Reed, Son Of Steve Jobs, Launches VC Firm Yosemite For Cancer Treatment

Reed Jobs, the son of Apple co-founder late Steve Jobs, has started a new firm named Yosemite that would focus on cancer treatment.

Reed Jobs, the son of Apple co-founder late Steve Jobs, has started a new firm named Yosemite that would focus on cancer treatment. The venture capital (VC) firm has completed an initial round of funding and raised $200 million. 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 MIT. Yosemite VC firm gets its name from Yosemite National Park where Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs got married. 

Thirty-one-year-old Reed is “expanding on his work at Emerson Collective, a philanthropic organisation founded by his mother, Laurene Powell Jobs,” reports DealBook. His father and iconic Apple figure Steve died from complications of pancreatic cancer in 2011.

“My father got diagnosed with cancer when I was 12,” Reed was quoted as saying. He was at Stanford University then, studying as an undergraduate student to become a doctor. Shaken by his father’s death, he took a break from oncology and switched to majoring in history. However, he returned to the field after completing his master’s degree and led Emerson’s healthcare division.

“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,” Reed was quoted as saying. 

“I had never ever wanted to be a venture capitalist. But I realised 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,” he added.

According to DealBook, Yosemite will run a for-profit business but also maintain a donor-advised fund. The idea is to help seed innovation. Reed has three siblings, sisters Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Eve Jobs and Erin Siena Jobs. After Job's death, Reed has become more involved in the tech industry. He has worked as a product manager at social networking giant Facebook and has also worked at Google. He has also co-founded a venture capital firm called Initialized Capital.