How Reed Jobs turned his personal loss into a public effort
When Reed Jobs talks about curing cancer, he isn’t speaking in abstractions or spreadsheets. He’s talking about his father – and about a future he believes can be different.
As the son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Reed Jobs has turned a deeply personal loss into a focused investing mission. His venture capital firm, Yosemite, is built around the belief that cancer doesn’t have to be a death sentence.
Spun out of Emerson Collective, a philanthropy organization founded by his mother Laurene Powell Jobs, Yosemite is now raising its second fund, with more than $200 million so far and a $350 million target. Its strategy is to bet on early, high-risk science that could transform how cancer is treated, detected, and ultimately lived with.
The diagnosis that changed everything
To understand why Yosemite looks nothing like a traditional VC firm, and why Reed Jobs believes its approach can change outcomes within his lifetime, you have to start years before the first fund was raised, with a diagnosis that changed his life.
When Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a rare pancreatic cancer at age 48, the course of his son’s life was irrevocably altered. Reed Jobs was just 12, and over eight years leading to his father’s death, he saw first-hand the devastating impact of cancer.
That loss became a personal mission to invest money in unproven but promising medical ideas, taking risks most investors won’t, in the hope of slowing a disease that kills nearly 10 million people worldwide each year.
Reed Jobs, now 34, began his journey within Emerson Collective after studying history at Stanford, a shift from a pre-med track he reconsidered after his father’s death. Rather than pursuing medicine through the clinic or the lab, he decided that he could create a better impact by helping promising cancer research secure the funding, partnerships, and time it needs to move from discovery to real-world treatment.
At Emerson, he developed a healthcare investment strategy emphasizing oncology innovation, focusing on bridging the notorious “Valley of Death“, which is a term for where many promising discoveries stall before attracting investment.
Carrying it forward
In 2023, Reed Jobs spun out Yosemite as an independent venture capital firm, named after the national park where his parents were married.
Launching with $263 million in its first fund, according to a recent interview with Forbes, the VC firm specializes in cancer-focused biotech investments. It has distinguished itself through a dual model – combining traditional venture investing alongside no-strings-attached grants for academic researchers – to de-risk early science and foster translational breakthroughs.
Yosemite’s founding team includes people like Dan McHugh, who leads investments, and Matt Bettonville, who focuses on digital health. Together, they brought deep relationships with academic labs and researchers, connections that can help further Yosemite’s goal to spot promising ideas early and guide them into viable startups.
Yosemite’s investments show how the firm puts its ideas into practice. One key example is Tune Therapeutics, led by scientific founder Charles Gersbach, which is focused on epigenome editing therapies. With Yosemite as a lead investor in a $175 million Series B raise, Tune is advancing therapies for diseases like hepatitis B, which can be a common cause of liver cancer.
Yosemite also backs AI-driven drug discovery startups like Chai Discovery, founded in 2024 by researchers including Josh Meier and Jack Dent. Chai’ Discovery’s innovative protein design platform recently secured $130 million at a $1.3 billion valuation, plus a key partnership with Eli Lilly, illustrating Yosemite’s role in connecting biotech innovation with big pharma collaborations.
What it takes to keep going
Earlier this year, Yosemite announced that it is raising over $200 million toward its second fund, targeting $350 million in total. The milestone has since brought a number of heavyweight institutional investors on board, including Amgen, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, MIT, and renowned venture capitalist John Doerr.
Now managing assets exceeding $1 billion – combining managed capital for endowments, hospitals, and foundations with its direct funds – Yosemite is reportedly preparing to invest in around 25 companies in the next phase.
For founders and builders, Reed Jobs’ story is less a playbook than an example. Instead of responding to tragedy by seeking control or speed, he chose patience. He stepped away from the obvious path, learned how science, money, and institutions intersect, and built something designed for a problem measured in decades, not quarters.
And Yosemite, as a result, reflects that posture. Especially when it comes to long timelines, early trust in people, and a willingness to fund work before outcomes are clear.
For anyone trying to build while carrying something personal – grief, frustration, anger, unfinished business – perhaps Reed Jobs offers a different model of ambition. You don’t have to solve the problem yourself, but you can build the conditions that let others solve it, while staying committed long enough for that work to matter.
