Steve Jobs' Son Doesn't Want To Talk About His Dad. He Wants To Talk About Curing Cancer.

Ask Reed Jobs about his last name, and he shrugs it off with a joke. Ask him about curing cancer, and he won't stop talking.

That tells you most of what you need to know about him.

Reed Jobs, yes, Steve Jobs' son isn't running a tech company or coasting on inherited fame. He's running Yosemite, an oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 with a specific, almost stubborn thesis: the cures for cancer aren't sitting in a pharma company's back catalog waiting to be licensed. They have to be built from scratch, out of raw academic research, before anyone else even sees the opportunity.

Three years in, that bet is starting to look prescient.

The Firm That Builds Its Own Companies

Most venture capital firms write checks. Yosemite does that too, but its real distinction is different: about a third of its money goes into companies it builds itself, from the ground up, often starting with a single grant to an academic lab.

"We don't think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered," Jobs said. "We think we need to go make them with new knowledge."

Two of Yosemite's portfolio companies in its first fund came directly out of grants, completely no-strings-attached philanthropic money handed to researchers before there was any company, any pitch deck, any business plan. One of them, Azalea, emerged from a grant to Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna's lab and is now in clinical trials.

It's a slower, more expensive way to build a portfolio than simply investing in existing startups. Jobs acknowledged as much, spinning up companies "takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it's only a third" of the fund. But it's also how Yosemite gets access to ideas before any other investor even knows they exist.

The firm just closed the first round of its second fund, targeting $350 million. Jobs described the current state of the business in one word: "extreme activity."

Why Biotech Suddenly Has Money Again

To understand why Yosemite is accelerating now, you have to understand what just happened to the broader biotech investment climate.

When Jobs launched Yosemite in 2023, biotech was still reeling. The XBI index, a benchmark for biotech stocks, was down massively from its 2021 highs. Pharmaceutical companies, sitting on pandemic-era cash, weren't yet in an acquisitive mood.

That's completely flipped.

"Interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic," Jobs explained. Major drugs are losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating urgent pressure for pharmaceutical giants to acquire new pipelines rather than build them internally.

The result has been an acquisition spree. Eli Lilly bought Kelonia for $7 billion. Antibody drug conjugates have delivered massive wins across the industry. And Revolution Medicines, a company targeting the notoriously "undruggable" KRAS gene in pancreatic cancer, has doubled survival rates for the most common form of pancreatic cancer, from 12 months to 24, in just the past year.

That's not incremental progress. That's the kind of result that makes investors who fled biotech during the downturn start paying attention again.

The NIH Fight That Almost Gutted American Science

Behind the scenes of this resurgence, there's been a genuinely alarming fight over government science funding that most people never heard about.

Last year, for the first time in American history, an administration proposed cutting the NIH budget by up to 40%. For context: the largest cut that had ever previously happened was 1%, back in 2009 during the global financial crisis, and that alone cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs.

A 40% cut would have been catastrophic on a scale with no historical precedent.

"Gratefully, the Senate and House, this is extremely bipartisan, totally rejected the 40% cut," Jobs said. This year, the administration came back requesting a 12% cut, still the largest cut in history by an order of magnitude if it happened, but Jobs expects it to be rejected again, citing NIH funding's more-than-90% public approval rating.

His own position goes further than just defense. "Personally, I think we should go on offense I'd increase it to something like $100 billion," he said, noting that NIH funding hasn't grown in real terms in about a decade, once you account for inflation.

It's a rare moment of genuine bipartisan alignment in an otherwise fractured political environment and a reminder that basic research funding, unglamorous as it sounds, is the foundation on which everything else in this story depends.

What AI Is Actually Doing Inside Drug Discovery

Ask Jobs whether AI in drug discovery is overhyped, and he doesn't dodge the question, but his answer is more precise than the breathless headlines suggest.

"What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work, not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes," he said.

But there's a second, more consequential shift happening: AI is opening up parts of biology that were previously untouchable. Historically, scientists could only target about 15% of the genome with drugs, because the chemistry required to drug proteins interacting with other proteins was too difficult. That's changed dramatically in the last few years, in tandem with AI advances.

The example Jobs points to is KRAS, one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, and for decades considered essentially undruggable. Its surface was, in his words, "basically a smooth oval, a death star," no natural crevice for a drug molecule to grab onto.

About a decade ago, researchers at Amgen found one cryptic pocket on KRAS, leading to the first drug that could target it. But that drug only worked against one specific mutation. AI has since helped identify the other variants of KRAS and found creative new strategies to block them, turning a single narrow breakthrough into a much broader therapeutic strategy.

Jobs is also bullish on AI's role somewhere less glamorous but arguably more urgent: clinical trials, which represent the single biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs roughly $260 million, and only one in three succeeds. Most of that cost comes from patient recruitment and retention.

AI could change that math directly, by building synthetic control arms, computer-generated stand-ins for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data. Instead of recruiting a full control group alongside your treatment group, you only need to recruit patients for the active treatment arm. "That halves the patients you need and massively increases speed," Jobs said. The FDA, notably, is already leaning into this approach.

