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