After a very profitable decade on the Microsoft board, Reid Hoffman is stepping down company announced Thursday. Hoffman joined the board after Microsoft bought his company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016.
Hoffman was on Microsoft’s board 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 until stepping down in 2023. quote there are too many potential conflicts of interest to continue. He was also on Microsoft’s board when the tech giant struck one of those non-acquisition, acquire-hire deals for $650 million with its AI startup Inflection AI. Through that deal, Microsoft hired Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.
Hoffman said on a recent episode of his “Possible” podcast, while speaking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, that he is ready to enter “founder mode” with his latest AI startup, Manus. Manus is a drug research company that has raised more than $50 million through a few seed rounds last year. Hoffman is an investor, as is General Catalyst.
However, Hoffman is listed as Manus co-founder and chairman of the board, not CEO. That task 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.”
Still, Hoffman said he’s excited to give Manus more attention.
“One of the things I realized in the last month was that we are seeing so much progress at Manus. I need to get back to founder mode,” he said. He believes the startup is making progress to “Set 37” AImeaning AI replacing human creativity in chemistry, especially to fight various forms of cancer, he added.
