Reid Hoffman is stepping down from Microsoft's board after a decade of profitable service, the company announced Thursday. Hoffman joined the board after Microsoft bought his company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016 - a transaction so lucrative it probably paid for a few vacation homes.

During his tenure, Hoffman was present for some of Microsoft's most notable AI investments. He was on the board when Microsoft poured its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. Hoffman, an original OpenAI investor, had already served on its board until stepping down in 2023, citing too many potential conflicts of interest - which is board-speak for "my fingers are in too many pies." He was also on Microsoft's board when the company entered into a $650 million non-acquisition, acqui-hire deal with his AI startup Inflection AI, a move that brought Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman into the Microsoft fold.

On a recent episode of his "Possible" podcast, Hoffman told Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella he's ready to go "founder mode" with his latest AI startup, Manus. The drug discovery company raised over $50 million through a couple of seed rounds last year, with Hoffman and General Catalyst as investors. Hoffman is listed as a co-founder and chairman of the board, but not CEO - that job belongs to Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the 2011 book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer." So, there's some medical credibility in the house.

Hoffman said he's excited 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. He believes the startup is making progress on "Move 37" AI - AI that supposedly surpasses human creativity in chemistry, especially for combating various cancers. Because if there's one thing cancer needs, it's a fancy chess metaphor.