Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name
Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name
里德·乔布斯更愿意谈论治愈癌症，而不是他的姓氏
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?” 里德·乔布斯（Reed Jobs）很容易让人产生好感。他口若悬河、自嘲幽默、喜欢用电子游戏做类比，并且显然热爱自己的工作。他并不特别想讨论自己是史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）儿子这一事实，但也并不为此感到拘谨。当我们的制片人玛吉（Maggie）在周四早上的视频通话中问他是否在使用 MacBook 时，他毫不犹豫地回答：“你在开玩笑吗？”
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. 他更愿意谈论的是 Yosemite，这是他在 2023 年创立的一家专注于肿瘤学的风险投资公司。该公司的部分目标是通过慈善捐赠和外部投资资本相结合的方式，从早期的学术研究中从零开始孵化生物技术公司。经过三年的发展，乔布斯雄心勃勃地想要将 Yosemite 打造成一个重量级参与者，这不仅是因为他渴望成功，还因为他认为，得益于人工智能在药物研发和临床试验设计方面的影响，他面前的机遇正在比预期更快地扩张。
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). 在他最引以为傲的投资组合公司中，包括源自詹妮弗·杜德纳（Jennifer Doudna）实验室资助项目、目前已进入临床阶段的 Azalea；以及与连续创业者克雷格·克鲁斯（Craig Crews）共同创立的 Quarry。Quarry 围绕一种名为“诱导邻近”（induced proximity）的新型治疗方法展开，其原理是通过物理手段将致病蛋白拖拽到细胞自身的分解系统旁（而不是试图直接阻断它）。
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. 近三年前，当我们在 TechCrunch Disrupt 大会上最后一次采访乔布斯时，Yosemite 还是个新生事物，而生物技术行业正处于疫情后崩盘的余波中。如今，该公司已拥有 17 人的团队；一批重磅药物几乎在同一时期失去专利保护，创造了各种新的机遇；人工智能也从一个新鲜事物变成了乔布斯口中“Yosemite 工作的重要组成部分”。我们回顾了这一切。以下问答经过删减。
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? TC：您在今年早些时候宣布了第二期基金的首次关账，目标金额为 3.5 亿美元。Yosemite 目前的状况如何？
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. RJ： 目前非常活跃。我们取得了令人难以置信的进展，并引入了许多非常重要的新合作伙伴。Yosemite 是一家独特的风险投资机构，原因有二：我们只专注于肿瘤学领域（这占生物技术的 40%），而且我们喜欢自己孵化公司。我们不认为癌症的治愈方法正静静地躺在制药公司等待被发现；我们认为我们需要利用新的知识去创造它们。为了在这些想法还处于大学实验室的萌芽阶段时就降低风险，我们以完全无附加条件的方式投入了一小部分慈善资金。我们第一期基金中的 20 家公司里，有两家直接源于这种资助。
How much of that $350 million is going into companies you’re spinning up yourselves versus companies you’re joining? 这 3.5 亿美元中有多少是用于你们自己孵化的公司，又有多少是用于你们参与投资的公司？
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. 大约三分之一用于我们自己创建的公司——要么是我们自己的想法，要么是我们与耶鲁大学、伯克利大学和斯坦福大学等机构的学者共同建立的公司。这需要花费大量的时间和精力，所以只占三分之一。其余的资金则投向了其他人创立、我们希望参与的公司。另外，基金管理资产（AUM）的 2.5% 会进入一个捐赠者建议基金（donor-advised fund）——这是完全无附加条件的资助资金，外加我们每年管理费中的 100 万美元。
It’s early days, but what’s the case you make to prospective LPs on performance relative to other life science VC firms? 虽然现在还处于早期阶段，但对于潜在的有限合伙人（LP），您如何说明你们相对于其他生命科学风投公司的业绩表现？
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. 对我们来说还非常早，但 Yosemite 有能力在其他公司涉足之前开辟新的医学领域。我的团队已经开创了其中的几个方向：表观遗传基因编辑（一种改变基因表达强度而非改变底层 DNA 序列本身的技术），以及将基因编辑安全地递送到特定细胞——这在过去十年里一直是整个领域的瓶颈。如果你想成为先行者，并希望帮助发现新的领域，那正是我们最擅长的。
Earlier on, you were worried about how conservative biotech investors had become. Has that changed? 早些时候，您曾担心生物技术投资者变得过于保守。这种情况有所改变吗？
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. 确实改变了。当我 2023 年创立 Yosemite 时，XBI（生物技术指数 ETF）仍较 2021 年的高点大幅下跌，制药公司也还没有开始大举收购。过去三年发生的变化是：利率环境改善了，制药公司正进入历史上最大的专利悬崖期，同时手中还握着疫情期间积累的创纪录现金储备。这导致过去八个月左右出现了一波收购狂潮。我们看到了巨大的退出案例，比如礼来公司（Eli Lilly）以 70 亿美元收购 Kelonia，以及抗体偶联药物（ADC）领域的巨大胜利。一个备受瞩目的案例是：Revolution Medicines 针对胰腺癌中的 KRAS（最常见的致癌基因突变之一，长期以来被认为几乎无法用药物靶向）进行研究，将（最常见胰腺癌类型的）生存率提高了一倍——从 12 个月延长到 24 个月。这仅仅是去年才发生的事情。
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. 去年您公开谈到了对拟议中的 NIH（美国国立卫生研究院）削减预算的担忧。不幸的是，联邦政府仍有压力，但它已不再像过去那样构成长期威胁。去年，政府历史上首次要求削减高达 40% 的 NIH 预算。作为背景，历史上最大的削减发生在 2009 年，当时为了应对全球金融危机削减了 1%，导致 7000 名 NIH 科学家失业。值得庆幸的是，参议院和众议院——这是非常两党一致的——完全否决了 40% 的削减方案。今年他们又回来要求削减 12%，这仍然是有史以来最大幅度的削减，高出一个数量级，我预计会再次遭到否决。NIH 的资助拥有超过 90% 的支持率。就我个人而言，我认为我们应该采取主动——我会将其增加到 1000 亿美元左右。从美元金额来看，它在大约十年内没有增长，所以相对于通货膨胀，它实际上是在缩水。
Where is AI already changing healthcare delivery? 人工智能在哪些方面已经改变了医疗服务？
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. 美国的医院是经济中最缺乏技术含量的场所之一——仍有大量工作依赖传真和软盘完成。举个例子：像 911 分诊这样的呼叫中心，全天候运营成本高昂，非常适合引入人工智能。