Steve Jobs's Son Starts Venture Capital Firm Named Yosemite

Steve Job's son Reed Jobs is launching a venture capital firm, Yosemite, with a focus on investing in new cancer treatments. He started on this path when his father died of pancreatic cancer in 2011.

"My dad succumbed to cancer when I was in college at Stanford," Jobs told DealBook. "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." He ended up majoring in history, and started working at Emerson Collective, a philanthropic organization founded by his mom Laurene Powell Jobs.

Jobs's Yosemite firm is a spinoff from Emerson. "I 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," he explained.

According to DealBook, which first reported the news, "The firm will run a for-profit business, but it will also maintain a donor-advised fund — essentially a type of foundation that manages giving by benefactors — to make grants to scientists. That dual structure creates a virtuous cycle for innovation, Jobs said: Scientists are given grants with no strings attached, but many of them, once they begin to commercialize their research, will most likely return to Yosemite for venture funding."

So far, Yosemite has raised $200 million from individuals like venture capitalist John Doerr and institutions including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University, and M.I.T.

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