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Reid Hoffman

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Reid Garrett Hoffman (born August 5, 1967) is an American internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist best known as a co-founder and former chief executive of LinkedIn and as a longtime partner at the Silicon Valley firm Greylock Partners. After an early career at PayPal, he built LinkedIn into the largest professional social network, then sold it to Microsoft in a 2016 deal valued at $26.2 billion [1][2]. Since roughly 2015 he has become one of the more visible financiers and builders of artificial intelligence, a role that now defines much of his public work [3].

Hoffman was among the group of technologists who launched OpenAI as a nonprofit in December 2015, and he later sat on its board before resigning in March 2023 to avoid conflicts of interest with his growing set of AI bets [7][8]. In 2022 he co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, the startup behind the Pi assistant, and in 2025 he co-founded the cancer drug-discovery company Manas AI with the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee [9][13]. He has also written two books about AI, including one drafted in dialogue with GPT-4, and hosts podcasts on technology and the future [16][17].

Beyond his companies, Hoffman is a prominent Democratic donor and an outspoken advocate of what he calls an optimistic, "bloomer" attitude toward AI, arguing that broadly distributed AI tools give ordinary people what he terms "superagency" [18][19]. He served on Microsoft's board from 2017 until deciding in 2026 not to stand for re-election so he could focus on Manas AI [25][26].

Early life and education

Hoffman was born in Palo Alto, California, on August 5, 1967 [2]. He studied symbolic systems and cognitive science at Stanford University, a program that blends artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1990 [2]. As a Marshall Scholar he then went to Wolfson College, Oxford, where he earned a Master of Studies in philosophy in 1993 [2][4]. He has said that he initially expected to become an academic before concluding that he could have more impact building things at scale [2].

His first jobs in the mid-1990s were at Apple, where he worked on the early online service eWorld, and at Fujitsu [2]. In 1997 he co-founded SocialNet.com, one of the first online services aimed at matching people for dating and shared interests. The company struggled, and it foreshadowed the social-networking work that would later define his career [2].

PayPal and SocialNet

Hoffman joined the online payments company that became PayPal in January 2000, brought in by co-founder Peter Thiel [2]. He served as an executive vice president and chief operating officer, responsible for business development and the company's external partnerships and relationships with regulators [2]. The role placed him alongside a group of founders and early employees, including Thiel, Elon Musk, and Max Levchin, who later became known as the "PayPal Mafia" for the companies they went on to build [2].

eBay announced its acquisition of PayPal on July 8, 2002, in a stock deal valued at about $1.5 billion, and the transaction closed that October [2]. The exit gave Hoffman the capital and the network to start his own venture.

LinkedIn

Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in late 2002 with several colleagues, among them Allen Blue, and the site launched publicly on May 5, 2003 [2][29]. The idea was a professional counterpart to consumer social networks: a place to keep an online profile, maintain business contacts, and find jobs and hires. He served as the founding chief executive.

In February 2007 he stepped aside as CEO in favor of Dan Nye, becoming chairman and president of products [5]. When Nye departed in December 2008, Hoffman briefly returned as CEO and brought in Jeff Weiner as president; Weiner took over as chief executive in 2009, and Hoffman moved into the role of executive chairman [6]. LinkedIn went public on the New York Stock Exchange on May 19, 2011, pricing its shares at $45; the stock more than doubled on its first day of trading, closing around $94 [2].

On June 13, 2016, Microsoft announced that it would acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in cash, or $196 per share, in what was then Microsoft's largest acquisition [1]. Microsoft described Hoffman as LinkedIn's chairman, co-founder, and controlling shareholder, and he said he "fully support[ed]" the deal and would vote his shares for it [1]. The transaction closed in December 2016. Hoffman joined Microsoft's board of directors in 2017 and remained a director for nearly a decade [2][25].

Greylock Partners and investing

Hoffman became a partner at Greylock Partners in 2009, and the firm became the base for a prolific angel and venture investing career [3]. His personal early bets included companies such as Facebook and Airbnb, and through Greylock he backed a long list of consumer and enterprise startups [3]. He co-founded, with Zynga's Mark Pincus, the "blank-check" investment vehicle Reinvent Technology Partners, which merged with and took public companies including the electric air-taxi maker Joby Aviation and the self-driving firm Aurora Innovation [27]. Hoffman has continued to serve on Aurora's board [27].

