Reed Jobs, son of Steve Jobs, takes the wraps off a $200 million venture fund that will back new cancer treatments

Reed Jobs, the 31-year-old son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, has spent his career behind the scenes. But he’s “stepping into the spotlight,” with a new venture capital firm to invest in new cancer treatments, DealBook reported earlier this morning.

Called Yosemite — after the national park where his parents were wed — the firm has already closed its debut fund with $200 million from prominent individuals and institutions, including MIT,  Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and John Doerr, per the report.

Jobs tells DealBook that when his father died from pancreatic cancer in 2011, he was at Stanford, studying as an undergraduate student to become a doctor; shaken by his father’s death, he switched majors, diving into history instead, nabbing a master’s degree and afterwards joining his mother at the impact investing and philanthropic organization she formed back in 2004, Emerson Collective.

Yosemite is a spin-off from that organization, and Jobs — who was the managing director of health at Emerson Collective, working with “entrepreneurs, researchers, and patients to accelerate cancer research,” per its website — is continuing that work under his new brand. 

According to DealBook, Yosemite will run a for-profit business but also maintain a donor-advised fund, making grant money available to scientists courtesy of the benefactors with whom it works. The idea is to help seed innovation, then hopefully get involved in its commercialization and its associated financial rewards, as well.

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