LinkedIn co-founder, prolific AI investor and author
Reid Hoffman
Profile
Reid Hoffman is one of those rare Silicon Valley figures who is hard to pin down with a single label — co-founder of LinkedIn, longtime partner at Greylock Partners, early PayPal executive, prolific author, podcaster, and more recently one of the most active and visible AI investors and thinkers. If you want to understand how Silicon Valley capital, product thinking, and networks are shaping the AI wave, Hoffman sits close to the center of that map.
His AI thesis is operator-flavored. In 2022 he co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, aiming at a personal-companion chatbot called Pi. That product never found the scale of ChatGPT, and in 2024 Microsoft essentially absorbed most of the team in a deal that put Suleyman in charge of Microsoft AI. Hoffman was also on the OpenAI board from 2018 until he stepped down in early 2023 to avoid conflicts with his growing AI investment portfolio. In 2024 he launched Manas AI with oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, targeting AI-driven drug discovery — a signal of where he thinks the next decade of real-world impact lives.
Hoffman’s writing and podcasting are where many developers first encounter him. His 2023 book Impromptu was one of the earliest serious attempts to co-write a book with GPT-4 in real time, using the model as a thinking partner rather than a ghostwriter. His 2025 follow-up Superagency makes an explicitly optimistic case for AI as human capability amplifier — pushing back hard against the doomer frame without pretending risks don’t exist. His podcasts Masters of Scale and Possible feature long, substantive conversations with founders and researchers; if you want to hear how the people actually building AI companies talk when they’re not pitching, this is good source material.
What makes Hoffman worth paying attention to for people building with AI: he is unusually articulate about the shape of platform shifts — what blitzscaling means in practice, how network effects compound, why the window for new defaults opens and closes quickly. He is also openly, constructively optimistic about AI in a moment when a lot of public discourse is either hype or doom. Read him skeptically — he is a billionaire investor with a book to sell — but read him.
Books
Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future Hoffman's 2025 manifesto for techno-humanist optimism about AI, co-written with Greg Beato. Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI The first book written in conversation with GPT-4, exploring how large language models can augment human thinking across education, work, and creativity. Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths from the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs Lessons on scaling companies drawn from the podcast of the same name, co-authored with June Cohen and Deron Triff. Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies The playbook for prioritizing speed over efficiency to win winner-take-most markets, co-written with Chris Yeh. The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age Reframes the employer-employee relationship as a series of tours of duty, co-written with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh. The Start-up of You: Adapt, Take Risks, Grow Your Network, and Transform Your Career Applies startup strategy to individual career building, co-written with Ben Casnocha.Key Articles & Papers
Technology Makes Us More Human AI for Humanity Why I'm Leaving the OpenAI Board Announcing Manas AIVideos
Spotify Podcasts
