Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name | TechCrunch
Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting $350 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that $350 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus $1 million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
It’s extremely early for us, but Yosemite has the ability to create new areas of medicine before other firms get there. My team has pioneered a couple of these: epigenetic gene editing [technology that changes how strongly a gene is expressed, rather than altering the underlying DNA sequence itself], and safe delivery of gene editing to specific cells — a bottleneck for the whole field for the better part of a decade. If you want to be first, and you want to help discover new areas, that’s what we’re going to be best at.
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed?
It has, actually. When I launched Yosemite in 2023, the XBI [ETF/index] was still down massively from its 2021 highs and pharma hadn’t gotten acquisitive yet. What’s changed in the last three years: interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic. That’s added up to an acquisitive spree over the last eight months or so. We’ve seen huge exits, like Eli Lilly buying Kelonia for $7 billion, and massive wins in antibody drug conjugates. One high-profile one: Revolution Medicines, going after KRAS [one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, long considered nearly impossible to target with drugs] in pancreatic cancer, has doubled the survival rate for [the most common form of pancreatic cancer] — from 12 to 24 months. That’s only happened in the last year.
Last year you talked publicly about your concerns over proposed NIH cuts.
Unfortunately, there’s still pressure from the federal government, but it’s less of a long-term threat than it was. Last year, for the first time in history, an administration asked for a cut of up to 40% of the NIH budget. For context, the biggest cut that ever happened was 1% in 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, and that cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs. Gratefully, the Senate and House — this is extremely bipartisan — totally rejected the 40% cut. This year they came back asking for 12%, still the biggest cut of all time by an order of magnitude, and I expect the same rejection. NIH funding has more than 90% approval. Personally, I think we should go on offense — I’d increase it to something like $100 billion. On a dollar basis, it hasn’t grown in about a decade, so relative to inflation, it’s actually shrunk.
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery?
American hospitals are some of the most technologically naive places in the economy — there’s still a huge amount done on fax, on floppy disk. One example: call centers, like 911 triage, are expensive to keep open 24/7 and are ripe for AI. There’s also electronic health records, radiology, pathology. But where I get really interested is clinical trials — the biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs about $260 million, and only one in three succeeds. The biggest cost is patient recruitment and retention. AI could help build a synthetic control arm [a computer-generated stand-in for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data], so instead of recruiting a full control group, you only recruit the active arm — that halves the patients you need and massively increases speed. The FDA is leaning into this right now.
What about AI in drug discovery — is it overhyped?
I think it’s a fantastic advancement, for democratizing science and for accelerating things. What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work — not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes.
AI has [also] been great at finding pockets we’ve never been able to hit before. Historically we could only drug about 15% of the genome, because we couldn’t drug proteins interacting with other proteins — the chemistry was too hard. That’s changed in the last couple of years, hand in hand with AI. Take Revolution Medicines: they’re the first to drug KRAS, which for decades had no [natural dent or crevice on its surface for a drug molecule to latch onto and block] — it’s basically a smooth oval, a death star. About 10 years ago, scientists at Amgen found a weird cryptic pocket in it, leading to the first drug against it, Lumakras. It only worked for one specific mutation; what AI has done is find all the other variants we can now target and show creative new ways to block it.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Yosemite Investor Reed Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 19, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images
What undruggable targets are your companies going after?
The biggest one of all: p53. We’re going after it with three different companies and several strategies. It’s a tumor suppressor gene — famously, elephants don’t get cancer, and one theory is they have dozens of copies of p53, while humans have just one, which is easily taken out. p53 is the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers; almost every cancer has to knock it out to exist in the first place. If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that’s one of cancer’s Achilles’ heels, and it’s never been done. We think we found something to hit that exposed [marker] across all the different ways p53 gets mutated.
Tell me about Tune Therapeutics.
Tune has been the premier epigenetic editing company in clinical development for the last couple of years, targeting hepatitis B, which affects over 250 million people and is the primary driver of liver cancer. The technology lets us add or remove methyl groups [small chemical tags that attach to DNA and act like a dimmer switch, turning a gene’s activity up or down without changing the gene itself] at specific sites in the liver. Every cell in your body has the same DNA but expresses it differently — think of gray hair: melanin gets methylated and turned off, so your body still makes hair, just less robust. That’s the same process behind aging immune systems and slowing metabolism. Hepatitis B looks foreign to your body, so we’re aiming to methylate and silence the virus itself, the way about 1% of people who spontaneously clear the virus seem to do naturally.
Meanwhile, Histosonics is a device company, which seems unusual for Yosemite.
You’re right, we don’t usually do devices. It’s the first company using histotripsy at scale for liver tumor destruction, using noninvasive therapy — creating small air pockets, then collapsing them to destroy tissue in a very specific area, similar to an ultrasound rather than a CT scan. Their lead programs are in pancreatic and liver tumors — most pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver, so it’s a natural pairing. We think this becomes a huge part of therapy for both.
How many companies are in the portfolio now, and any failures yet?
Close to 25 across both funds. Two haven’t worked out for scientific reasons — we tranche these investments against scientific milestones, and since we’re so early, sometimes things fail on the science. That’s what we’d expect.
How do you advise founders weighing a big check from big pharma?You get the funding, but it cuts off other options.
Pharma is a key partner, but founders need to see it as a moving target — priorities shift a lot depending on leadership. After COVID, many pharma companies lost money in infectious disease and moved out of the space entirely — Pfizer, for instance. Staying attuned to who’s actually active in your area is probably the most important thing.
How can founders who want to get in front of you do this?
We have an open door. When we look at grants and companies, we take people’s CVs out of it — I don’t want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds. We’ve funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I’m equally happy with either outcome. We look at every modality — small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI, digital health. Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it.
Does storytelling matter as much for biotech founders as in other industries?
Unfortunately, yes — I’ve seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO. But usually the founder and CEO aren’t the same person. The founder is often the academic — the chief scientist or chief medical officer — and the CEO is a professionalized operator whose job includes raising capital and telling the story. That division of labor works well.
Three years into running Yosemite, what’s been the biggest surprise?
We now have the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, because of GLP-1s — the best-selling drug class in the world. We’re also seeing early signs GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer, unrelated to weight loss, because obesity is one of only two “pan-disease” risk factors — the other being smoking — that raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That’s made people look with fresh eyes, fresh ambition, and real capital at huge disease areas that had gone cold. Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53 — the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades — are now, we think, within reach. I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering.
Before you go, what do you make of the longevity industry?
I don’t want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally. But I don’t think we — or anyone — really knows what we’re talking about yet. Ask a geneticist and they’ll tell you about telomeres; ask an immunologist and they’ll tell you about T cells losing efficacy; ask a metabolomicist and you’ll get a different answer still. There’s no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics. I don’t think you “have” a longevity problem — I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging. Optimizing that per person is exactly what healthcare should be doing, but I don’t know how you turn longevity into a one-size-fits-all business.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting $350 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that $350 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus $1 million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
It’s extremely early for us, but Yosemite has the ability to create new areas of medicine before other firms get there. My team has pioneered a couple of these: epigenetic gene editing [technology that changes how strongly a gene is expressed, rather than altering the underlying DNA sequence itself], and safe delivery of gene editing to specific cells — a bottleneck for the whole field for the better part of a decade. If you want to be first, and you want to help discover new areas, that’s what we’re going to be best at.
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed?
It has, actually. When I launched Yosemite in 2023, the XBI [ETF/index] was still down massively from its 2021 highs and pharma hadn’t gotten acquisitive yet. What’s changed in the last three years: interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic. That’s added up to an acquisitive spree over the last eight months or so. We’ve seen huge exits, like Eli Lilly buying Kelonia for $7 billion, and massive wins in antibody drug conjugates. One high-profile one: Revolution Medicines, going after KRAS [one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, long considered nearly impossible to target with drugs] in pancreatic cancer, has doubled the survival rate for [the most common form of pancreatic cancer] — from 12 to 24 months. That’s only happened in the last year.
Last year you talked publicly about your concerns over proposed NIH cuts.
Unfortunately, there’s still pressure from the federal government, but it’s less of a long-term threat than it was. Last year, for the first time in history, an administration asked for a cut of up to 40% of the NIH budget. For context, the biggest cut that ever happened was 1% in 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, and that cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs. Gratefully, the Senate and House — this is extremely bipartisan — totally rejected the 40% cut. This year they came back asking for 12%, still the biggest cut of all time by an order of magnitude, and I expect the same rejection. NIH funding has more than 90% approval. Personally, I think we should go on offense — I’d increase it to something like $100 billion. On a dollar basis, it hasn’t grown in about a decade, so relative to inflation, it’s actually shrunk.
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery?
American hospitals are some of the most technologically naive places in the economy — there’s still a huge amount done on fax, on floppy disk. One example: call centers, like 911 triage, are expensive to keep open 24/7 and are ripe for AI. There’s also electronic health records, radiology, pathology. But where I get really interested is clinical trials — the biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs about $260 million, and only one in three succeeds. The biggest cost is patient recruitment and retention. AI could help build a synthetic control arm [a computer-generated stand-in for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data], so instead of recruiting a full control group, you only recruit the active arm — that halves the patients you need and massively increases speed. The FDA is leaning into this right now.
