Reed Jobs Is Betting Cancer Doesn’t Have to Be Fatal

**Connie Loizos** (0:01)
Hi, I'm Connie Loizos.

**Alex Gove** (0:03)
And this is Alex Gove.

**Connie Loizos** (0:04)
And this is StrictlyVC Download.
Hi, and welcome back to StrictlyVC Download. Today's guest is Reed Jobs, founder and managing partner of Yosemite, a venture firm taking an unconventional approach to company creation and biotech. Rather than waiting for promising start-ups to emerge, like third rock ventures before it, Yosemite helps build them from the earliest stages, pairing venture capital with no strings attached research grants to translate cutting edge academic science into new cancer therapies. Since we last spoke with Reed back in 2023, the firm has announced the first close of its second fund, expanded its company creation efforts, and continued backing breakthroughs in gene editing, AI-powered drug discovery and oncology. In this chat, we talk with Reed about why biotech is entering one of its most exciting periods in decades, how AI is transforming everything from drug discovery to clinical trials, and why he thinks venture firms need to take bigger scientific risks. We also get into the state of biotech fundraising, the debate over federal research funding, and how Yosemite decides which breakthroughs are worth building companies around, and why some of the biggest advances in medicine may still be ahead of us. We loved talking with Reed. We hope you will enjoy this chat, and we will see you back here next week.
It is great to talk to you. Three years gone by so quickly. So when we sat down at Disrupt, you had just taken the wraps off of Yosemite. I saw in February that you announced the first close of your second fund, that you were targeting $350 million. Let's maybe start there. Tell us about the State of the Union at Yosemite.

**Reed Jobs** (2:00)
The State of the Union at Yosemite is one of extreme activity right now. I am very pleased to say that we've had incredible traction and just response in the markets, and we have a lot of really important new partners that we brought on for Yosemite. Not only are we really excited about the companies we're making, but at the highest level, the model that you and I talked that I was experimenting with, we really validated. I'm sure you remember this, but for the audience out there, Yosemite is a very unique venture capital organization for really two reasons. First of all, we only work in oncology, and that's 40% of biotech and that's a huge area, but that is one constraint that we have. The other one though is we actually like to make our own companies ourselves. We don't think that the cures for cancers are actually sitting out in pharma or anywhere waiting to be discovered. We think we need to actually go make them with new knowledge, and to do that, we actually want to de-risk things really early on when there are really young, really gentle ideas in university labs. To do that, we actually use a little philanthropy in a completely no strings attached way to de-risk early projects. Already, we've had in our first fund, two of our 20 companies have been that direct grant into a company immediately already. What I'm really proud of not only is that we have great new partners and that the firm is going wonderfully, but that the model that we tried to make for really testing out the borders of venture capital with a great new ambition has truly been realized, and that's the bigger victory for me.

**Connie Loizos** (3:34)
That's exciting. When we see a headline number of $350 million, how much of that is going into companies that were already up and running versus that you were spinning up and or research grants?

**Reed Jobs** (3:46)
We have about a third of our deployed capital that we're planning to go into companies that we're making ourselves, and these are incubations that the team comes up with our own ideas. You know, we have our own ideas, Connie.
And sometimes, though, we also will make them with academics in university labs, and that's where we have the most experience. We've done that at Yale, at Berkeley, at Stanford so far. We'd like to do that in a lot of other places. That, of course, though, takes a lot of time and energy from our team. That's why it's about a third of our capital goes into that. The rest will go into companies that other people make, and that we, you know, want to join in because we think it's a great idea, but maybe someone else got there first. I'll also just say we have, in our model, 2.5% of the funds AUM goes into a donor-advised fund. That is the basis of our grant dollars. Those are completely no strings attached. We also put in a million dollars around management fees into that every year. It's so important.