After a highly profitable decade on Microsoft’s board, Reid Hoffman steps down, the the company announced on Thursday. Hoffman joined the board after Microsoft bought 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. quoting too many potential conflicts of interest to continue. He was also on Microsoft’s board of directors when the tech giant entered into one of those non-acquisition agreements, acquisition and lease agreements for 650 million dollars with his AI startup Inflection AI. Microsoft hired Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman through that deal.
Hoffman said on a recent episode of his “Possible” podcast, while speaking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, that 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 dollars through a a couple of seed rounds last year. Hoffman is an investor, as is General Catalyst.
However, Hoffman is cited as co-founder of Manus and chairman of the board, not as CEO. That work belongs to Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, biologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the 2011 book “The Emperor of All Diseases: A Biography of Cancer.”
Still, Hoffman said he’s excited to give Manus more attention.
“One of the things I realized over the last month was that we are seeing great progress with Manus. I need to get back into founder mode,” he said. He believes the startup is making progress. about AI “Move 37”that is, AI that replaces human creativity in chemistry, especially to combat various types of cancer, he added.
