Inside Reed Jobs's mission to make cancer non-lethal

Fortune
38 followers
Nov 4, 2026
I started working in cancer when my dad got sick and a lot of people
are motivated by a family reason.
You sat down with Reid Hoffman for your Term Sheet podcast.
For people who don't know him, give us a bit of a biography.
He's made it his mission to make cancer non-lethal.
The phrasing on that is very specific.
Yeah, non-lethal because Jobs says
that he doesn't think it's realistic to cure cancer.
So what is he aiming for when it comes to treatment?
So there are, I think, a couple of different outcomes.
So he's sort of investing kind of across
the stack if you will as they would say
in tech he's invested in all sorts of companies including
really early science companies to AI drug discovery companies
and the non-lethal distinction
i think is really important anyone i talk
to sort of says cancer is intractable it's not
like you're going to cure the flu for example
but eventually we can get to the place where our
Ability to detect cancer improves wildly.
Pancreatic cancer, for example,
famously difficult to detect.
So he's definitely invested in detection capabilities
and also improving outcomes.
This is somebody who could have chosen a lot of lives.
And his father passing away from cancer
that was undetectable for a long time,
clearly affected how he saw the world.
And I think growing up in sort of the milieu of tech,
I wonder if he took away the right lessons
where he sort of sat there and said,
what if it doesn't have to be this way?
What does it mean to invest towards that?
