Josh Weiner
Reed Jobs, the son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, has spent much of his career building toward a specific goal: fighting cancer, the disease that killed his father in 2011 after a 2003 pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Now, through Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture capital firm he runs, Jobs is making the case that GLP-1 drugs, the medications best known for driving weight loss, deserve a bigger place in that fight than most people realize.
Jobs’s path there wasn’t accidental. He studied pre-med at Stanford and spent time working in cancer labs before moving into venture investing, building a career specifically oriented around oncology rather than general biotech. Yosemite’s most recent funding round exceeded its $350 million target, giving the firm substantial capital to deploy into the space Jobs has focused his attention on.
His argument for GLP-1 drugs rests on a connection that gets less attention than the medications’ weight-loss headlines: obesity’s role as a cancer risk factor. Jobs points to obesity’s link to 13 different cancer types, noting it accounts for roughly 40% of US cancer diagnoses annually, a scale he compares to smoking as a cumulative, compounding risk rather than a single isolated factor.
That framing has research behind it. A JAMA Oncology study found that GLP-1 users had a 17% lower risk of developing 14 of the cancers studied compared to people not taking the drugs, evidence Jobs cites as part of why he considers GLP-1s "some of the most impactful drugs that we've ever made," a status he places well beyond their original use case in diabetes and weight management.
Jobs is careful not to oversell where this leads. He doesn't frame the goal as curing cancer outright, calling that unrealistic, and instead describes a model closer to how HIV is managed today: not eliminated, but controlled well enough through medication that it stops being a fatal diagnosis. In his view, GLP-1 drugs are one piece of a broader toolkit that could move cancer treatment in that direction.
The bet extends beyond oncology narrowly defined. Jobs has said the benefits of these drugs reach people who are obese and struggling with that, but also intersect with cancer, cardiovascular disease and a range of other conditions tied to metabolic health, a framing that positions GLP-1s less as a weight-loss category and more as a foundational tool across chronic disease. For Yosemite, that thesis is now backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh capital and a founder whose personal stake in the fight against cancer predates the firm by two decades.
