Reid Hoffman — co-founder of LinkedIn, early investor in OpenAI, board member at Microsoft for a decade — is stepping down from Microsoft’s board. The reason: he’s going “founder mode” with Manus, an AI drug discovery startup that he believes is approaching what he calls “Move 37” — the moment AI supersedes human creativity in chemistry.
The CEO isn’t a technologist. It’s Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee — physician, cancer biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies. The initial targets: breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma.
Hoffman leaving Microsoft’s board is a signal about where the smartest money in AI thinks the next decade of value creation — as explored in how AI is restructuring the traditional value chain — happens. Not in another chatbot. Not in another foundation model. In AI applied to physical-world problems where the search space is too large for human intuition — drug discovery, materials science, protein engineering.
The “Move 37” reference is deliberate. In 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo played move 37 against world champion Lee Sedol — a move no human would have conceived, that turned out to be brilliant. Hoffman believes AI is approaching that moment in chemistry: generating drug candidates that no human chemist would design, that turn out to work.
The Funding
Manus raised over $50 million across two seed rounds, backed by Hoffman personally, General Catalyst, and Greylock. At $50M in seed funding with Hoffman’s full attention, the company isn’t capital-constrained — it’s execution-constrained. The limiting factor isn’t money. It’s whether the AI models can generate drug candidates that survive clinical trials.
The Microsoft Angle
Hoffman joined Microsoft’s board in 2017 after Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. He was instrumental in Microsoft’s early OpenAI investment — reportedly one of the voices advocating for the $1 billion initial bet in 2019 that turned into a $13 billion partnership.
His departure comes at a pivotal moment. Microsoft just launched its own frontier AI models (Project Polaris, MAI-Thinking-1) and is actively reducing its OpenAI dependency. The board that oversaw Microsoft’s transformation into an AI company is losing the person who helped catalyze that transformation. Whether this matters operationally is debatable — Hoffman was an advisor, not an operator. But symbolically, the architect of Microsoft’s AI bet is moving on to the next one.
The Structural Insight
The AI economy’s first phase (2023-2026) was about infrastructure — as explored in the economics of AI compute infrastructure — : GPUs, models, cloud, agents. The next phase is about application to domains where AI creates value that didn’t exist before — not making existing work faster, but discovering new knowledge. Drug discovery is the canonical example: the search space of possible molecules is 10^60, far beyond human capacity. AI doesn’t just accelerate drug discovery. It makes previously impossible discoveries possible.
Hoffman isn’t leaving Microsoft because Microsoft is declining. He’s leaving because he thinks the frontier of AI value creation has moved from infrastructure to application — and he wants to be at the frontier.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
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