Reed Jobs, son of Steve Jobs, has revealed his new project, a million dollar fund intended to finance new cancer treatments. It’s called Yosemite, and also participates in the mother Laurene Powell Jobs and wife of the co-founder and former CEO of Apple.
According to the New York Times, Yosemite is a branch of the Emerson Collective, founded by Jobs’ widow in 2004 for philanthropic endeavors. This organization already had an area specifically dedicated to health to accelerate the development of new cancer treatments, and Reed Jobs was responsible for it. Yosemite will continue the business, but will do so independently. The fund has already attracted the interest of major investors, raising $200 million: it is financially supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan Kettering, a leading cancer research and medical center in the United States. Reed Jobs, 31, has also secured the backing of John Doerr, one of the most successful investors in the tech world.
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New treatments
It is unknown what new treatments Yosemite will fund. Being a spin-off of sorts from the Emerson Collective, the new fund will not start its journey from scratch, but with extensive knowledge of existing research and trends in oncology medicine.
The fund will be divided into two entities that will work in parallel: on the one hand a for-profit structure such as a venture capital fund, on the other a foundation that will receive donations and pass them on to researchers.
According to Reed Jobs, those financial contributions will be “unconstrained.” If, thanks to grants from the foundation, scientists come up with new cancer treatments, they could ask Yosemite to invest in their startups.
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A second chance
“I never wanted to be a venture capitalist. But I’ve realized that when you’re incubating something and trying to launch it, you can make a huge difference in the resources that go into it,” Reed Jobs explained. The new cancer treatment fund also has sentimental significance for him. In 2011, after Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer, he decided to drop out of university. “When my father died, I was studying at Stanford. I really wanted to be a doctor and heal people. But it was very difficult after he died,” he said. Now, with Yosemite, he has another chance.
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