What about AI in drug discovery — is it overhyped?
I think it’s a fantastic advancement, for democratizing science and for accelerating things. What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work — not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes.
AI has [also] been great at finding pockets we’ve never been able to hit before. Historically we could only drug about 15% of the genome, because we couldn’t drug proteins interacting with other proteins — the chemistry was too hard. That’s changed in the last couple of years, hand in hand with AI. Take Revolution Medicines: they’re the first to drug KRAS, which for decades had no [natural dent or crevice on its surface for a drug molecule to latch onto and block] — it’s basically a smooth oval, a death star. About 10 years ago, scientists at Amgen found a weird cryptic pocket in it, leading to the first drug against it, Lumakras. It only worked for one specific mutation; what AI has done is find all the other variants we can now target and show creative new ways to block it.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Yosemite Investor Reed Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 19, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images
What undruggable targets are your companies going after?
The biggest one of all: p53. We’re going after it with three different companies and several strategies. It’s a tumor suppressor gene — famously, elephants don’t get cancer, and one theory is they have dozens of copies of p53, while humans have just one, which is easily taken out. p53 is the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers; almost every cancer has to knock it out to exist in the first place. If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that’s one of cancer’s Achilles’ heels, and it’s never been done. We think we found something to hit that exposed [marker] across all the different ways p53 gets mutated.
Tell me about Tune Therapeutics.
Tune has been the premier epigenetic editing company in clinical development for the last couple of years, targeting hepatitis B, which affects over 250 million people and is the primary driver of liver cancer. The technology lets us add or remove methyl groups [small chemical tags that attach to DNA and act like a dimmer switch, turning a gene’s activity up or down without changing the gene itself] at specific sites in the liver. Every cell in your body has the same DNA but expresses it differently — think of gray hair: melanin gets methylated and turned off, so your body still makes hair, just less robust. That’s the same process behind aging immune systems and slowing metabolism. Hepatitis B looks foreign to your body, so we’re aiming to methylate and silence the virus itself, the way about 1% of people who spontaneously clear the virus seem to do naturally.
Meanwhile, Histosonics is a device company, which seems unusual for Yosemite.
You’re right, we don’t usually do devices. It’s the first company using histotripsy at scale for liver tumor destruction, using noninvasive therapy — creating small air pockets, then collapsing them to destroy tissue in a very specific area, similar to an ultrasound rather than a CT scan. Their lead programs are in pancreatic and liver tumors — most pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver, so it’s a natural pairing. We think this becomes a huge part of therapy for both.
How many companies are in the portfolio now, and any failures yet?
Close to 25 across both funds. Two haven’t worked out for scientific reasons — we tranche these investments against scientific milestones, and since we’re so early, sometimes things fail on the science. That’s what we’d expect.
How do you advise founders weighing a big check from big pharma?You get the funding, but it cuts off other options.
Pharma is a key partner, but founders need to see it as a moving target — priorities shift a lot depending on leadership. After COVID, many pharma companies lost money in infectious disease and moved out of the space entirely — Pfizer, for instance. Staying attuned to who’s actually active in your area is probably the most important thing.
How can founders who want to get in front of you do this?
We have an open door. When we look at grants and companies, we take people’s CVs out of it — I don’t want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds. We’ve funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I’m equally happy with either outcome. We look at every modality — small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI, digital health. Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it.
Does storytelling matter as much for biotech founders as in other industries?
Unfortunately, yes — I’ve seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO. But usually the founder and CEO aren’t the same person. The founder is often the academic — the chief scientist or chief medical officer — and the CEO is a professionalized operator whose job includes raising capital and telling the story. That division of labor works well.
Three years into running Yosemite, what’s been the biggest surprise?
We now have the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, because of GLP-1s — the best-selling drug class in the world. We’re also seeing early signs GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer, unrelated to weight loss, because obesity is one of only two “pan-disease” risk factors — the other being smoking — that raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That’s made people look with fresh eyes, fresh ambition, and real capital at huge disease areas that had gone cold. Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53 — the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades — are now, we think, within reach. I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering.
Before you go, what do you make of the longevity industry?
I don’t want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally. But I don’t think we — or anyone — really knows what we’re talking about yet. Ask a geneticist and they’ll tell you about telomeres; ask an immunologist and they’ll tell you about T cells losing efficacy; ask a metabolomicist and you’ll get a different answer still. There’s no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics. I don’t think you “have” a longevity problem — I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging. Optimizing that per person is exactly what healthcare should be doing, but I don’t know how you turn longevity into a one-size-fits-all business.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
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I am back from vacation. What did I miss? Turns out, quite a lot — including the end of the Uber-Waymopartnership in Phoenix. Uber and Waymo still have robotaxi service partnerships in Atlanta and Austin. The question is not if, but when will these agreements end? But that isn’t the most intriguing question, in my opinion. I am far more intrigued by how these two companies will behave once the remaining partnerships end.
There is already tension with Uber executives taking not-so-subtle shots at Waymo. I expect that once the partnerships end, these thinly veiled barbs will be replaced with more direct action. One battleground will be policy, specifically markets where robotaxi companies are angling to get access.
This week, we saw another interesting development in the autonomous vehicle industry on the federal stage. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration administrator Jonathan Morrison issued a directive to autonomous vehicle developers, stating that it is unacceptable for their vehicles to interfere with first responders or law enforcement.
The money quote: “Let me be clear: the inability to detect and appropriately respond to such situations represents a functional insufficiency. Emergency scenes are not rare or extreme ‘edge cases.’ As such, NHTSA is today issuing a call to action for AV developers and operators to immediately focus their resources on fixing this issue.”
Morrison’s letter never calls out any one robotaxi company and it was sent to every AV developer listed in the Department of Transportation’s Standing General Order. But it sure seems like Morrison is directing the agency’s ire at Waymo.
A previous TechCrunch investigation found that Waymo — which operates the largest robotaxi fleet in the United States, with vehicles in cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco — has had repeated run-ins with first responders. And just this week, San Francisco supervisor Bilal Mahmood said he plans to submit a letter of inquiry to examine how autonomous vehicles affected public transit services and emergency responders following a July 4 fireworks show that resulted in massive gridlock. Local news outlets reported that numerous Waymo robotaxis had to be towed after running out of power during the lengthy traffic jam.
Morrison’s letter has gravitas. But will there be substantive consequences for AV developers? It’s hard to tell at this point. For now, the NHTSA has demanded companies present the agency with “solutions” by the end of the month.
One more news item from the feds. Take a look at the new 2026 Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda, which was updated last week. It contains a long list of proposed changes to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) requirements, which govern vehicle design and equipment requirements. These proposed changes could help autonomous vehicle companies like Tesla and Zoox, which are developing vehicles without steering wheels, pedals, or other features required on human-driven cars.
We usually focus on venture deals, but this week I wanted to highlight Rivian and the sale of 86.25 million Class A common shares priced at $15.50 each (that includes an added 11.25 million in additional shares that underwriters opted to buy).
In all, Rivian said it expects to raise $1.32 billion in new capital. The raise comes at a notable time for the EV maker. The company started delivering its new R2 SUV last month and recently raised its sales forecast for 2026. The company said it now expects to deliver between 65,000 and 70,000 vehicles after outperforming its own expectations in the second quarter due to robust growth quarter-over-quarter in EDV and R1, coupled with the introduction of R2 deliveries.
The company didn’t explain the reason for the raise. But as a reminder, Rivian is not yet profitable and scaling up production of the R2 — or any vehicle for that matter — isn’t cheap!
Other deals that got my attention …
Bidbus, a Los Angeles-based startup that built a digital marketplace where multiple dealers can bid on a car, raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Ibex Investors. Mucker Capital, FJ Labs, Motley Fool Ventures, Data Point Capital, Walter Ventures, and the Car Dealership Guy’s Yossi Levi also participated.
Lyft said it plans to acquire Serveo’s bike-share business in Spain. Terms weren’t disclosed, but the ride-hailing company said it is expected to close this year.
TaiSan, a U.K. battery startup, raised £4.65 million in a seed funding round co-led by Eos Advisory and the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II. InnoEnergy, AFI Ventures, EverQuest Capital Partners, Exergon, Heartfelt Ventures, Adeline Arts & Science, Techmind, angel investor François Badelon, and matched funding from Innovate UK also participated.
Notable reads and other tidbits
Image Credits:Bryce Durbin
AssuranceAmerica, a U.S. insurance provider, confirmed a data breach that affected the personal information and driver’s license numbers of 6.9 million people, making it the largest known spill of Americans’ driver’s license information this year.
Beta Technologies, the electric vehicle takeoff and landing developer, completed operational flights conducted under the U.S. Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration’s new eVTOL Integration Pilot Program. The flights covered about 275 nautical miles covering Virginia and Maryland.
