After a highly profitable decade on Microsoft's board, Reid Hoffman is stepping down, the company announced Thursday. Hoffman joined Microsoft's board after Microsoft acquired his company, LinkedIn, for $26.2 billion in 2016.
Hoffman was a member of Microsoft's board of directors when it made its first $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019. Hoffman was one of OpenAI's original investors and served on Model Maker's board until he resigned in 2023, citing too many potential conflicts of interest to continue. He was also a member of Microsoft's board of directors when the company signed a $650 million non-purchase, no-hire agreement with its AI startup, Inflection AI. Through this deal, Microsoft hired Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.
In a recent episode of the Possible podcast, Hoffman said he was ready to go into “founder mode” with his latest AI startup, Manas, while speaking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Manas is a drug discovery company that raised more than $50 million in several seed rounds last year. Mr. Hoffman, like Mr. General Catalyst, is an investor.
However, Hoffman is referred to as Manas' co-founder and chairman of the board, not its CEO. That work belongs to Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, biologist, and Pulitzer Prize winner for his 2011 book The Empire of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
Still, Hoffman said he's excited to get more attention for Manus.
“One of the things I've realized over the last month is that we're seeing so much progress at Manus. I need to get back into founder mode,” he said. He added that he believes the startup stands for “Move 37” AI, specifically AI that replaces human creativity in chemistry to fight various cancers.