In August 2023 Hoffman scaled back his role at Greylock, announcing that he would not serve as a general partner on the firm's next fund and would instead act as a venture partner, freeing time for his AI work [2]. He remains listed among the firm's partners [3].

OpenAI

Hoffman was one of the technologists behind OpenAI's creation. When the lab launched as a nonprofit on December 11, 2015, he was named among its backers alongside Musk, Thiel, Sam Altman, and others who collectively pledged up to $1 billion, though only small sums were committed at the start [7]. He joined its board of directors in March 2018 [24].

He stepped down from the board on March 3, 2023, less than two weeks before OpenAI released GPT-4 [8]. Hoffman said the move was meant to head off conflicts of interest as he invested in and built more AI companies whose products might compete with or depend on OpenAI's technology [8].

Inflection AI

In March 2022 Hoffman co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind, and the AI researcher Karén Simonyan [2][9]. Suleyman served as chief executive, and the founders positioned it as a consumer-focused company building AI software to make it easier for people to talk to computers in natural language [9]. Its flagship product, a personal-assistant chatbot named Pi (for "personal intelligence"), launched on May 2, 2023, and was tuned to be conversational, patient, and emotionally supportive rather than task-focused [10].

Inflection raised heavily during the generative-AI boom. In June 2023 it announced $1.3 billion in new funding from investors including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Hoffman, Bill Gates, and Eric Schmidt, valuing the company at about $4 billion, and it built a large training cluster using tens of thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs [30].

The venture changed shape abruptly in March 2024. On March 19, Microsoft said that Suleyman and Simonyan, along with much of Inflection's team, were joining the company to form a new division called Microsoft AI, with Suleyman as its chief executive reporting to Satya Nadella and Simonyan as chief scientist [11]. In a related arrangement, Microsoft agreed to pay Inflection about $650 million, most of it to license Inflection's models [12]. The unusual structure, which transferred a startup's leadership and core technology to a larger rival without a formal merger, drew scrutiny from antitrust regulators [12]. Hoffman said that "all investors in Inflection AI will have a good outcome today, and I anticipate good future upside" [31]. Under a new chief executive, Sean White, Inflection continued as an independent company and pivoted toward enterprise customers and an AI studio business [31].

Manas AI

Hoffman's next company applied AI to biology. On January 27, 2025, he and the physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee (known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "The Emperor of All Maladies") publicly launched Manas AI, a drug-discovery startup, with a $24.6 million seed round led by General Catalyst and including Greylock [13][14]. The company describes itself as an AI-native biopharmaceutical firm that combines generative computational chemistry, molecular docking accelerated on Microsoft's Azure cloud, and proprietary AI filters to design new small-molecule drug candidates, with an initial focus in oncology on triple-negative breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma [13][14]. Mukherjee serves as chief executive; Hoffman is a co-founder and board member rather than an operating executive [28].

In September 2025 Manas AI announced a $26 million seed extension, bringing total funding to about $50.6 million, and named the technologist Ujjwal Singh as a co-founder and chief technology officer [15]. The company said the money would support its drug-discovery models and early therapeutic programs [15].

Books, podcasts, and an AI avatar

Hoffman has co-written several business books, including "The Start-Up of You" (2012), "The Alliance" (2014), and "Blitzscaling" (2018) [3]. His more recent titles focus directly on artificial intelligence.

TitleYearCo-author or collaboratorNote
The Start-Up of You2012Ben CasnochaCareer strategy
The Alliance2014Ben Casnocha, Chris YehManaging talent
Blitzscaling2018Chris YehRapid company scaling
Impromptu2023GPT-4Written in dialogue with the model
Superagency2025Greg BeatoThe case for AI optimism

"Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI" was published in March 2023 and was unusual in method: Hoffman wrote it in conversation with GPT-4, interspersing his own text with the model's responses across roughly a thousand prompts, and released it as an early demonstration of what a large language model could and could not do [17]. "Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future," written with Greg Beato and published by Authors Equity on January 28, 2025, lays out his broader argument that AI can expand individual capability if it is deployed widely rather than restricted [16].