Longtime followers of Tesla will remember the heady days when Elon Musk battled various short sellers of the company’s stock. Musk is more polarizing than ever, and one exchange-traded fund creator has found a way to tap into that negative sentiment with two new anti-Elon exchange-traded funds.
GM brand Chevrolet built an all-American EV truck. Senior reporter Tim De Chant asks, Why is nobody buying it?
Manna Aero, the Ireland-based autonomous drone delivery startup, is scaling up in the United States with a factory and operations center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that it says will employ 1,000 in the next few years.
Slate Auto teamed up with Crayola to offer its EV truck and SUV customers vehicle wraps in five crayon colors. (Reminder: The basic Slate EV vehicle isn’t painted. Instead, it comes in a gray composite material that can be customized with a vehicle wrap. The company has hundreds of options to choose from.)
One more thing …
TechCrunch podcast Build Mode just launched its third season, and it’s a banger. Build Mode is hosted by Isabelle Johannessen, who heads TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield program. Unlike Equity — the TC podcast I co-host along with Anthony Ha and Sean O’Kane — Build Mode is designed to help early-stage founders.
The new season kicks off with Precursor Ventures founder and managing partner Charles Hudson, who talks about what early-stage founders need to know before raising their first institutional round.
I am back from vacation. What did I miss? Turns out, quite a lot — including the end of the Uber-Waymopartnership in Phoenix. Uber and Waymo still have robotaxi service partnerships in Atlanta and Austin. The question is not if, but when will these agreements end? But that isn’t the most intriguing question, in my opinion. I am far more intrigued by how these two companies will behave once the remaining partnerships end.
There is already tension with Uber executives taking not-so-subtle shots at Waymo. I expect that once the partnerships end, these thinly veiled barbs will be replaced with more direct action. One battleground will be policy, specifically markets where robotaxi companies are angling to get access.
This week, we saw another interesting development in the autonomous vehicle industry on the federal stage. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration administrator Jonathan Morrison issued a directive to autonomous vehicle developers, stating that it is unacceptable for their vehicles to interfere with first responders or law enforcement.
The money quote: “Let me be clear: the inability to detect and appropriately respond to such situations represents a functional insufficiency. Emergency scenes are not rare or extreme ‘edge cases.’ As such, NHTSA is today issuing a call to action for AV developers and operators to immediately focus their resources on fixing this issue.”
Morrison’s letter never calls out any one robotaxi company and it was sent to every AV developer listed in the Department of Transportation’s Standing General Order. But it sure seems like Morrison is directing the agency’s ire at Waymo.
A previous TechCrunch investigation found that Waymo — which operates the largest robotaxi fleet in the United States, with vehicles in cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco — has had repeated run-ins with first responders. And just this week, San Francisco supervisor Bilal Mahmood said he plans to submit a letter of inquiry to examine how autonomous vehicles affected public transit services and emergency responders following a July 4 fireworks show that resulted in massive gridlock. Local news outlets reported that numerous Waymo robotaxis had to be towed after running out of power during the lengthy traffic jam.
Morrison’s letter has gravitas. But will there be substantive consequences for AV developers? It’s hard to tell at this point. For now, the NHTSA has demanded companies present the agency with “solutions” by the end of the month.
One more news item from the feds. Take a look at the new 2026 Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda, which was updated last week. It contains a long list of proposed changes to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) requirements, which govern vehicle design and equipment requirements. These proposed changes could help autonomous vehicle companies like Tesla and Zoox, which are developing vehicles without steering wheels, pedals, or other features required on human-driven cars.
We usually focus on venture deals, but this week I wanted to highlight Rivian and the sale of 86.25 million Class A common shares priced at $15.50 each (that includes an added 11.25 million in additional shares that underwriters opted to buy).
In all, Rivian said it expects to raise $1.32 billion in new capital. The raise comes at a notable time for the EV maker. The company started delivering its new R2 SUV last month and recently raised its sales forecast for 2026. The company said it now expects to deliver between 65,000 and 70,000 vehicles after outperforming its own expectations in the second quarter due to robust growth quarter-over-quarter in EDV and R1, coupled with the introduction of R2 deliveries.
The company didn’t explain the reason for the raise. But as a reminder, Rivian is not yet profitable and scaling up production of the R2 — or any vehicle for that matter — isn’t cheap!
Other deals that got my attention …
Bidbus, a Los Angeles-based startup that built a digital marketplace where multiple dealers can bid on a car, raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Ibex Investors. Mucker Capital, FJ Labs, Motley Fool Ventures, Data Point Capital, Walter Ventures, and the Car Dealership Guy’s Yossi Levi also participated.
Lyft said it plans to acquire Serveo’s bike-share business in Spain. Terms weren’t disclosed, but the ride-hailing company said it is expected to close this year.
TaiSan, a U.K. battery startup, raised £4.65 million in a seed funding round co-led by Eos Advisory and the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II. InnoEnergy, AFI Ventures, EverQuest Capital Partners, Exergon, Heartfelt Ventures, Adeline Arts & Science, Techmind, angel investor François Badelon, and matched funding from Innovate UK also participated.
Notable reads and other tidbits
Image Credits:Bryce Durbin
AssuranceAmerica, a U.S. insurance provider, confirmed a data breach that affected the personal information and driver’s license numbers of 6.9 million people, making it the largest known spill of Americans’ driver’s license information this year.
Beta Technologies, the electric vehicle takeoff and landing developer, completed operational flights conducted under the U.S. Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration’s new eVTOL Integration Pilot Program. The flights covered about 275 nautical miles covering Virginia and Maryland.
Longtime followers of Tesla will remember the heady days when Elon Musk battled various short sellers of the company’s stock. Musk is more polarizing than ever, and one exchange-traded fund creator has found a way to tap into that negative sentiment with two new anti-Elon exchange-traded funds.
GM brand Chevrolet built an all-American EV truck. Senior reporter Tim De Chant asks, Why is nobody buying it?
Manna Aero, the Ireland-based autonomous drone delivery startup, is scaling up in the United States with a factory and operations center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that it says will employ 1,000 in the next few years.
Slate Auto teamed up with Crayola to offer its EV truck and SUV customers vehicle wraps in five crayon colors. (Reminder: The basic Slate EV vehicle isn’t painted. Instead, it comes in a gray composite material that can be customized with a vehicle wrap. The company has hundreds of options to choose from.)
One more thing …
TechCrunch podcast Build Mode just launched its third season, and it’s a banger. Build Mode is hosted by Isabelle Johannessen, who heads TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield program. Unlike Equity — the TC podcast I co-host along with Anthony Ha and Sean O’Kane — Build Mode is designed to help early-stage founders.
The new season kicks off with Precursor Ventures founder and managing partner Charles Hudson, who talks about what early-stage founders need to know before raising their first institutional round.
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!
I am back from vacation. What did I miss? Turns out, quite a lot — including the end of the Uber-Waymopartnership in Phoenix. Uber and Waymo still have robotaxi service partnerships in Atlanta and Austin. The question is not if, but when will these agreements end? But that isn’t the most intriguing question, in my opinion. I am far more intrigued by how these two companies will behave once the remaining partnerships end.
There is already tension with Uber executives taking not-so-subtle shots at Waymo. I expect that once the partnerships end, these thinly veiled barbs will be replaced with more direct action. One battleground will be policy, specifically markets where robotaxi companies are angling to get access.
This week, we saw another interesting development in the autonomous vehicle industry on the federal stage. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration administrator Jonathan Morrison issued a directive to autonomous vehicle developers, stating that it is unacceptable for their vehicles to interfere with first responders or law enforcement.
The money quote: “Let me be clear: the inability to detect and appropriately respond to such situations represents a functional insufficiency. Emergency scenes are not rare or extreme ‘edge cases.’ As such, NHTSA is today issuing a call to action for AV developers and operators to immediately focus their resources on fixing this issue.”
Morrison’s letter never calls out any one robotaxi company and it was sent to every AV developer listed in the Department of Transportation’s Standing General Order. But it sure seems like Morrison is directing the agency’s ire at Waymo.
A previous TechCrunch investigation found that Waymo — which operates the largest robotaxi fleet in the United States, with vehicles in cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco — has had repeated run-ins with first responders. And just this week, San Francisco supervisor Bilal Mahmood said he plans to submit a letter of inquiry to examine how autonomous vehicles affected public transit services and emergency responders following a July 4 fireworks show that resulted in massive gridlock. Local news outlets reported that numerous Waymo robotaxis had to be towed after running out of power during the lengthy traffic jam.
Morrison’s letter has gravitas. But will there be substantive consequences for AV developers? It’s hard to tell at this point. For now, the NHTSA has demanded companies present the agency with “solutions” by the end of the month.
One more news item from the feds. Take a look at the new 2026 Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda, which was updated last week. It contains a long list of proposed changes to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) requirements, which govern vehicle design and equipment requirements. These proposed changes could help autonomous vehicle companies like Tesla and Zoox, which are developing vehicles without steering wheels, pedals, or other features required on human-driven cars.
