Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, which launched in 2003, and became a partner at the venture firm Greylock in 2009. When Microsoft bought LinkedIn for 26.2 billion dollars he joined Microsoft's board, where he served on the committee for environmental, social and public policy. He was among the donors who pledged money to OpenAI at its founding in December 2015 and later joined its nonprofit board. His two roles met in the account Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, gave at the Musk v. Altman trial in May 2026. Scott testified that a 2018 email asking whether OpenAI's donors knew of its for-profit plans had Hoffman in mind, and that he later learned over dinner with Sam Altman that Hoffman was investing in OpenAI's new capped-profit company and joining the nonprofit board.

In March 2022 Hoffman co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman, who had joined Greylock as a venture partner, and the DeepMind researcher Karén Simonyan. Inflection launched its Pi chatbot in May 2023 and raised 1.3 billion dollars in June 2023 from investors including Microsoft and NVIDIA. Hoffman resigned from OpenAI's board in March 2023, citing possible conflicts with Inflection and his Greylock investments. In March 2024 Microsoft hired Suleyman, Simonyan and most of Inflection's staff to form Microsoft AI and paid Inflection a licensing fee reported at about 650 million dollars, a deal that American and British competition authorities then examined.

Hoffman wrote Impromptu (2023) partly with GPT-4 and, with Greg Beato, Superagency (January 2025), which argues for "iterative deployment," putting AI tools in public hands and adjusting to how people use them. The same month he and the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee launched Manas AI, a cancer drug-discovery company, with a 24.6 million dollar seed round and Microsoft as its cloud partner. On 2 June 2026 he told Microsoft he would not stand for re-election at its 2026 annual meeting; on his podcast Possible he told Satya Nadella he wanted to return to "founder mode" at Manas.