TL;DR
Reid Hoffman is leaving Microsoft’s board after a decade to focus on Manus, his AI drug discovery startup. The company has raised over $50 million.
Reid Hoffman is stepping down from Microsoft‘s board of directors after nearly a decade. The company disclosed the departure in a regulatory filing on Thursday. Hoffman said he wants to go “founder mode” with Manus, his AI-powered drug discovery startup.
Hoffman joined the board in 2016 after Microsoft bought his company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. His tenure overlapped with some of the most consequential AI deals in the company’s history. He was a board member when Microsoft invested its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019, a bet that reshaped the company’s trajectory.
Hoffman was also one of OpenAI’s original investors and served on that company’s board until 2023. He stepped down citing too many potential conflicts of interest. Those conflicts multiplied further when Microsoft struck a $650 million acqui-hire deal with Inflection AI, the AI startup Hoffman co-founded.
That deal brought Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman into Microsoft, where he now leads a narrower AI division focused on superintelligence. It also raised regulatory questions about conflicts on Big Tech boards.
Hoffman’s next chapter is Manus, a drug discovery company he co-founded. The startup has raised over $50 million across two seed rounds, with backing from General Catalyst. Its CEO is Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Emperor of All Maladies.”
Hoffman holds the title of co-founder and chairman, not CEO. But he signalled on a recent episode of his “Possible” podcast that he plans to be far more hands-on.
“One of the things I realized over the last month was that, we’re seeing such progress with Manus. I need to get back to founder mode,” he told Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during the conversation.
Hoffman said Manus is making progress on what he calls “Move 37” AI. The term refers to AI that supersedes human creativity, borrowed from AlphaGo’s famous move against world champion Lee Sedol. He believes the concept applies to chemistry, particularly in discovering novel compounds to combat cancer.
The departure comes as AI drug discovery heats up across the industry. ByteDance’s Anew Labs recently presented its first AI-designed therapy, and Google DeepMind’s Isomorphic Labs has AI-designed drug candidates entering clinical trials.