We usually focus on venture deals, but this week I wanted to highlight Rivian and the sale of 86.25 million Class A common shares priced at $15.50 each (that includes an added 11.25 million in additional shares that underwriters opted to buy).
In all, Rivian said it expects to raise $1.32 billion in new capital. The raise comes at a notable time for the EV maker. The company started delivering its new R2 SUV last month and recently raised its sales forecast for 2026. The company said it now expects to deliver between 65,000 and 70,000 vehicles after outperforming its own expectations in the second quarter due to robust growth quarter-over-quarter in EDV and R1, coupled with the introduction of R2 deliveries.
The company didn’t explain the reason for the raise. But as a reminder, Rivian is not yet profitable and scaling up production of the R2 — or any vehicle for that matter — isn’t cheap!
Other deals that got my attention …
Bidbus, a Los Angeles-based startup that built a digital marketplace where multiple dealers can bid on a car, raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Ibex Investors. Mucker Capital, FJ Labs, Motley Fool Ventures, Data Point Capital, Walter Ventures, and the Car Dealership Guy’s Yossi Levi also participated.
Lyft said it plans to acquire Serveo’s bike-share business in Spain. Terms weren’t disclosed, but the ride-hailing company said it is expected to close this year.
TaiSan, a U.K. battery startup, raised £4.65 million in a seed funding round co-led by Eos Advisory and the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II. InnoEnergy, AFI Ventures, EverQuest Capital Partners, Exergon, Heartfelt Ventures, Adeline Arts & Science, Techmind, angel investor François Badelon, and matched funding from Innovate UK also participated.
Notable reads and other tidbits
Image Credits:Bryce Durbin
AssuranceAmerica, a U.S. insurance provider, confirmed a data breach that affected the personal information and driver’s license numbers of 6.9 million people, making it the largest known spill of Americans’ driver’s license information this year.
Beta Technologies, the electric vehicle takeoff and landing developer, completed operational flights conducted under the U.S. Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration’s new eVTOL Integration Pilot Program. The flights covered about 275 nautical miles covering Virginia and Maryland.
Longtime followers of Tesla will remember the heady days when Elon Musk battled various short sellers of the company’s stock. Musk is more polarizing than ever, and one exchange-traded fund creator has found a way to tap into that negative sentiment with two new anti-Elon exchange-traded funds.
GM brand Chevrolet built an all-American EV truck. Senior reporter Tim De Chant asks, Why is nobody buying it?
Manna Aero, the Ireland-based autonomous drone delivery startup, is scaling up in the United States with a factory and operations center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that it says will employ 1,000 in the next few years.
Slate Auto teamed up with Crayola to offer its EV truck and SUV customers vehicle wraps in five crayon colors. (Reminder: The basic Slate EV vehicle isn’t painted. Instead, it comes in a gray composite material that can be customized with a vehicle wrap. The company has hundreds of options to choose from.)
One more thing …
TechCrunch podcast Build Mode just launched its third season, and it’s a banger. Build Mode is hosted by Isabelle Johannessen, who heads TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield program. Unlike Equity — the TC podcast I co-host along with Anthony Ha and Sean O’Kane — Build Mode is designed to help early-stage founders.
The new season kicks off with Precursor Ventures founder and managing partner Charles Hudson, who talks about what early-stage founders need to know before raising their first institutional round.
#Noise #REP #Band #Launched #India #Health #Insights #SubscriptionNoise">Noise REP Band Launched in India With Health Insights and No Subscription
Noise has added another device to its range of wearables with the launch of the REP Band, its first product in the screenless wearables category. The device provides comprehensive health tracking and insights through the NoiseFit app, with no subscription fees. Pre-bookings can be made for Rs. 9,999, and the device claims up to 10 days of battery life.
Noise REP Band Features and Specifications
The Noise REP Band is designed for those who want health-monitoring features on their wearable device without being distracted by a display screen. The screenless technology makes the wearable device look minimalist, and the stainless steel body makes it very durable. The device weighs only 27g; thus, it is very light to wear for extended periods. Its woven band, one-handed clasp, 10-day battery life, and 5ATM water resistance make it perfect for everyday use.
The wearable continuously tracks key health metrics, including heart rate, blood oxygen, stress, sleep, respiratory rate, recovery score, and VO2 Max. However, instead of providing raw numbers, the NoiseFit app transforms the information above into AI-driven daily health insights. Since these insights do not require a subscription, users can access all app features at no additional cost.
Noise has also considered tracking accuracy. The optical sensor has been tuned for different skin tones to deliver accurate readings. The 6-axis motion sensor detects any movement, including running, walking, cycling, rowing, and elliptical training. The REP Band can connect to a smartphone via Bluetooth on Android and iOS. It can also connect via Bluetooth to Android and iOS smartphones.
Noise REP Band Price in India, Availability
The Noise REP Band is available for pre-booking in India at an introductory price of Rs. 9,999. Users can pick the REP Band in Vivid Orange, Navy Blue, Classic Black, or Sand Beige. Buyers can reserve the wearable through the Noise website, Amazon, and Flipkart. The company has not yet confirmed its regular pricing or sale date.
It’s been previously reported that Apple will be skipping expected variants of its M6 chip and speeding up production of the M7. But the writing on the wall suggests very, very expensive M7 Ultra-powered desktop Macs coming in 2028—and the reason may (not) shock you.
Anonymous sources are apparently continuing to inform Bloomberg’s scoop-getter Mark Gurman about Apple disrupting its traditional chip rollout process. M6-powered Apple products don’t even exist yet—though they are expected later this year—and that whole generation of chip is already basically obsolete as far as Apple is concerned, according to Gurman.
But you’re never going to guess what Gurman now claims the reason is. Haha yes you are because it’s AI:
“The takeaway is that AI is no longer just another feature Apple’s chips need to support. It is now shaping how those products are designed and when they are shipped. That’s a shift from the days when the main concerns were things like processing speeds, graphics, battery life and thinner designs.”
That’s a little depressing because I happen to like things like processing speeds, graphics, and battery life. Hell, thinness is even pretty cool compared to AI.
But anyway, Gurman says we shouldn’t expect M6 Pro, Max, or Ultra products. Finalization of the M7 started just six months after the M6 was finalized. Which suggests a weird product timeline: We’ll basically say hello and goodbye to the M6 at the same time at the end of this year, and the first M7 products will materialize at the start of next year. Then things will be relatively normal as M7 Pro, and M7 Max arrive at the end of 2027. Then M7 Ultra products will come along in 2028.
If you’re saving your pennies for a high-end desktop, that M7 Ultra is something to keep in mind. Gurman writes:
“The new Ultra is designed to support as much as 1.5 terabytes of memory — roughly double the capacity planned for the M5 Ultra — though whether Apple ultimately offers that configuration will depend on the state of the industry. Widespread memory-chip shortages have made the component harder to find and more expensive.”
Indeed, it’s worth pausing here to really mull over the pricing implications a bit. There are no M5 Ultras yet, but rumors suggest a high-performance desktop release in the form of the Mac Studio. Last month, when Apple famously raised the price of products like the MacBook Neo, which went from $600 to $700, it also raised the price of the base Mac Studio by $500 to $2500. But the price of the higher-end 96GB Mac Studio climbed $1,300 to $5,299. Are you sweating yet?
And remember, the M7 Ultra is reportedly built for AI. Gurman claims that it will approach “the class of dedicated AI accelerators such as Nvidia Corp.’s Blackwell.” And how much does it actually cost to buy an Nvidia Blackwell? Currently the cheapest Blackwell I can find on Newegg dot com is priced at $12,499.99. Just for the processor.
Obviously you can’t buy this imaginary Mac right now, and the consumer market will shift in predictable and unpredictable ways over the next couple of years. But if we imagine it’s 2028 and you’re thinking about buying a maxed-out M7 Ultra-powered Mac Studio (or whichever model is the top of the line in almost two years), then presumably you just—and I mean this literally—took outa second mortgage on your house. This truly could be a computer at a real-estate-level price point.
It’s been previously reported that Apple will be skipping expected variants of its M6 chip and speeding up production of the M7. But the writing on the wall suggests very, very expensive M7 Ultra-powered desktop Macs coming in 2028—and the reason may (not) shock you.
Anonymous sources are apparently continuing to inform Bloomberg’s scoop-getter Mark Gurman about Apple disrupting its traditional chip rollout process. M6-powered Apple products don’t even exist yet—though they are expected later this year—and that whole generation of chip is already basically obsolete as far as Apple is concerned, according to Gurman.
But you’re never going to guess what Gurman now claims the reason is. Haha yes you are because it’s AI:
“The takeaway is that AI is no longer just another feature Apple’s chips need to support. It is now shaping how those products are designed and when they are shipped. That’s a shift from the days when the main concerns were things like processing speeds, graphics, battery life and thinner designs.”
That’s a little depressing because I happen to like things like processing speeds, graphics, and battery life. Hell, thinness is even pretty cool compared to AI.
