Reed Jobs’s Yosemite raises $350 million second fund to make cancer non-lethal

Reed Jobs isn’t trying to cure cancer. 

For Jobs—an investor and, yes, Steve Jobs’s son—the aim’s far more precise: To make cancer non-lethal. The rhetorical distinction is important. 

“I don’t think you’ll cure cancer because we’re human,” said Jobs. “Any human cell could become cancerous, right? And we’re not going to stop having human cells. So, the idea that none of them could ever become cancer is preposterous. That risk’s never going away.”

And medicine, however advanced it may be, seldom makes diseases vanish. But there’s a path to a world where cancer is much less intractable. Consider, Jobs says, the trajectory of AIDS as a guide to what might be possible for cancer treatment. 

“There’s no vaccine for [AIDS], unfortunately,” he said. “I’d love for there to be, but in the absence of that, it’s a far less scary disease now in the United States because it’s non-lethal. With a cocktail of drugs, you can actually prevent mortality. In many ways, I think that’s a massive victory and, in some ways, the most essential victory. Because it’s victory over death, and that’s what I want for cancer patients.”

For Jobs, this has been his life’s work—he started working in cancer labs as a teenager when his father got sick (Steve Jobs would pass away in 2011). Today, he’s a VC, the founder of venture firm Yosemite, which he started after spinning out of Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective in 2023. Yosemite (and Jobs) are devoted to cancer-focused investing, both in startups and via scientific grants. 

Yosemite has now closed its second fund at $350 million, a serious jump from January’s first close at $200 million, Jobs exclusively told Fortune and the Term Sheet Podcast. Jobs’s LPs include Amgen, AbbVie, MIT,........

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