedicated to fighting cancer.
My dad succumbed to cancer when I was in college at Stanford. I was pre-med because I really wanted to be a doctor and cure people myself. But just completely candidly, it was really difficult after he passed away.
Taking a break from oncology, Mr. Jobs switched to majoring in history (with a focus on nuclear weapons policy). But he returned to the field after completing his master’s degree and led Emerson’s health care division, which has invested in companies and given grants to labs.
Of his career path, Mr. Jobs said:
I had never ever wanted to be a venture capitalist. But I realized that when you’re actually incubating something and putting it together, you can make a tremendous difference in what assets are part of that, what direction it’s going to take, and what the scientific focus is going to be.
Yosemite will have an unusual operating model. The firm will run a for-profit business, but it will also maintain a donor-advised fund — essentially a type of foundation that manages giving by benefactors — to make grants to scientists.
That dual structure creates a virtuous cycle for innovation, Jobs said: Scientists are given grants with no strings attached, but many of them, once they begin to commercialize their research, will most likely return to Yosemite for venture funding.
An example of that was Tune Therapeutics, which focuses on epigenetic therapies that reprogram genes; the company’s work started with an Emerson grant and then was later founded in part by an investment from the organization.
