Reid Hoffman is stepping down from Microsoft’s board of directors after a decade-long tenure that began with the tech giant’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016. The company announced the departure Thursday, with Hoffman saying he is ready to shift into ‘founder mode’ for his latest venture, Manus, an AI-powered drug discovery startup.
Hoffman’s departure marks the end of a period during which Microsoft made some of its most consequential bets on artificial intelligence. He was on the board when Microsoft invested its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019, and later when the company entered into a $650 million deal with Hoffman’s own AI startup, Inflection AI — a transaction structured as a non-acquisition, acqui-hire that brought Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to Microsoft.
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Hoffman had already stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2023, citing potential conflicts of interest. Now, he is narrowing his focus further.
Going ‘founder mode’ with Manus
Manus is a drug discovery company that raised over $50 million across two seed rounds last year. Hoffman is listed as a co-founder and chairman of the board, but the CEO is Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the 2011 book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
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On a recent episode of his podcast ‘Possible,’ Hoffman told Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that he is ready to give Manus more attention. ‘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 said.
Hoffman added that the startup is making progress on what he called ‘Move 37’ AI — a reference to the concept of AI that surpasses human creativity, particularly in the field of chemistry to combat various cancers.
What ‘Move 37’ means for drug discovery
The term ‘Move 37’ is a direct allusion to a famous moment in 2016 when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo made a non-human, creative move during its match against Go champion Lee Sedol — a move that experts initially thought was a mistake but later proved to be a stroke of strategic genius. Hoffman is applying that metaphor to AI’s potential in chemistry: the ability to discover novel molecular structures and drug candidates that human researchers might never conceive.
Manus is backed by General Catalyst alongside Hoffman. The company operates in the increasingly competitive field of AI-driven biotech, where startups and Big Pharma alike are racing to use machine learning to shorten the decade-long timeline typically required to bring a new drug to market.
Why this matters
Hoffman’s move is significant for several reasons. First, it signals that one of the most connected figures in Silicon Valley sees more opportunity in early-stage AI biotech than in shepherding a trillion-dollar company’s board strategy. Second, it underscores the growing convergence of AI and life sciences — a sector that has attracted billions in venture capital but has yet to produce a blockbuster drug from an AI-discovered molecule.
For Microsoft, Hoffman’s departure is unlikely to shift its AI strategy, which remains deeply tied to its multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI. But it removes a board member who had unique insight into both the promise and the conflicts inherent in the rapidly evolving AI space.
Hoffman, for his part, is returning to the role he knows best: founder. Whether Manus can deliver on the promise of ‘Move 37’ AI in drug discovery will be one of the more closely watched experiments in the biotech world over the next few years.
