Steve Jobs’s Son Gets Into Venture Capital
Mr. 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.
Source: The New York Times
