A new firm focused on cancer treatments
Reed Jobs is stepping into the spotlight: The 31-year-old son of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs is starting a venture capital firm to invest in new cancer treatments, DealBook is the first to report. It’s an area that hits close to home, since his father, the iconic Apple co-founder, died from complications of pancreatic cancer in 2011.
“My father got diagnosed with cancer when I was 12,” Mr. Jobs told DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in his first interview with a news organization. That led him to begin focusing on oncology, starting with a summer internship at Stanford when he was 15.
That path has inspired the creation of Yosemite, whose name alludes to the national park where his parents were married. The firm has raised $200 million from investors and institutions including the venture capitalist John Doerr, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University and M.I.T.
Yosemite is a spinoff from Emerson Collective — the business and philanthropic organization founded by his mother — where Jobs has served as managing director for health.
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IMr. Jobs will still be dedicated to fighting cancer. “My dad succumbed to cancer when I was in college at Stanford,” Mr. Jobs said. “I was pre-med because I really wanted to be a doctor and cure people myself. But just completely candidly, it was really difficult after he passed away.”
Taking a break from oncology, Mr. Jobs switched to majoring in history (with a focus on nuclear weapons policy). But he returned to the field after completing his master’s degree and led Emerson’s health care division, which has invested in companies and given grants to labs.
Of his career path, Mr. Jobs said: “I had never ever wanted to be a venture capitalist. But I realized that when you’re actually incubating something and putting it together, you can make a tremendous difference in what assets are part of that, what direction it’s going to take, and what the scientific focus is going to be.”
Yosemite will have an unusual operating model. The firm will run a for-profit business, but it will also maintain a donor-advised fund — essentially a type of foundation that manages giving by benefactors — to make grants to scientists.
That dual structure creates a virtuous cycle for innovation, Jobs said: Scientists are given grants with no strings attached, but many of them, once they begin to commercialize their research, will most likely return to Yosemite for venture funding.
An example of that was Tune Therapeutics, which focuses on epigenetic therapies that reprogram genes; the company’s work started with an Emerson grant and then was later founded in part by an investment from the organization.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
More executives leave Goldman Sachs. David Thomas, a top lawyer at the firm’s asset and wealth management business, and David Rusoff, the general counsel of global banking and markets, are departing the Wall Street bank. Several other prominent executives have left in recent weeks, as the firm’s chief executive, David Solomon, overhauls its operations.
A House committee is reportedly investigating BlackRock and MSCI over Chinese investments. The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has sent letters to the financial giant and the market index company for helping Americans invest in Chinese companies that the U.S. government has accused of enabling the military and bolstering human rights violations, according to The Wall Street Journal. The committee doesn’t have lawmaking powers, but it has subpoena authority.
Twitter sues a nonprofit group that tracks hate speech online. Elon Musk’s social network, recently renamed X, accused the Center for Countering Digital Hate of trying to silence freedom of expression. The group’s research found that the company had taken no action against many user accounts that were reported for hateful speech. Separately, Twitter removed a big “X” sign from its San Francisco headquarters after fighting with city inspectors.
Birkenstock is said to plan an I.P.O. in New York in the fall. The sandal maker is aiming for a valuation surpassing $8 billion, which would give it one of the most prominent market debuts this year, according to Bloomberg. Birkenstock, which is owned by the investment firm L Catterton, has seen sales rise thanks to its footwear’s appearance in the “Barbie” movie.
The G.O.P. donor’s dilemma
Donald Trump has a commanding lead in the latest Republican presidential primary poll, beating his closest opponent, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by 37 percentage points.
But that success has run into a different problem: The former president’s political action committee is nearly broke after paying millions in legal fees for Mr. Trump and some of his associates. That could test donors’ willingness to keep giving if Mr. Trump asks them for more money.