But anyway, Gurman says we shouldn’t expect M6 Pro, Max, or Ultra products. Finalization of the M7 started just six months after the M6 was finalized. Which suggests a weird product timeline: We’ll basically say hello and goodbye to the M6 at the same time at the end of this year, and the first M7 products will materialize at the start of next year. Then things will be relatively normal as M7 Pro, and M7 Max arrive at the end of 2027. Then M7 Ultra products will come along in 2028.
If you’re saving your pennies for a high-end desktop, that M7 Ultra is something to keep in mind. Gurman writes:
“The new Ultra is designed to support as much as 1.5 terabytes of memory — roughly double the capacity planned for the M5 Ultra — though whether Apple ultimately offers that configuration will depend on the state of the industry. Widespread memory-chip shortages have made the component harder to find and more expensive.”
Indeed, it’s worth pausing here to really mull over the pricing implications a bit. There are no M5 Ultras yet, but rumors suggest a high-performance desktop release in the form of the Mac Studio. Last month, when Apple famously raised the price of products like the MacBook Neo, which went from $600 to $700, it also raised the price of the base Mac Studio by $500 to $2500. But the price of the higher-end 96GB Mac Studio climbed $1,300 to $5,299. Are you sweating yet?
And remember, the M7 Ultra is reportedly built for AI. Gurman claims that it will approach “the class of dedicated AI accelerators such as Nvidia Corp.’s Blackwell.” And how much does it actually cost to buy an Nvidia Blackwell? Currently the cheapest Blackwell I can find on Newegg dot com is priced at $12,499.99. Just for the processor.
Obviously you can’t buy this imaginary Mac right now, and the consumer market will shift in predictable and unpredictable ways over the next couple of years. But if we imagine it’s 2028 and you’re thinking about buying a maxed-out M7 Ultra-powered Mac Studio (or whichever model is the top of the line in almost two years), then presumably you just—and I mean this literally—took outa second mortgage on your house. This truly could be a computer at a real-estate-level price point.
#Bring #MindBendingly #Expensive #Apple #Product #TimeApple,apple silicon,Mac Pro,Mac Studio">2028 Could Bring the Most Mind-Bendingly Expensive Apple Product of All Time
It’s been previously reported that Apple will be skipping expected variants of its M6 chip and speeding up production of the M7. But the writing on the wall suggests very, very expensive M7 Ultra-powered desktop Macs coming in 2028—and the reason may (not) shock you.
Anonymous sources are apparently continuing to inform Bloomberg’s scoop-getter Mark Gurman about Apple disrupting its traditional chip rollout process. M6-powered Apple products don’t even exist yet—though they are expected later this year—and that whole generation of chip is already basically obsolete as far as Apple is concerned, according to Gurman.
But you’re never going to guess what Gurman now claims the reason is. Haha yes you are because it’s AI:
“The takeaway is that AI is no longer just another feature Apple’s chips need to support. It is now shaping how those products are designed and when they are shipped. That’s a shift from the days when the main concerns were things like processing speeds, graphics, battery life and thinner designs.”
That’s a little depressing because I happen to like things like processing speeds, graphics, and battery life. Hell, thinness is even pretty cool compared to AI.
But anyway, Gurman says we shouldn’t expect M6 Pro, Max, or Ultra products. Finalization of the M7 started just six months after the M6 was finalized. Which suggests a weird product timeline: We’ll basically say hello and goodbye to the M6 at the same time at the end of this year, and the first M7 products will materialize at the start of next year. Then things will be relatively normal as M7 Pro, and M7 Max arrive at the end of 2027. Then M7 Ultra products will come along in 2028.
If you’re saving your pennies for a high-end desktop, that M7 Ultra is something to keep in mind. Gurman writes:
“The new Ultra is designed to support as much as 1.5 terabytes of memory — roughly double the capacity planned for the M5 Ultra — though whether Apple ultimately offers that configuration will depend on the state of the industry. Widespread memory-chip shortages have made the component harder to find and more expensive.”
Indeed, it’s worth pausing here to really mull over the pricing implications a bit. There are no M5 Ultras yet, but rumors suggest a high-performance desktop release in the form of the Mac Studio. Last month, when Apple famously raised the price of products like the MacBook Neo, which went from $600 to $700, it also raised the price of the base Mac Studio by $500 to $2500. But the price of the higher-end 96GB Mac Studio climbed $1,300 to $5,299. Are you sweating yet?
And remember, the M7 Ultra is reportedly built for AI. Gurman claims that it will approach “the class of dedicated AI accelerators such as Nvidia Corp.’s Blackwell.” And how much does it actually cost to buy an Nvidia Blackwell? Currently the cheapest Blackwell I can find on Newegg dot com is priced at $12,499.99. Just for the processor.
Obviously you can’t buy this imaginary Mac right now, and the consumer market will shift in predictable and unpredictable ways over the next couple of years. But if we imagine it’s 2028 and you’re thinking about buying a maxed-out M7 Ultra-powered Mac Studio (or whichever model is the top of the line in almost two years), then presumably you just—and I mean this literally—took outa second mortgage on your house. This truly could be a computer at a real-estate-level price point.
#Bring #MindBendingly #Expensive #Apple #Product #TimeApple,apple silicon,Mac Pro,Mac Studio
![Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name | TechCrunch
Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting 0 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that 0 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
It’s extremely early for us, but Yosemite has the ability to create new areas of medicine before other firms get there. My team has pioneered a couple of these: epigenetic gene editing [technology that changes how strongly a gene is expressed, rather than altering the underlying DNA sequence itself], and safe delivery of gene editing to specific cells — a bottleneck for the whole field for the better part of a decade. If you want to be first, and you want to help discover new areas, that’s what we’re going to be best at.
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed?
It has, actually. When I launched Yosemite in 2023, the XBI [ETF/index] was still down massively from its 2021 highs and pharma hadn’t gotten acquisitive yet. What’s changed in the last three years: interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic. That’s added up to an acquisitive spree over the last eight months or so. We’ve seen huge exits, like Eli Lilly buying Kelonia for billion, and massive wins in antibody drug conjugates. One high-profile one: Revolution Medicines, going after KRAS [one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, long considered nearly impossible to target with drugs] in pancreatic cancer, has doubled the survival rate for [the most common form of pancreatic cancer] — from 12 to 24 months. That’s only happened in the last year.
Last year you talked publicly about your concerns over proposed NIH cuts.
Unfortunately, there’s still pressure from the federal government, but it’s less of a long-term threat than it was. Last year, for the first time in history, an administration asked for a cut of up to 40% of the NIH budget. For context, the biggest cut that ever happened was 1% in 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, and that cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs. Gratefully, the Senate and House — this is extremely bipartisan — totally rejected the 40% cut. This year they came back asking for 12%, still the biggest cut of all time by an order of magnitude, and I expect the same rejection. NIH funding has more than 90% approval. Personally, I think we should go on offense — I’d increase it to something like 0 billion. On a dollar basis, it hasn’t grown in about a decade, so relative to inflation, it’s actually shrunk.
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery?
American hospitals are some of the most technologically naive places in the economy — there’s still a huge amount done on fax, on floppy disk. One example: call centers, like 911 triage, are expensive to keep open 24/7 and are ripe for AI. There’s also electronic health records, radiology, pathology. But where I get really interested is clinical trials — the biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs about 0 million, and only one in three succeeds. The biggest cost is patient recruitment and retention. AI could help build a synthetic control arm [a computer-generated stand-in for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data], so instead of recruiting a full control group, you only recruit the active arm — that halves the patients you need and massively increases speed. The FDA is leaning into this right now.
What about AI in drug discovery — is it overhyped?
I think it’s a fantastic advancement, for democratizing science and for accelerating things. What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work — not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes.
AI has [also] been great at finding pockets we’ve never been able to hit before. Historically we could only drug about 15% of the genome, because we couldn’t drug proteins interacting with other proteins — the chemistry was too hard. That’s changed in the last couple of years, hand in hand with AI. Take Revolution Medicines: they’re the first to drug KRAS, which for decades had no [natural dent or crevice on its surface for a drug molecule to latch onto and block] — it’s basically a smooth oval, a death star. About 10 years ago, scientists at Amgen found a weird cryptic pocket in it, leading to the first drug against it, Lumakras. It only worked for one specific mutation; what AI has done is find all the other variants we can now target and show creative new ways to block it.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Yosemite Investor Reed Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 19, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images
What undruggable targets are your companies going after?
The biggest one of all: p53. We’re going after it with three different companies and several strategies. It’s a tumor suppressor gene — famously, elephants don’t get cancer, and one theory is they have dozens of copies of p53, while humans have just one, which is easily taken out. p53 is the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers; almost every cancer has to knock it out to exist in the first place. If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that’s one of cancer’s Achilles’ heels, and it’s never been done. We think we found something to hit that exposed [marker] across all the different ways p53 gets mutated.
Tell me about Tune Therapeutics.
