Steve Jobs’ son launches venture capital firm to fund new cancer treatments

Reed Jobs, the 31-year-old son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, is starting a venture capital firm to fund new treatments against cancer, the disease that killed his dad, reports Forbes. 

The venture has already raised $200 million from investors including the venture capitalist billionaire John Doerr, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University and M.I.T. The firm, called Yosemite, is an off-shoot of Emerson Collective, a hybrid investment, social impact and philanthropic firm Laurene Powell Jobs, founded in 2004.

Yosemite derives its name from Yosemite National Park, where Steve and Laurene got married, to the New York Times.​ It will run a for-profit business but also maintain a donor-advised fund in the hopes that, once a project is successful, it will become a benefactor of other promising ideas, the Times reported. 

Reed 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.