Reed Jobs' VC Yosemite aims to fund cancer treatments

Reed Jobs, son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, has launched Yosemite, a $200M venture capital firm taking aim at cancer treatments.

The 31-year-old Reed Jobs' creation, named after the national park where his parents got married, has so far raised $200 million from a wide range of investors and institutions, including the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Rockefeller University, and M..I.T, among others.

The concept of Yosemite is to invest in new cancer treatments, reports DealBook, and is inspired by the death of Steve Jobs from pancreatic cancer in 2011.

"My dad succumbed to cancer when I was in college at Stanford," said Reed. "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."

The organization is a spin-off from Emerson Collective, the philanthropic organization founded by Steve Jobs's wife, Laurene Powell Jobs. Reed served as the managing director for health at the organization, before coming up with Yosemite.

Unlike typical venture capital arrangements, Yosemite will be working under two structures. It will operate as a for-profit business for investments, but it will also offer a donor-advised fund that can provide grants to scientists and researchers.

The theory is that, while the donor fund will provide no-strings-attached grants, those who accept the grants will be more likely to return to Yosemite for venture funding at a later time.

Reed wasn't initially keen on creating a VC fund, insisting he "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."

4 Comments

jimh2 661 comments · 8 Years

About 1 year ago

This is what happens when you spend other people’s money. He will feel good about himself as he pisses his Dad’s fortune away. Please have a publicly displayed scorecard of where the money went and if anything of value came out of the grant.

A better use of the funds would be to give it away on street corners.

kestral 306 comments · 23 Years

If Steve were still alive I wonder what he would think of nepo babies.

Marvin 15336 comments · 18 Years

jimh2 said:

This is what happens when you spend other people’s money. He will feel good about himself as he pisses his Dad’s fortune away. Please have a publicly displayed scorecard of where the money went and if anything of value came out of the grant.
A better use of the funds would be to give it away on street corners.

It's not his fault that his family is wealthy. At least he's doing something to benefit other people. Some rich kids just flaunt their wealth on social media and spend on vanity items for themselves.

Training to be a doctor and running a health initiative for cancer research are wholesome activities.

It's true that in light of the cost of living, especially lack of affordable housing, affecting most people (including their health), a lot of good could be done by billionaires handing down wealth to poorer people. $50k would massively benefit most families and someone with over $10b could improve the lives of 200,000 families and still be a billionaire afterwards.

There's a clear systemic issue with wealth accumulation. Mackenzie Bezos got $36b in her divorce, pledged to give away half (got to keep $18b for a rainy day), she gave away over $12b and now has... $43b because her investments increased in value since the divorce.

Warren Buffet has said "if you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die". The way people make money while they sleep is to own parts of the means of production in other words, exploiting people who work for a living to let people who don't work, accumulate profits for nothing. The rich earn interest on their wealth while the poor pay interest on their loans. Almost as if the whole economy was designed by rich people and not poor people.

Nobody seems to have any interest in putting in a systemic fix for wealth inequality so until that happens, this is what we are left with - hoping that the privileged few make respectable choices with their wealth. Reed Jobs seems to be making respectable choices.

tenthousandthings 1060 comments · 17 Years

This hybrid approach is the same idea as the Emerson Collective, which was something both of his parents conceived. It’s just that this is focused on a single mission.

I’m not sure that working at your own family’s philanthropic organization counts as nepotism. It’s not like he’s working at Apple. I didn’t know he existed before today, and I gather he graduated from Stanford but medical school wasn’t an option, so of all the things the children of the .1% can do with that, this is pretty worthwhile.

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