Tune has been the premier epigenetic editing company in clinical development for the last couple of years, targeting hepatitis B, which affects over 250 million people and is the primary driver of liver cancer. The technology lets us add or remove methyl groups [small chemical tags that attach to DNA and act like a dimmer switch, turning a gene’s activity up or down without changing the gene itself] at specific sites in the liver. Every cell in your body has the same DNA but expresses it differently — think of gray hair: melanin gets methylated and turned off, so your body still makes hair, just less robust. That’s the same process behind aging immune systems and slowing metabolism. Hepatitis B looks foreign to your body, so we’re aiming to methylate and silence the virus itself, the way about 1% of people who spontaneously clear the virus seem to do naturally.
Meanwhile, Histosonics is a device company, which seems unusual for Yosemite.
You’re right, we don’t usually do devices. It’s the first company using histotripsy at scale for liver tumor destruction, using noninvasive therapy — creating small air pockets, then collapsing them to destroy tissue in a very specific area, similar to an ultrasound rather than a CT scan. Their lead programs are in pancreatic and liver tumors — most pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver, so it’s a natural pairing. We think this becomes a huge part of therapy for both.
How many companies are in the portfolio now, and any failures yet?
Close to 25 across both funds. Two haven’t worked out for scientific reasons — we tranche these investments against scientific milestones, and since we’re so early, sometimes things fail on the science. That’s what we’d expect.
How do you advise founders weighing a big check from big pharma? You get the funding, but it cuts off other options.
Pharma is a key partner, but founders need to see it as a moving target — priorities shift a lot depending on leadership. After COVID, many pharma companies lost money in infectious disease and moved out of the space entirely — Pfizer, for instance. Staying attuned to who’s actually active in your area is probably the most important thing.
How can founders who want to get in front of you do this?
We have an open door. When we look at grants and companies, we take people’s CVs out of it — I don’t want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds. We’ve funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I’m equally happy with either outcome. We look at every modality — small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI, digital health. Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it.
Does storytelling matter as much for biotech founders as in other industries?
Unfortunately, yes — I’ve seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO. But usually the founder and CEO aren’t the same person. The founder is often the academic — the chief scientist or chief medical officer — and the CEO is a professionalized operator whose job includes raising capital and telling the story. That division of labor works well.
Three years into running Yosemite, what’s been the biggest surprise?
We now have the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, because of GLP-1s — the best-selling drug class in the world. We’re also seeing early signs GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer, unrelated to weight loss, because obesity is one of only two “pan-disease” risk factors — the other being smoking — that raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That’s made people look with fresh eyes, fresh ambition, and real capital at huge disease areas that had gone cold. Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53 — the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades — are now, we think, within reach. I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering.
Before you go, what do you make of the longevity industry?
I don’t want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally. But I don’t think we — or anyone — really knows what we’re talking about yet. Ask a geneticist and they’ll tell you about telomeres; ask an immunologist and they’ll tell you about T cells losing efficacy; ask a metabolomicist and you’ll get a different answer still. There’s no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics. I don’t think you “have” a longevity problem — I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging. Optimizing that per person is exactly what healthcare should be doing, but I don’t know how you turn longevity into a one-size-fits-all business.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Reed #Jobs #talk #curing #cancer #TechCrunch](https://i2.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/53200091183_f376523593_k.jpg?w=680&ssl=1 "Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name | TechCrunch
Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting 0 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that 0 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
It’s extremely early for us, but Yosemite has the ability to create new areas of medicine before other firms get there. My team has pioneered a couple of these: epigenetic gene editing [technology that changes how strongly a gene is expressed, rather than altering the underlying DNA sequence itself], and safe delivery of gene editing to specific cells — a bottleneck for the whole field for the better part of a decade. If you want to be first, and you want to help discover new areas, that’s what we’re going to be best at.
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed?
It has, actually. When I launched Yosemite in 2023, the XBI [ETF/index] was still down massively from its 2021 highs and pharma hadn’t gotten acquisitive yet. What’s changed in the last three years: interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic. That’s added up to an acquisitive spree over the last eight months or so. We’ve seen huge exits, like Eli Lilly buying Kelonia for billion, and massive wins in antibody drug conjugates. One high-profile one: Revolution Medicines, going after KRAS [one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, long considered nearly impossible to target with drugs] in pancreatic cancer, has doubled the survival rate for [the most common form of pancreatic cancer] — from 12 to 24 months. That’s only happened in the last year.
Last year you talked publicly about your concerns over proposed NIH cuts.
Unfortunately, there’s still pressure from the federal government, but it’s less of a long-term threat than it was. Last year, for the first time in history, an administration asked for a cut of up to 40% of the NIH budget. For context, the biggest cut that ever happened was 1% in 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, and that cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs. Gratefully, the Senate and House — this is extremely bipartisan — totally rejected the 40% cut. This year they came back asking for 12%, still the biggest cut of all time by an order of magnitude, and I expect the same rejection. NIH funding has more than 90% approval. Personally, I think we should go on offense — I’d increase it to something like 0 billion. On a dollar basis, it hasn’t grown in about a decade, so relative to inflation, it’s actually shrunk.
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery?
American hospitals are some of the most technologically naive places in the economy — there’s still a huge amount done on fax, on floppy disk. One example: call centers, like 911 triage, are expensive to keep open 24/7 and are ripe for AI. There’s also electronic health records, radiology, pathology. But where I get really interested is clinical trials — the biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs about 0 million, and only one in three succeeds. The biggest cost is patient recruitment and retention. AI could help build a synthetic control arm [a computer-generated stand-in for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data], so instead of recruiting a full control group, you only recruit the active arm — that halves the patients you need and massively increases speed. The FDA is leaning into this right now.
What about AI in drug discovery — is it overhyped?
I think it’s a fantastic advancement, for democratizing science and for accelerating things. What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work — not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes.
AI has [also] been great at finding pockets we’ve never been able to hit before. Historically we could only drug about 15% of the genome, because we couldn’t drug proteins interacting with other proteins — the chemistry was too hard. That’s changed in the last couple of years, hand in hand with AI. Take Revolution Medicines: they’re the first to drug KRAS, which for decades had no [natural dent or crevice on its surface for a drug molecule to latch onto and block] — it’s basically a smooth oval, a death star. About 10 years ago, scientists at Amgen found a weird cryptic pocket in it, leading to the first drug against it, Lumakras. It only worked for one specific mutation; what AI has done is find all the other variants we can now target and show creative new ways to block it.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Yosemite Investor Reed Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 19, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images
What undruggable targets are your companies going after?
The biggest one of all: p53. We’re going after it with three different companies and several strategies. It’s a tumor suppressor gene — famously, elephants don’t get cancer, and one theory is they have dozens of copies of p53, while humans have just one, which is easily taken out. p53 is the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers; almost every cancer has to knock it out to exist in the first place. If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that’s one of cancer’s Achilles’ heels, and it’s never been done. We think we found something to hit that exposed [marker] across all the different ways p53 gets mutated.
Tell me about Tune Therapeutics.
Tune has been the premier epigenetic editing company in clinical development for the last couple of years, targeting hepatitis B, which affects over 250 million people and is the primary driver of liver cancer. The technology lets us add or remove methyl groups [small chemical tags that attach to DNA and act like a dimmer switch, turning a gene’s activity up or down without changing the gene itself] at specific sites in the liver. Every cell in your body has the same DNA but expresses it differently — think of gray hair: melanin gets methylated and turned off, so your body still makes hair, just less robust. That’s the same process behind aging immune systems and slowing metabolism. Hepatitis B looks foreign to your body, so we’re aiming to methylate and silence the virus itself, the way about 1% of people who spontaneously clear the virus seem to do naturally.
Meanwhile, Histosonics is a device company, which seems unusual for Yosemite.
You’re right, we don’t usually do devices. It’s the first company using histotripsy at scale for liver tumor destruction, using noninvasive therapy — creating small air pockets, then collapsing them to destroy tissue in a very specific area, similar to an ultrasound rather than a CT scan. Their lead programs are in pancreatic and liver tumors — most pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver, so it’s a natural pairing. We think this becomes a huge part of therapy for both.
How many companies are in the portfolio now, and any failures yet?
Close to 25 across both funds. Two haven’t worked out for scientific reasons — we tranche these investments against scientific milestones, and since we’re so early, sometimes things fail on the science. That’s what we’d expect.
How do you advise founders weighing a big check from big pharma? You get the funding, but it cuts off other options.
Pharma is a key partner, but founders need to see it as a moving target — priorities shift a lot depending on leadership. After COVID, many pharma companies lost money in infectious disease and moved out of the space entirely — Pfizer, for instance. Staying attuned to who’s actually active in your area is probably the most important thing.
How can founders who want to get in front of you do this?
We have an open door. When we look at grants and companies, we take people’s CVs out of it — I don’t want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds. We’ve funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I’m equally happy with either outcome. We look at every modality — small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI, digital health. Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it.
Does storytelling matter as much for biotech founders as in other industries?
Unfortunately, yes — I’ve seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO. But usually the founder and CEO aren’t the same person. The founder is often the academic — the chief scientist or chief medical officer — and the CEO is a professionalized operator whose job includes raising capital and telling the story. That division of labor works well.
