A Firm That Grew Faster Than Its Founder Planned
Three years ago, Reed Jobs walked into TechCrunch Disrupt with a venture firm that had barely gotten off the ground. Yosemite was new, biotech was still climbing out of the crater left by its post-pandemic valuation collapse, and AI was an interesting sidebar rather than a core operational tool. A lot has changed. The firm now runs a team of 17, AI has become – in Jobs’s own words – “a huge part of what Yosemite does,” and a wave of patent expirations is opening corridors in drug development that didn’t exist a few years ago.
Jobs returned to TechCrunch Disrupt for a follow-up conversation that made one thing clear: the pace surprised even him.
“I didn’t expect Yosemite to be moving this fast,” Jobs said.
What the Patent Cliff Actually Means for Early-Stage Biotech
The phrase “patent cliff” gets used often enough that it starts to sound like background noise, but the timing of the current window is specific and significant. A cluster of blockbuster drugs – not one or two, but a concentration of major commercial products – are losing patent protection at roughly the same time. When exclusivity expires on a high-revenue drug, it doesn’t just open a generic market. It reshuffles licensing opportunities, frees up molecular scaffolds, and creates space for smaller firms to build on chemistry that was previously locked behind IP walls.
For a venture outfit like Yosemite, which is focused on cancer therapeutics, that kind of structural shift in the market creates deal flow that wouldn’t otherwise exist. A firm with 17 people and a focused thesis can move quickly when larger pharmaceutical players are managing the fallout from revenue erosion on their flagship products. The overlap between patent expiration cycles and the maturation of AI-driven drug discovery tools is what gives Yosemite its current positioning – not luck, but timing that Jobs appears to have watched carefully even when the firm was still getting started.
None of this means the science gets easier. Cancer drug development remains expensive, failure-prone, and slow relative to almost every other category of technology investment. The average timeline from early discovery to approval still stretches across many years, and the majority of candidates that enter clinical trials don’t make it out. What changes with better tooling and more open IP is where firms can place their bets – and how quickly they can move from hypothesis to testable molecule.
AI’s Role Inside Yosemite Is No Longer a Talking Point
Jobs’s description of AI as “a huge part of what Yosemite does” is worth sitting with, because it marks a real change from where the conversation was even two years ago. In 2023, most biotech investors were acknowledging AI’s potential while hedging carefully – the tools were promising but the validated results in oncology were still sparse. By mid-2026, that posture has shifted across the industry, and Yosemite’s internal adoption reflects a broader change in how AI is being used in drug discovery, not just discussed.
The firm has grown from a startup-scale operation to a 17-person team over a period when biotech as a sector was still working through a difficult fundraising environment. That growth, while modest in absolute headcount, suggests Yosemite has been building infrastructure rather than just making investments – analysts, scientists, and operational staff alongside the capital deployment function. Jobs hasn’t detailed the full breakdown of the team publicly, but the number itself signals that Yosemite is functioning as an active participant in the companies it backs, not a passive capital allocator.
The intersection of AI tooling and oncology investment is increasingly crowded, with firms ranging from large crossover funds to university spinouts all claiming some version of the same thesis. What distinguishes Yosemite in that field is harder to assess from the outside – Jobs’s background generates attention, but the firm’s ability to identify and support genuinely differentiated science is the variable that will matter over a 10-to-15-year investment horizon.
Jobs arrived at Disrupt this year clearly more interested in talking about the mechanics of cancer drug development than in relitigating his family name – and the substance of what Yosemite is building may eventually give him that ground, but the firm is still early, the science is still hard, and the patent cliff that looks like opportunity today will close on its own schedule whether the drugs are ready or not.
