- Reed Jobs, the son of Steve Jobs, launched Yosemite, a VC firm that will invest in cancer treatments.
- The 31-year-old started the the fund after his dad died from complications with pancreatic cancer.
Reed Jobs, Steve Jobs’s oldest son, is striking out on his own.
Jobs, one of three children of the Apple cofounder and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, is launching Yosemite, a venture capital firm that will invest in new cancer treatments, according to a press release.
The 31-year-old was inspired by his father to start the fund after Steve Jobs died from complications of pancreatic cancer in 2011, he told The New York Times.
So far, Yosemite has raised $200 million dollars through investments from medical institutions like Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University, and M.I.T, as well as from venture capitalist John Doerr, according to the Times.
Jobs plans to raise $400 million for his firm’s initial fund, The Information reported, which is just about 10 times the average fund size of new venture capitalists last year, according to Pitchbook.
The VC firm will incorporate a dual structure model of a for-profit business and a donor-advised fund, which will provide grants to scientists, according to a press release. Scientists can use the grants for their research and then go back to Yosemite for venture funding.
Jobs’s latest business venture will build on his previous work as a managing director at the Emerson Collective, the mission-driven corporation founded by his mother. While he was leading Emerson’s health care space, the company invested in healthcare enterprises like ElevateBio, a gene therapy startup, and GetLabs, an at-home diagnostics collector, according to Emerson Collective’s website.
He is bringing at least three high-ranking members from Emerson with him to Yosemite, The Information reported.
While Jobs told the Times that starting a venture capital firm was never one of his career goals, he said that his new role will help scientists build and focus their research.
“I had never ever wanted to be a venture capitalist,” Jobs said. “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.”
Jobs attributes his interest in the healthcare space, at least in part, to his father’s death.
“My dad succumbed to cancer when I was in college at Stanford,” Jobs told the Times. “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.”
Even though Jobs didn’t study business or medicine — he ended up graduating with both a BA and master’s in history, according to Stanford’s website — he may have learned a thing or two about business by time spent with his father.
Before college, the Apple cofounder took his son on a business trip to Hawaii so he could “be in the room” with leaders like Apple executives and other high-level tech moguls, according to “Steve Jobs,” a biography by Walter Isaacson.
Yosemite didn’t respond to Insider’s immediate request for comment before publication.