Three years into running Yosemite, what’s been the biggest surprise?
We now have the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, because of GLP-1s — the best-selling drug class in the world. We’re also seeing early signs GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer, unrelated to weight loss, because obesity is one of only two “pan-disease” risk factors — the other being smoking — that raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That’s made people look with fresh eyes, fresh ambition, and real capital at huge disease areas that had gone cold. Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53 — the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades — are now, we think, within reach. I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering.
Before you go, what do you make of the longevity industry?
I don’t want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally. But I don’t think we — or anyone — really knows what we’re talking about yet. Ask a geneticist and they’ll tell you about telomeres; ask an immunologist and they’ll tell you about T cells losing efficacy; ask a metabolomicist and you’ll get a different answer still. There’s no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics. I don’t think you “have” a longevity problem — I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging. Optimizing that per person is exactly what healthcare should be doing, but I don’t know how you turn longevity into a one-size-fits-all business.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Reed #Jobs #talk #curing #cancer #TechCrunch")
![Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name | TechCrunch
Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting 0 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that 0 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
It’s extremely early for us, but Yosemite has the ability to create new areas of medicine before other firms get there. My team has pioneered a couple of these: epigenetic gene editing [technology that changes how strongly a gene is expressed, rather than altering the underlying DNA sequence itself], and safe delivery of gene editing to specific cells — a bottleneck for the whole field for the better part of a decade. If you want to be first, and you want to help discover new areas, that’s what we’re going to be best at.
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed?
It has, actually. When I launched Yosemite in 2023, the XBI [ETF/index] was still down massively from its 2021 highs and pharma hadn’t gotten acquisitive yet. What’s changed in the last three years: interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic. That’s added up to an acquisitive spree over the last eight months or so. We’ve seen huge exits, like Eli Lilly buying Kelonia for billion, and massive wins in antibody drug conjugates. One high-profile one: Revolution Medicines, going after KRAS [one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, long considered nearly impossible to target with drugs] in pancreatic cancer, has doubled the survival rate for [the most common form of pancreatic cancer] — from 12 to 24 months. That’s only happened in the last year.
Last year you talked publicly about your concerns over proposed NIH cuts.
Unfortunately, there’s still pressure from the federal government, but it’s less of a long-term threat than it was. Last year, for the first time in history, an administration asked for a cut of up to 40% of the NIH budget. For context, the biggest cut that ever happened was 1% in 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, and that cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs. Gratefully, the Senate and House — this is extremely bipartisan — totally rejected the 40% cut. This year they came back asking for 12%, still the biggest cut of all time by an order of magnitude, and I expect the same rejection. NIH funding has more than 90% approval. Personally, I think we should go on offense — I’d increase it to something like 0 billion. On a dollar basis, it hasn’t grown in about a decade, so relative to inflation, it’s actually shrunk.
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery?
American hospitals are some of the most technologically naive places in the economy — there’s still a huge amount done on fax, on floppy disk. One example: call centers, like 911 triage, are expensive to keep open 24/7 and are ripe for AI. There’s also electronic health records, radiology, pathology. But where I get really interested is clinical trials — the biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs about 0 million, and only one in three succeeds. The biggest cost is patient recruitment and retention. AI could help build a synthetic control arm [a computer-generated stand-in for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data], so instead of recruiting a full control group, you only recruit the active arm — that halves the patients you need and massively increases speed. The FDA is leaning into this right now.
What about AI in drug discovery — is it overhyped?
I think it’s a fantastic advancement, for democratizing science and for accelerating things. What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work — not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes.
AI has [also] been great at finding pockets we’ve never been able to hit before. Historically we could only drug about 15% of the genome, because we couldn’t drug proteins interacting with other proteins — the chemistry was too hard. That’s changed in the last couple of years, hand in hand with AI. Take Revolution Medicines: they’re the first to drug KRAS, which for decades had no [natural dent or crevice on its surface for a drug molecule to latch onto and block] — it’s basically a smooth oval, a death star. About 10 years ago, scientists at Amgen found a weird cryptic pocket in it, leading to the first drug against it, Lumakras. It only worked for one specific mutation; what AI has done is find all the other variants we can now target and show creative new ways to block it.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Yosemite Investor Reed Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 19, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images
What undruggable targets are your companies going after?
The biggest one of all: p53. We’re going after it with three different companies and several strategies. It’s a tumor suppressor gene — famously, elephants don’t get cancer, and one theory is they have dozens of copies of p53, while humans have just one, which is easily taken out. p53 is the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers; almost every cancer has to knock it out to exist in the first place. If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that’s one of cancer’s Achilles’ heels, and it’s never been done. We think we found something to hit that exposed [marker] across all the different ways p53 gets mutated.
Tell me about Tune Therapeutics.
Tune has been the premier epigenetic editing company in clinical development for the last couple of years, targeting hepatitis B, which affects over 250 million people and is the primary driver of liver cancer. The technology lets us add or remove methyl groups [small chemical tags that attach to DNA and act like a dimmer switch, turning a gene’s activity up or down without changing the gene itself] at specific sites in the liver. Every cell in your body has the same DNA but expresses it differently — think of gray hair: melanin gets methylated and turned off, so your body still makes hair, just less robust. That’s the same process behind aging immune systems and slowing metabolism. Hepatitis B looks foreign to your body, so we’re aiming to methylate and silence the virus itself, the way about 1% of people who spontaneously clear the virus seem to do naturally.
Meanwhile, Histosonics is a device company, which seems unusual for Yosemite.
You’re right, we don’t usually do devices. It’s the first company using histotripsy at scale for liver tumor destruction, using noninvasive therapy — creating small air pockets, then collapsing them to destroy tissue in a very specific area, similar to an ultrasound rather than a CT scan. Their lead programs are in pancreatic and liver tumors — most pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver, so it’s a natural pairing. We think this becomes a huge part of therapy for both.
How many companies are in the portfolio now, and any failures yet?
Close to 25 across both funds. Two haven’t worked out for scientific reasons — we tranche these investments against scientific milestones, and since we’re so early, sometimes things fail on the science. That’s what we’d expect.
How do you advise founders weighing a big check from big pharma? You get the funding, but it cuts off other options.
Pharma is a key partner, but founders need to see it as a moving target — priorities shift a lot depending on leadership. After COVID, many pharma companies lost money in infectious disease and moved out of the space entirely — Pfizer, for instance. Staying attuned to who’s actually active in your area is probably the most important thing.
How can founders who want to get in front of you do this?
We have an open door. When we look at grants and companies, we take people’s CVs out of it — I don’t want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds. We’ve funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I’m equally happy with either outcome. We look at every modality — small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI, digital health. Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it.
Does storytelling matter as much for biotech founders as in other industries?
Unfortunately, yes — I’ve seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO. But usually the founder and CEO aren’t the same person. The founder is often the academic — the chief scientist or chief medical officer — and the CEO is a professionalized operator whose job includes raising capital and telling the story. That division of labor works well.
Three years into running Yosemite, what’s been the biggest surprise?
We now have the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, because of GLP-1s — the best-selling drug class in the world. We’re also seeing early signs GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer, unrelated to weight loss, because obesity is one of only two “pan-disease” risk factors — the other being smoking — that raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That’s made people look with fresh eyes, fresh ambition, and real capital at huge disease areas that had gone cold. Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53 — the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades — are now, we think, within reach. I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering.
Before you go, what do you make of the longevity industry?
I don’t want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally. But I don’t think we — or anyone — really knows what we’re talking about yet. Ask a geneticist and they’ll tell you about telomeres; ask an immunologist and they’ll tell you about T cells losing efficacy; ask a metabolomicist and you’ll get a different answer still. There’s no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics. I don’t think you “have” a longevity problem — I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging. Optimizing that per person is exactly what healthcare should be doing, but I don’t know how you turn longevity into a one-size-fits-all business.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Reed #Jobs #talk #curing #cancer #TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/53200091183_f376523593_k.jpg?w=680 "Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name | TechCrunch
Reed Jobs is easy to like. He’s motormouthed, self-deprecating, prone to video-game analogies, and clearly loves his work. He doesn’t particularly want to discuss the fact that he is Steve Jobs’s son, but he’s not uptight about it, either. When our producer, Maggie, asked if he was on a MacBook for our video call Thursday morning, he didn’t miss a beat: “Are you kidding?”
What he’d much rather talk about is Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023 to, in part, build biotech companies from scratch, out of early academic research, using a mix of philanthropy and outside investment capital. Three years in, Jobs is ambitious about turning Yosemite into a serious player, not just because he wants to win but because he thinks the opportunity in front of him is expanding faster than he expected thanks to AI’s impacts on both drug discovery and clinical trial design.
Among the portfolio companies he’s proudest of are Azalea, born from a grant to Jennifer Doudna’s lab and now in the clinic, and Quarry, a company built with serial founder Craig Crews around a novel therapeutic approach called induced proximity, wherein a drug works by physically dragging a disease-causing protein next to the cell’s own breakdown system (instead of trying to block it directly).
