Understanding the sheer scale of global networks requires a particular kind of intellectual stamina. The mind must comfortably hold the microscopic details of user interaction alongside the massive shifts of the modern era. Reid Hoffman has mastered this duality. Today, his work spans venture investing, artificial intelligence, and company building, with roles including Partner at Greylock and Co-Founder of Manas AI and Inflection AI.
Foundational Networks and Payments
Reid earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993, later returning to Wolfson College as an Honorary Fellow in 2016. Professionally, he started at Apple in 1994, where he worked on eWorld, an early online service. He later worked at Fujitsu before cofounding SocialNet in 1997, an early online network focused on matching people around shared interests.
While at SocialNet, he was also a founding board member of PayPal. In January 2000, he joined PayPal full-time as its Chief Operating Officer, later becoming Executive Vice President, with responsibility for external relationships spanning business development, corporate development, international affairs, government relations, legal matters, and payments infrastructure.
Alongside his operating roles, Reid built an extensive angel-investing portfolio. By 2009, he was an investor in more than 60 internet ventures, including Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Six Apart, and Technorati.
The LinkedIn Era and Beyond
In December 2002, Reid cofounded LinkedIn, which launched publicly in May 2003. The platform eventually grew into the world’s largest professional network, surpassing one billion members, before Microsoft agreed in 2016 to acquire LinkedIn in a transaction valued at $26.2 billion. The acquisition was completed in December 2016.
He joined Greylock as a partner in 2009, where his investment focus has centered heavily on businesses with network effects and technology products capable of reaching very large populations.
In March 2017, he joined Microsoft’s board of directors. In June 2026, however, he announced that he would step down from the board and not seek reelection at the company’s 2026 annual shareholder meeting, ending nearly a decade of service.
His investment and advisory portfolio has stretched across consumer technology, education, fintech, logistics, autonomous mobility, and software, with associations that have included Airbnb, Edmodo, Xapo, Coda, Blockstream, Convoy, Nauto, Aurora, Joby Aviation, and Entrepreneur First. Rather than treating these as a collection of isolated bets, Reid has consistently focused on companies capable of achieving significant scale or benefiting from powerful network effects.
Driving the Artificial Intelligence Frontier
In 2015, Reid became an early investor in OpenAI and later served on the organization’s board from March 2019 until February 2023. He stepped away as his expanding investments and relationships in the artificial-intelligence sector created potential conflicts of interest.
In March 2022, he cofounded Inflection AI, an artificial-intelligence company that developed Pi and later expanded its focus toward enterprise AI.
In January 2025, Reid cofounded Manas AI with Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee and became the company’s Co-Founder and Executive Board Chair. The company combines artificial intelligence, computational chemistry, and biology to accelerate drug discovery, initially focusing on cancer and other serious diseases. Manas AI launched with $24.6 million in seed funding and uses Microsoft Azure as part of its technology infrastructure.
His academic and institutional work has expanded alongside his technology investments. He has served as a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics’ Data Science Institute since February 2025, and Cambridge Judge Business School currently lists him among its fellows. He has also held a fellowship at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics.
In January 2026, he joined Semafor World Economy’s advisory board, extending his involvement beyond venture investing into wider conversations about technology, economics, and the future of business.
His newest work reflects an increasingly concentrated focus on artificial intelligence as a platform for transformation. Manas AI represents his move directly into building with AI, while his continuing work at Greylock and across the startup ecosystem keeps him closely connected to the companies shaping the next generation of technology.
Reflecting on this new era, Reid notes, “The future of medicine has never held more promise.” The observation appeared in the January 2025 announcement introducing Manas AI, where Reid and Mukherjee described their ambition to combine AI and human scientific expertise to accelerate the discovery of new medicines.
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