He hosts two podcasts: "Masters of Scale," a show about company-building that began in 2017, and "Possible," launched in 2023 and co-hosted with Aria Finger, which imagines optimistic futures across fields such as health, climate, and education [3].

In April 2024 Hoffman released a video in which he interviewed "Reid AI," a digital twin of himself. The avatar combined a video likeness from Hour One, a cloned voice from ElevenLabs, and a custom GPT-4 chatbot trained on two decades of his books, speeches, articles, and podcasts [20]. He framed the experiment as a way to explore AI as "a powerful amplifier of humans" rather than a replacement, while acknowledging concerns about voice cloning and synthetic media [20].

Views on artificial intelligence

Hoffman is one of the technology industry's more prominent AI optimists, though he distinguishes his position from uncritical boosterism. In "Superagency" and in interviews around its release, he sorts attitudes toward AI into four groups: doomers, who see an existential threat; gloomers, who fear mass job loss and social harm; zoomers, who want maximum speed with few limits; and bloomers, who favor rapid progress paired with deliberate guardrails [19]. He identifies as a bloomer [18].

Two ideas recur in his argument. The first is "superagency," his term for the way broadly available AI tools can extend what individuals are able to do, so that a person benefits not only from their own AI but from everyone else's as well [18]. The second is "iterative deployment," the practice of releasing AI systems to the public and improving them through real-world feedback; he argues, using the analogy of automotive safety features that emerged over time, that careful release can make systems safer rather than less safe [18]. On regulation he favors targeted rules aimed at concrete harms such as terrorism and cybercrime, rather than broad restrictions he believes would slow beneficial innovation [18]. He has also acknowledged risks including hallucination, privacy, and energy use [19].

Political activity and the Musk lawsuit

Hoffman is a major Democratic donor and political organizer. In 2013 he helped found the immigration-reform advocacy group FWD.us alongside Mark Zuckerberg and other technology leaders [2]. During the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign he backed Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris after Biden withdrew, and by mid-2024 had donated $7 million to a leading pro-Democratic PAC [21]. He drew attention that July when he said he hoped Harris would replace FTC chair Lina Khan, whom he called "a person who is not helping America," a stance that highlighted tension between his party loyalty and his opposition to aggressive antitrust enforcement [21]. In 2026 he gave $10 million to Lone Star Rising, a super PAC supporting Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, a donation that accounted for most of the group's fundraising that quarter [22].

Hoffman was drawn into Elon Musk's litigation against OpenAI. Musk's amended complaint named Hoffman as a defendant, arguing that his simultaneous service on the boards of OpenAI and Microsoft amounted to an unlawful interlocking directorate under Section 8 of the Clayton Act [24]. On March 4, 2025, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed that claim against Hoffman on standing grounds, reasoning that he had resigned from OpenAI's board more than a year before the complaint was filed [24]. Hoffman, for his part, publicly said Musk had a "complete lack of credibility" on the lawsuit, noting that Musk opposed OpenAI's shift toward a for-profit structure even as his own AI company operated for profit [23]. (For the wider case, see Musk v. OpenAI.)

Later Microsoft ties

Hoffman's board seat at Microsoft, held since 2017, ended after nearly a decade. In a securities filing dated June 5, 2026, Microsoft disclosed that Hoffman had informed the company on June 2 that he would not stand for re-election at the 2026 annual shareholder meeting; the filing stated that his decision was "not as a result of any disagreement" with management [25]. Coverage of the departure linked it to his growing focus on Manas AI [26].

