Steve Jobs’ son Reed Jobs seems uncannily like a chip off the old block in a new interview.
An interview with Steve Jobs’ son Reed Jobs is garnering attention partly because how much Reed has been reminding people of his father. Reed Jobs bears a striking resemblance to Steve Jobs, including the shape of his face and his hairline. He seems to share his father’s intense gaze and his mannerisms. More interestingly, he also sounds like Steve Jobs when he talks — he has the same slow, deliberate way of speaking. Like Jobs, he seems to like to draw upon stories to make his points.
Reed Jobs, though, doesn’t seem particularly interested in leaning into the comparison. When once asked whether he was using a MacBook for a call, he brushed off the loaded question with a quick, dry joke rather than engaging with the Apple connection at all. He’s said in the past that he’d much rather talk about his work than about being Steve Jobs’ son, and reporters who’ve spent time with him describe someone who is fairly relaxed about the legacy, even if he doesn’t go out of his way to invite comparisons.
Who Is Reed Jobs Today
Reed Paul Jobs was born in 1991 to Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs, and studied at Stanford University. He’s been drawn to medicine and oncology since he was a teenager — he interned in an oncology lab at just 15, while his father was privately battling the pancreatic cancer that would eventually take his life in 2011. Steve Jobs is said to have called his son’s early interest in biotech the “silver lining” of his own illness, and that interest has since become the defining mission of Reed’s career.
After his father’s death, Reed switched his college major to history, but the pull toward cancer research never really left. He went on to serve as Managing Director of Health at Emerson Collective, the philanthropic venture organization founded by his mother. In 2023, he spun out his own firm, Yosemite, with roughly $200 million in initial backing from investors including MIT and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Yosemite is unusual among venture funds in that it works exclusively in oncology and often builds biotech companies from the ground up out of early academic research, rather than simply investing in existing startups. The firm also runs a donor-advised fund that hands out no-strings-attached grants to university labs, an approach designed to de-risk promising science long before it’s ready for traditional venture money. Two of the twenty companies in Yosemite’s first fund trace directly back to one of these grants, including a company that emerged from a grant to Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna’s lab and is now in clinical trials.
Yosemite recently announced the first close of a second fund targeting $350 million, with the firm now employing a team of 17 and increasingly betting on how artificial intelligence can accelerate drug discovery and clinical trials. Reed has said his singular goal is to make cancer non-lethal within our lifetime — a mission that, for obvious reasons, is deeply personal.