When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the firm has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs’s words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. We caught up on all of it.
This Q&A has been edited for length.
TC: You announced the first close of your second fund earlier in the year, targeting 0 million. What’s the state of the union at Yosemite?
RJ: One of extreme activity right now. We’ve had incredible traction, and we’ve brought on a lot of really important new partners. Yosemite is a unique venture organization for two reasons: we only work in oncology — that’s 40% of biotech — and we like to make our own companies ourselves. We don’t think the cures for cancer are sitting out in pharma waiting to be discovered; we think we need to go make them with new knowledge. To de-risk those ideas early, when they’re still gentle ideas in university labs, we use a little philanthropy in a completely no-strings-attached way. Two of our 20 companies in the first fund came directly out of a grant.
How much of that 0 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining?
About a third goes into companies we’re making ourselves — either our own ideas or ones we build alongside academics, at places like Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. That takes a lot of time and energy, which is why it’s only a third. The rest goes into companies other people made that we want to join. Separately, 2.5% of the fund’s [assets under management] goes into a donor-advised fund — that’s completely no-strings-attached grant money, plus million a year from our management fees.
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms?
It’s extremely early for us, but Yosemite has the ability to create new areas of medicine before other firms get there. My team has pioneered a couple of these: epigenetic gene editing [technology that changes how strongly a gene is expressed, rather than altering the underlying DNA sequence itself], and safe delivery of gene editing to specific cells — a bottleneck for the whole field for the better part of a decade. If you want to be first, and you want to help discover new areas, that’s what we’re going to be best at.
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed?
It has, actually. When I launched Yosemite in 2023, the XBI [ETF/index] was still down massively from its 2021 highs and pharma hadn’t gotten acquisitive yet. What’s changed in the last three years: interest rates are better, and pharma is entering its largest patent cliff in history while sitting on record cash reserves from the pandemic. That’s added up to an acquisitive spree over the last eight months or so. We’ve seen huge exits, like Eli Lilly buying Kelonia for billion, and massive wins in antibody drug conjugates. One high-profile one: Revolution Medicines, going after KRAS [one of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving genes, long considered nearly impossible to target with drugs] in pancreatic cancer, has doubled the survival rate for [the most common form of pancreatic cancer] — from 12 to 24 months. That’s only happened in the last year.
Last year you talked publicly about your concerns over proposed NIH cuts.
Unfortunately, there’s still pressure from the federal government, but it’s less of a long-term threat than it was. Last year, for the first time in history, an administration asked for a cut of up to 40% of the NIH budget. For context, the biggest cut that ever happened was 1% in 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, and that cost 7,000 NIH scientists their jobs. Gratefully, the Senate and House — this is extremely bipartisan — totally rejected the 40% cut. This year they came back asking for 12%, still the biggest cut of all time by an order of magnitude, and I expect the same rejection. NIH funding has more than 90% approval. Personally, I think we should go on offense — I’d increase it to something like 0 billion. On a dollar basis, it hasn’t grown in about a decade, so relative to inflation, it’s actually shrunk.
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery?
American hospitals are some of the most technologically naive places in the economy — there’s still a huge amount done on fax, on floppy disk. One example: call centers, like 911 triage, are expensive to keep open 24/7 and are ripe for AI. There’s also electronic health records, radiology, pathology. But where I get really interested is clinical trials — the biggest cost and time sink in drug development. A Phase 3 cancer trial costs about 0 million, and only one in three succeeds. The biggest cost is patient recruitment and retention. AI could help build a synthetic control arm [a computer-generated stand-in for the untreated comparison group, built from existing patient data], so instead of recruiting a full control group, you only recruit the active arm — that halves the patients you need and massively increases speed. The FDA is leaning into this right now.
What about AI in drug discovery — is it overhyped?
I think it’s a fantastic advancement, for democratizing science and for accelerating things. What AI is doing right now is accelerating a lot of grunt work — not necessarily doing it better, but doing it incredibly fast, with reproducible outcomes.
AI has [also] been great at finding pockets we’ve never been able to hit before. Historically we could only drug about 15% of the genome, because we couldn’t drug proteins interacting with other proteins — the chemistry was too hard. That’s changed in the last couple of years, hand in hand with AI. Take Revolution Medicines: they’re the first to drug KRAS, which for decades had no [natural dent or crevice on its surface for a drug molecule to latch onto and block] — it’s basically a smooth oval, a death star. About 10 years ago, scientists at Amgen found a weird cryptic pocket in it, leading to the first drug against it, Lumakras. It only worked for one specific mutation; what AI has done is find all the other variants we can now target and show creative new ways to block it.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Yosemite Investor Reed Jobs speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 at Moscone Center on September 19, 2023 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images
What undruggable targets are your companies going after?
The biggest one of all: p53. We’re going after it with three different companies and several strategies. It’s a tumor suppressor gene — famously, elephants don’t get cancer, and one theory is they have dozens of copies of p53, while humans have just one, which is easily taken out. p53 is the most frequently suppressed gene across human cancers; almost every cancer has to knock it out to exist in the first place. If we could turn it back on, or attack its mutated forms, that’s one of cancer’s Achilles’ heels, and it’s never been done. We think we found something to hit that exposed [marker] across all the different ways p53 gets mutated.
Tell me about Tune Therapeutics.
Tune has been the premier epigenetic editing company in clinical development for the last couple of years, targeting hepatitis B, which affects over 250 million people and is the primary driver of liver cancer. The technology lets us add or remove methyl groups [small chemical tags that attach to DNA and act like a dimmer switch, turning a gene’s activity up or down without changing the gene itself] at specific sites in the liver. Every cell in your body has the same DNA but expresses it differently — think of gray hair: melanin gets methylated and turned off, so your body still makes hair, just less robust. That’s the same process behind aging immune systems and slowing metabolism. Hepatitis B looks foreign to your body, so we’re aiming to methylate and silence the virus itself, the way about 1% of people who spontaneously clear the virus seem to do naturally.
Meanwhile, Histosonics is a device company, which seems unusual for Yosemite.
You’re right, we don’t usually do devices. It’s the first company using histotripsy at scale for liver tumor destruction, using noninvasive therapy — creating small air pockets, then collapsing them to destroy tissue in a very specific area, similar to an ultrasound rather than a CT scan. Their lead programs are in pancreatic and liver tumors — most pancreatic cancer metastasizes to the liver, so it’s a natural pairing. We think this becomes a huge part of therapy for both.
How many companies are in the portfolio now, and any failures yet?
Close to 25 across both funds. Two haven’t worked out for scientific reasons — we tranche these investments against scientific milestones, and since we’re so early, sometimes things fail on the science. That’s what we’d expect.
How do you advise founders weighing a big check from big pharma? You get the funding, but it cuts off other options.
Pharma is a key partner, but founders need to see it as a moving target — priorities shift a lot depending on leadership. After COVID, many pharma companies lost money in infectious disease and moved out of the space entirely — Pfizer, for instance. Staying attuned to who’s actually active in your area is probably the most important thing.
How can founders who want to get in front of you do this?
We have an open door. When we look at grants and companies, we take people’s CVs out of it — I don’t want to know whose idea it is or what title someone holds. We’ve funded Nobel laureate labs and first-time grant recipients, and I’m equally happy with either outcome. We look at every modality — small molecules, radiopharmaceuticals, gene therapy, immunotherapy, AI, digital health. Please email us. Any idea that can affect cancer patients, we want to know about it.
Does storytelling matter as much for biotech founders as in other industries?
Unfortunately, yes — I’ve seen companies with great science fail because of bad storytelling from the CEO. But usually the founder and CEO aren’t the same person. The founder is often the academic — the chief scientist or chief medical officer — and the CEO is a professionalized operator whose job includes raising capital and telling the story. That division of labor works well.
Three years into running Yosemite, what’s been the biggest surprise?
We now have the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, because of GLP-1s — the best-selling drug class in the world. We’re also seeing early signs GLP-1s may be protective against neurodegenerative disease and cancer, unrelated to weight loss, because obesity is one of only two “pan-disease” risk factors — the other being smoking — that raise your risk across nearly every disease category. That’s made people look with fresh eyes, fresh ambition, and real capital at huge disease areas that had gone cold. Genes like KRAS, Myc, beta-catenin, and p53 — the pantheon of oncogenes that have evaded us for decades — are now, we think, within reach. I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast. This time is more important than I realized, which is both scarier and more empowering.
Before you go, what do you make of the longevity industry?
I don’t want to die anytime soon, and longevity is important to me personally. But I don’t think we — or anyone — really knows what we’re talking about yet. Ask a geneticist and they’ll tell you about telomeres; ask an immunologist and they’ll tell you about T cells losing efficacy; ask a metabolomicist and you’ll get a different answer still. There’s no grand unified theory of aging the way there is in physics. I don’t think you “have” a longevity problem — I think your body ages differently across different cell types, and the interaction of all that is what we call aging. Optimizing that per person is exactly what healthcare should be doing, but I don’t know how you turn longevity into a one-size-fits-all business.
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