\n<\/p>\n
After a very profitable decade on Microsoft\u2019s board, Reid Hoffman is stepping down, the company announced Thursday.<\/a> Hoffman joined the board after Microsoft bought his company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016.<\/a><\/p>\n Hoffman was on Microsoft\u2019s board when it invested its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. Hoffman was one of OpenAI\u2019s original investors and served on the model maker\u2019s board until he stepped down in 2023, citing<\/a> too many potential conflicts of interest to continue. He was also on Microsoft\u2019s board when the tech giant entered into one of those non-acquisition, acqui-hire deals for $650 million <\/a>with his AI startup Inflection AI. Microsoft hired Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman through that deal.<\/p>\n Hoffman said on a recent episode of his \u201cPossible\u201d podcast, while talking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, that he\u2019s ready to go \u201cfounder mode\u201d with his latest AI startup, Manus<\/a>. Manus is a drug discovery company that raised over $50 million<\/a> through a couple of seed rounds last year.<\/a> Hoffman is an investor, as is General Catalyst.<\/p>\n Hoffman is cited as a co-founder of Manus and chairman of the board, not the CEO, though. That job belongs to Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the 2011 book \u201cThe Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, Hoffman said he\u2019s excited to give Manus more attention. <\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things I realized over the last month was that, we\u2019re seeing such progress with Manus. I need to get back to founder mode,\u201d he said. He believes the startup is making progress on \u201cMove 37\u201d AI<\/a>, meaning AI that supersedes human creativity in chemistry, especially to combat various cancers, he added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n