Reid Hoffman, who spent a highly profitable decade on Microsoft’s board of directors, is resigning, the company announced Thursday. Hoffman joined Microsoft’s board of directors after it acquired his company, LinkedIn, for $26.2 billion in 2016.
Hoffman was on Microsoft’s board of directors when it invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019. Hoffman was one of OpenAI’s original investors and served on the model maker’s board of directors until he resigned in 2023, citing too many potential conflicts of interest to continue. He was also on Microsoft’s board when the tech giant signed one of its $650 million non-acquisition, acquisition hire deals with his AI startup, Inflection AI. Microsoft hired Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman through this deal.
Speaking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on a recent episode of his “Possible” podcast, Hoffman said he’s ready to go into “founder mode” with his latest AI startup, Manus. Manus is a drug discovery company that raised more than $50 million through several seed rounds last year. Hoffman, like General Catalyst, is an investor.
However, Hoffman was mentioned as Manus’ co-founder and board chairman, not as CEO. That job belongs to Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, biologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the 2011 book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.”
Nonetheless, Hoffman said he is glad to see more attention being given to Manus.
“One of the things I’ve realized in the last month is that we’re seeing this progress at Manus, and I need to get back into founder mode,” he said. He added that he believes the startup is making progress in “Move 37” AI, which refers to AI replacing human creativity in chemistry to specifically fight various cancers.
