Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name

Reed 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 no-strings-attached philanthropy and old-fashioned venture 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 through AI’s collision with drug discovery and clinical trial design.