Steve Jobs’ son has stepped into his own spotlight after starting his own venture capital firm to invest in new cancer treatments.
Reed Jobs (pictured), 31, was a pre-med student at Stanford University when his Apple CEO father died of pancreatic cancer in 2011 – something which has been a catalyst for his career. Jobs has created Yosemite – and has so far garnered $200million from investors who believe in the vision to create a virtuous cycle of innovation, reports DealBook. His investors include some of the biggest names in the pharmaceutical and business landscape, including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University and M.I.T.
The concept of the VC is to give scientists grants to fund their life-saving research, which they will hopefully one day commercialize and then return to Yosemite for venture funding. Jobs, 31, said that the name of the VC was a nod to the national park that his mom and dad got married in. Before college, he studied oncology during a summer internship at Stanford when he was 15. He started as a pre-med student at 18, before his father passed away. Reed then switched to majoring in history, focusing on nuclear weapons policy, because he admitted that his dad’s death hit him hard. However, he returned to the medical field post-grad, and he got his master’s degree.
The new venture capital firm is a spinoff from Emerson Collective, which is the business that Laurene Powell Jobs, his mother, set up. She is currently the president of the firm. Reed worked as the philanthropic organization’s managing director for health. He told DealBook: ‘My dad succumbed to cancer when I was in college at Stanford. 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. ‘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.’
When Reed was still a teenager, he appeared on Quiz Kids, a public-access show broadcast in the San Francisco Bay Area. He used the name ‘Reed Powell’, adopting his mother’s maiden name in order to keep a low profile. But he fast attracted attention – not because of his father, but thanks to his impressive range of general knowledge. His proud parents were watching in the audience, according to Mr Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson. Although the technology mogul tried to go incognito, by wearing his favorite black turtleneck he was ‘clearly recognizable’, said Mr Isaacson.
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