creators

Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock, Manas AI

Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn and Manas AI, is a partner at Greylock, and leaves Microsoft's board at its 2026 annual meeting after nine years.

Reid Garrett Hoffman (born 5 August 1967 in Palo Alto, California) took a BS in symbolic systems from Stanford in 1990 and an MSt in philosophy from Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1993 on a Marshall Scholarship. He joined PayPal as chief operating officer in January 2000 and stayed through eBay's purchase of the company in 2002, part of the group later called the 'PayPal Mafia'. He co-founded LinkedIn in December 2002; it launched in May 2003, went public in 2011, and Microsoft agreed to buy it for $26.2 billion in cash in June 2016. Hoffman joined Microsoft's board in March 2017. On 2 June 2026 he told the company he would not stand for re-election at its 2026 annual shareholder meeting, and he stays a director until that meeting, which Microsoft has set for 8 December 2026. He is a partner at Greylock, which also lists him on the boards of Aurora, Entrepreneur First, Inflection and Nauto. Hoffman was an early funder of OpenAI and resigned from its board in March 2023. He co-founded Inflection AI and, in January 2025, Manas AI, a drug-discovery company where he is chairman and Siddhartha Mukherjee is chief executive; explaining the Microsoft decision he said he needed 'to get back to founder mode'. He has written six books, among them Superagency, and hosts the podcasts Masters of Scale and Possible.

Specialization

venture capital, AI investing, startup scaling, AI drug discovery

Country

United States