Reid Hoffman is leaving the Microsoft board to go into “founder mode” with startup Manus

After a decade of great success on Microsoft’s board of directors, Reid Hoffman is stepping down, the 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 the original investors in OpenAI and served on the model maker’s board 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 closed a $650 million buy-and-lease deal with its AI startup Inflection AI. Microsoft hired Inflection co-founder Mustafa Soliman through that deal.

While speaking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Hoffman said on a recent episode of his Possible podcast 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 through two seed rounds last year. Hoffman is an investor, as is General Catalyst.

Hoffman is cited as Manus’ co-founder and chairman, not 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.

However, Hoffman said he is excited to give Manos more attention.

“One of the things I’ve realized over the last month is that we’re seeing such progress with Manus. I need to get back into founder mode,” he said. He added that he believes that the startup is making progress in the field of artificial intelligence “Move 37”, that is, artificial intelligence that replaces human creativity in chemistry, especially to combat various cancers.