Nearly three years ago, TechCrunch Disrupt introduced readers to Reed Jobs and his venture firm, Yosemite, when it was still brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. The big surprise then was pace. The big surprise now is that the pace is still the point, and it has only accelerated.

Jobs tells TechCrunch that “I didn't expect Yosemite to be moving this fast.” In the intervening period, Yosemite has grown to a team of 17. It is not a tiny science fair project anymore. It is a real investing machine that has to decide what to back, what to ignore, and how to allocate attention across a rapidly shifting biotech landscape.

What changed underneath Yosemite is the timing of patent protection. The source notes that a cluster of blockbuster drugs is all losing patent protection in roughly the same window. This matters because patents are not just legal artifacts, they are economic guardrails. When exclusivity ends, competition can arrive, pricing pressure can intensify, and the value of any given drug shifts. For investors, that creates a predictable kind of chaos: companies and researchers have to re-think what comes next, and new entrants can attack with generics, reformulations, or entirely new mechanisms. The expiration window becomes an opportunity window, but only for teams that can move quickly and understand what “next” actually means for science, clinical development, and go-to-market.

Yosemite’s growth, then, is not just headcount for headcount’s sake. It signals that Jobs is treating this patent-driven timing as investable opportunity, not background noise. Venture firms are built to harvest mispricings and delayed conclusions, and when an entire category faces a synchronized shift, the odds of a few dislocations rising to the surface go up. In practical terms, that can mean more deal flow, more competition for the best science, and more urgency around due diligence.

Now add a second accelerant: AI. The source says AI has gone from a curiosity to a huge part of what Yosemite does. That line is doing a lot of work. In biotech investing, the hard part is often not access to information, it is converting information into judgment. In that workflow, AI can become a force multiplier, helping teams sift through signals, organize hypotheses, and speed up internal debate. Importantly, the story here is not that AI magically picks winners. The story is that Yosemite is positioning its process so it can keep up when biotech timelines are compressing and decisions are increasingly time-sensitive.

This is also a moment when boards and investors tend to ask sharper questions. If patent cliffs are creating new windows, what thesis does the firm use to identify which windows translate into durable company value? If the firm is adding talent from 1 to 17, what governance and decision-making mechanisms are in place to scale without slowing down? And if AI becomes central, how does the firm ensure it is a decision tool, not a distraction machine.

For peers in venture and growth investing, the second-order takeaway is that “biotech as a static sector” is getting harder to defend. When multiple blockbuster drugs lose patent protection in roughly the same window, you get a synchronized reset of incentives across developers, buyers, and capital allocators. That reset can ripple into pipeline strategy, partnership behavior, and the kinds of founders who can raise money and justify valuations. Yosemite’s stated reaction to that environment is straightforward: build a team, lean into speed, and make AI part of the core system.

So the strategic stake for executives and decision-makers is timing plus tooling. Yosemite is telling you, in plain terms, that it is moving faster than it expected while the category’s economics are shifting on a schedule that looks like a wave, not a trickle. If you are managing a biotech investment book, sitting on an investment committee, or leading a corporate venture unit, the question becomes less “Is disruption coming?” and more “Can we act at the speed disruption shows up?”