See also

References

  1. ^Microsoft News Center, "Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn," June 13, 2016. news.microsoft.com/...microsoft-to-acquire-linkedin
  2. ^Wikipedia, "Reid Hoffman." en.wikipedia.org/...Reid_Hoffman
  3. ^American Academy of Arts & Sciences, "Reid G. Hoffman." amacad.org/...reid-g-hoffman
  4. ^Association of Marshall Scholars, "Reid Hoffman." marshallscholars.org/...reid-hoffman
  5. ^LinkedIn Press, "LinkedIn Names New CEO," February 5, 2007. news.linkedin.com/...linkedin-names-new-ceo
  6. ^LinkedIn Press, "LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman Returns to Helm as CEO," December 17, 2008. news.linkedin.com/...offman-returns-to-helm-as-ceo
  7. ^Fortune, "Elon Musk, other tech leaders create $1 billion nonprofit OpenAI," December 11, 2015. fortune.com/...open-ai
  8. ^CNBC, "Reid Hoffman steps down from OpenAI board to avoid potential conflicts," March 3, 2023. cnbc.com/...nai-board-to-avoid-potential-conflicts
  9. ^Wikipedia, "Inflection AI." en.wikipedia.org/...Inflection_AI
  10. ^Forbes, "Inflection AI, Startup From Ex-DeepMind Leaders, Launches Pi," May 2, 2023. forbes.com/...n-ai-ex-deepmind-launches-pi-chatbot
  11. ^Microsoft, "Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot," March 19, 2024. blogs.microsoft.com/...s-microsoft-to-lead-copilot
  12. ^Reuters, "Microsoft agreed to pay Inflection $650 million while hiring its staff," March 21, 2024. reuters.com/...ng-its-staff-information-2024-03-21
  13. ^Manas AI, "Manas AI Launches to Transform Discovery of Novel Cancer Medicines," January 27, 2025. manasai.co/...-discovery-of-novel-cancer-medicines
  14. ^TechCrunch, "Reid Hoffman's Manas AI raises $24.6M, a fraction of other AI drug discovery startups," January 27, 2025. techcrunch.com/...other-ai-drug-discovery-startups
  15. ^Manas AI / Business Wire, "Manas AI Announces $26M Seed Extension and the Appointment of Ujjwal Singh as Co-Founder and CTO," September 23, 2025. businesswire.com/...r-and-Chief-Technology-Officer
  16. ^Kirkus Reviews, "Superagency" by Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato (Authors Equity, January 28, 2025). kirkusreviews.com/...superagency
  17. ^Impromptu (official book site). impromptubook.com
  18. ^TechCrunch, "Why Reid Hoffman feels optimistic about our AI future," January 26, 2025. techcrunch.com/...s-optimistic-about-our-ai-future
  19. ^Knowledge at Wharton, "Embracing AI: Are You a Doomer, Gloomer, Zoomer, or Bloomer?" February 4, 2025. knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/...r-zoomer-or-bloomer
  20. ^Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), "Me, Myself, and (A)I: A Q&A with My Avatar," April 24, 2024. linkedin.com/...ai-qa-my-avatar-reid-hoffman-71unf
  21. ^Fortune, "First Trump, now Harris: LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman has angered both parties," July 26, 2024. fortune.com/...-republicans-trump-harris-lina-khan
  22. ^The Texas Tribune, "Reid Hoffman gives $10 million to pro-Talarico super PAC," July 16, 2026. texastribune.org/...an-10-million-lone-star-rising
  23. ^Semafor, "Reid Hoffman said Elon Musk has 'complete lack of credibility' on OpenAI lawsuit," April 25, 2025. semafor.com/...ck-of-credibility-on-openai-lawsuit
  24. ^FindLaw, "Musk v. OpenAI, Inc." (N.D. Cal. order, March 4, 2025). caselaw.findlaw.com/...117026476
  25. ^U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Form 8-K, Microsoft Corp. (filed June 5, 2026), via StockTitan. stocktitan.net/...orts-material-event-d4df490b0587
  26. ^GeekWire, "LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman to leave Microsoft board after nearly a decade," 2026. geekwire.com/...rosoft-board-after-nearly-a-decade
  27. ^Aurora Innovation, "Board of Directors." ir.aurora.tech/...board-of-directors
  28. ^Manas AI, "Leadership." manasai.co/leadership
  29. ^LinkedIn, "About LinkedIn" (company history). about.linkedin.com
  30. ^Business Wire, "Inflection AI Announces $1.3 Billion of Funding Led by Current Investors, Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and New Investor NVIDIA," June 29, 2023. businesswire.com/...chmidt-and-New-Investor-NVIDIA
  31. ^TechCrunch, "Microsoft hires Inflection AI founders to run its new consumer AI division," March 19, 2024. techcrunch.com/...-to-run-new-consumer-ai-division

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