Going After Cancer's Most Notorious Gene

If there's one target that captures Yosemite's ambition, it's p53, a gene so central to cancer biology that Jobs describes it as one of the field's last true frontiers.

p53 is a tumor suppressor gene, and it's the most frequently disabled gene across virtually all human cancers. Almost every cancer has to knock out p53 to exist in the first place. There's a striking biological detail here: elephants essentially don't get cancer, and one leading theory is that they carry dozens of copies of p53, providing enormous redundancy. Humans have just one copy, meaning a single mutation can disable the body's primary defense against runaway cell growth.

"If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that's one of cancer's Achilles' heels, and it's never been done," Jobs said.

Yosemite is pursuing p53 through three different companies using several distinct strategies simultaneously, a level of parallel investment that reflects both how significant the target is and how uncertain the path to actually hitting it remains.

The Portfolio Beyond p53

Yosemite's approach spans a genuinely wide range of therapeutic strategies, not just one big bet.

Quarry, built alongside serial founder Craig Crews, is pursuing something called induced proximity instead of trying to directly block a disease-causing protein; the drug physically drags that protein next to the cell's own natural breakdown machinery, letting the cell destroy it through its existing disposal system.

Tune Therapeutics has become a leader in epigenetic editing, currently targeting the hepatitis B virus, affecting more than 250 million people worldwide, and the primary driver of liver cancer. Rather than editing the underlying DNA, Tune's technology adds or removes small chemical tags called methyl groups at specific sites, essentially acting as a dimmer switch that turns gene activity up or down. The strategy mimics something roughly 1% of people do naturally when they spontaneously clear hepatitis B, silencing the virus by methylating it into inactivity.

HistoSonics is a rare departure for Yosemite: a medical device company rather than a drug company. It uses histotripsy, a noninvasive technique that creates small air pockets in tissue and then collapses them to destroy targeted areas, similar in spirit to ultrasound rather than radiation or surgery. Its lead programs target pancreatic and liver tumors, a natural pairing given that most pancreatic cancer eventually metastasizes to the liver.

Across both funds, Yosemite now has close to 25 companies in its portfolio. Two have failed for scientific reasons, an outcome Jobs treats as expected rather than alarming, given how early-stage the science is. Yosemite structures its investments in tranches tied to scientific milestones specifically because some ideas, tested against real biology, simply won't work.

How Yosemite Actually Picks Who To Fund

Jobs described an evaluation process that deliberately strips out pedigree and credentials.

"When we look at grants and companies, we take people's CVs out of it. I don't want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds," he said. "We've funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I'm equally happy with either outcome."

The firm evaluates every treatment modality, including small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI-driven approaches, and digital health, rather than specializing narrowly. His message to potential founders is straightforward: "Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it."

He also offered a candid observation about what actually determines whether great science becomes a successful company: storytelling matters more than most scientists want to admit. "I've seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO," he said. That's typically why the founding scientist and the CEO end up being different people. The academic serves as chief scientist or chief medical officer, while a professionalized operator handles fundraising and narrative.

The Surprise That Changed Everything

Asked what's surprised him most since launching Yosemite three years ago, Jobs pointed to something that initially had nothing to do with cancer: the rise of GLP-1 drugs.

Eli Lilly became the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company on the strength of GLP-1s, now the best-selling drug class in the world. But what's caught researchers' attention more recently is emerging evidence that GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer independent of their weight-loss effects.

The reasoning connects back to obesity's unique status as what Jobs calls a "pan-disease" risk factor, one of only two conditions (the other being smoking) that measurably raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That realization has redirected fresh capital and fresh scientific ambition toward disease areas that had previously gone cold.

"Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53, the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades are now, we think, within reach," Jobs said. "I didn't expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering."

What He Actually Thinks About Longevity

Given his position at the intersection of biotech and cutting-edge science, Jobs gets asked about the longevity industry constantly. His answer is refreshingly honest for someone whose job partly involves selling ambitious futures to investors.

"I don't want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally," he said. "But I don't think we or anyone really knows what we're talking about yet."

He pointed out that different specialists give completely different explanations for aging. Geneticists point to telomeres, immunologists point to declining T-cell efficacy, metabolomicists point to something else entirely. "There's no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics," he said.

His actual view is more nuanced than the "solve aging" framing that dominates longevity marketing: "I don't think you 'have' a longevity problem, I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging." Personalizing that, he argues, is what healthcare should already be doing, but he's skeptical anyone has figured out how to turn that into a single, scalable business.

Reed Jobs isn't trying to be the next Steve Jobs, and he's clearly uninterested in being defined by the first one. What he's built instead is a venture firm with a genuinely distinctive thesis: go straight to the source of new scientific knowledge, fund it before anyone else sees the opportunity, and be patient enough to let tranched, milestone-based investment absorb the inevitable scientific failures along the way.

Three years in, that bet looks better than it did at launch, helped by a pharmaceutical industry facing its biggest patent cliff in history, an AI wave that's cracked open genome targets once considered impossible, and a research funding fight that, so far, science has managed to win.

Whether Yosemite actually cracks p53, or turns HistoSonics' ultrasound-based tumor destruction into mainstream cancer therapy, remains to be seen. But the approach evaluate the science, strips out the pedigree, fund the idea wherever it comes from is a legitimately different model than most of venture capital operates on.

For Jobs, that's clearly the point. He didn't build Yosemite to talk about his last name. He built it to talk about the diseases his portfolio companies are trying to dismantle, one undruggable target at a time.