GoKawiilReed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting $350 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that $350 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus $1 million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
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