How Reid Hoffman’s new company will create cancer cures

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1:17This week on Masters of Scale, Reid Hoffman is here to tell us all about the new company he's launched, Manus AI. To say that Reed has formed a brilliant team would be a big understatement. To say that they have ambitious goals would be an even bigger one. Reed has put some of the world's most powerful AI tools in the hands of some of the world's best researchers. The mission? To discover new ways to treat disease and to actually, finally, cure cancer. You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it?

1:55Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working as a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it.

2:18This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. We're checking in with our very own Reid Hoffman this week, whose 2025 has had a very busy start. In addition to publishing a book, Super Agency, in January, he also co-founded a new company. We thought it would be interesting to hear how Reid tackles starting and blitzscaling a brand new business from scratch. Reid, welcome back to your show. So it's great to be here. And, you know, hey, I think at this point it's appropriately our show. But yes. I'm, as always, thrilled to get to see you and chat with you. And I'm especially so today because we're going to talk about Manus.

3:01And will you just tell us what Manus is, what you're setting out to do? So Manus is kind of a new AI-driven drug discovery company targeting primarily cancer that says, we have this AI revolution, which creates these enormously new, better cognitive artifacts. And how can we deploy that in various ways to get drug discovery superpowered? And it came about because I had kind of gone to my partner's gray lock and I'd said, look, I think there's going to be a lot of great investments and agents and productivity tools and work automation and a bunch of those things, and we should do all those and I'll help.

3:44But I'm really interested in this area of there's a bunch of things that this AI technology could really make a huge difference, you know, in the world for societies and industries. And currently, most of the AI people are all looking at all the software stuff. And I said, well, would you have mine? I said, well, drug discovery. And so I went out and started talking to some of my smart friends, one of whom is Siddhartha Mukherjee. And he's a very smart friend. Yes. Very smart friend. And professor at Columbia, world-renowned oncology researcher, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of multiple books, including The Emperor of All Maladies, just a massively talented guy.

4:19And I'm talking to him for why. And he said, well, you know I'm an entrepreneur too. And I was like, no, I didn't know that. He's like, well, no, I've actually brought cancer drugs to market. I'm not just casual about this. I actually know this stuff. And I said, oh, that's interesting. And he said, and this sounds like this could be f***ing amazing. Let's talk about it. Right? That's how kind of Manus came about. And that's what Manus is. You've invested in, I'm sure dozens, I'm guessing hundreds of companies at this point. It's very rare that you choose to be a co-founder, but you chose to be a co-founder here.

4:53What's your filter for deciding when to invest and when to co-found and why be a co-founder here? Well, co-founder in this case, there's not quite the same thing it meant when co-founding LinkedIn, which is Saturday morning, I'm in the office. And so it is still co-founder because it's like at least a day a week, but it's when you have a CEO co-founder who is exactly the right kind of person that I know how to add in in the way that a co-founder adds in versus, for example, a board member, which is different in these cases. I mean, there's an overlap with a board member and obviously a board member of Manus as well.

5:31And Sid and I spent a couple of months It's basically whiteboarding out the entire drug discovery process from the, I have an idea, to a drug entering the market and slicing it as thinly as possible and understanding what each of these stages were. And then what we do is we talk about my current understanding of what AI is, what I would predict AI is going to go to in one to three years naturally, what things might be possible with AI that are not part of the natural trajectory that we could create or stimulate uniquely as a business. and then kind of going through all those. And that's when Sid was like, look, I think you need to co-found this with me because in a sense, I'm the person who's responsible for making sure the various kinds of parts of the AI talent, I mean, he's an enormously talented guy, learns things lightning fast and has a very deep understanding and also has that sideways understanding you want entrepreneurs to have, which is, well, why is it this way?

6:31And why couldn't it be some way that's a lot better, which is kind of one of the things that's fundamental to the entrepreneurial impulse. And it was like, okay, great, because A, it's a huge mission. Cancer is a huge killer. It kills children. It kills healthy adults. It kills old people. It kills people in every culture, every society. So it's like, okay, this is a huge thing. And by the way, there's not just one cancer. There's lots of cancers. That's one of the reasons why it's a real problem. It's like, hey, we figured out this cancer. And so it's like, okay, what is the way that we make a dent on this whole problem?

7:03And that really matters. And then also, of course, when you transform an industry. And so part of this is to say that there's obviously a lot of things that the drug pharma industry is really, really good at. It's been doing this for a long time. It's added a whole bunch of society. But it's very classic industry. It's very rooted in the way they've been doing things for the last X decades. And it's like, OK, so you could create a new one like the other giants because you're bringing in new things. Those combination of SID, an important target, possibly transforming an industry, an elevation of humanity, that all gets me into co-founding.

7:44I mean, that deep mission alignment is so clear here. And I'm curious, as you and Sid were on that whiteboard and you were slicing into the step-by-step-by-step-by-step-by-step, what did you see that got you fired up about how AI is such a difference maker? When Sid and I went through the whole area, we abandoned any interest in AI things. There wasn't a minimum of 10x. And frequently it was like, okay, no, no, it's much greater than 10x if we can make this work. And then focus on those areas. And then we didn't go, we're going to invent all the technology. We said, okay, which technology should we be building?

8:22And then which technology can we use? And that's part of what led us into partnering with Microsoft. Because both Sid and I, from two different angles, had some understanding of where Microsoft had been working on some pretty unique technology that hadn't really been and hasn't really been fully advanced to the market and said, hey, this could be a good way for Microsoft to get in this as well, not just as Azure, but some of the stuff that the excellent Microsoft research has been doing as baseline. And let's do some areas where we're building, do some areas where we're deploying. Some of the deployment is open source.

8:56Some of the deployment is Microsoft stuff. Some of the deployment is other things that we've learned and discovered as you're kind of along the way. And then the way you put them all together, including the things you're building, as the kind of angle for having the technology strategy and doing that, that's much more my network than SIDS networks. SIDS networks is the, you know, world-class scientists and other folks in mine is the tech people. I want to drill down into this for a minute because I think this is a really important part of this next phase of how people are solving problems with AI as a, to borrow Microsoft's term, a co-pilot.

9:31We're all by now familiar with ChatGPT or Pi or other AI companions effectively helping us figure out what's for dinner. And most of us by now are familiar with something like Sierra for customer service or Harvey for legal tech, for legal AI. The blend of where you are using someone else's AI, where you are customizing for yourself, where you're building for yourself. Help us understand how you make those decisions and how business leaders should be approaching these problems as they're making these decisions for their own companies. Great question. And a very good one from Astros Scale, too, because it's generalizing out of the problems we're solving to problems that a lot of people are solving.

10:12So for us, it kind of comes down to a couple things. So one is anticipating where there's going to be a really good continuing workflow where some other entity could be an open source thing, could be a, and it could be us contributing to an open source thing too, but an open source thing could be a proprietary model. that we say, well, actually, in fact, that investment thesis of going forward on that, we will benefit from that at at least, call it 70%, 80 % plus of that ongoing technological development is going to benefit us and can be in the slot. And if we were to start doing it ourselves, we wouldn't get something that was at least 10x better than what's happening.

10:51Then we should use the existing one. So that's one kind of decision about when you do the open source thing or when you deploy someone else's commercial library or other direction. Another one might be, well, we're going to use the commercial library right now or the open source library right now, but that's a time-saving measure of us getting to market. We think we're ultimately going to build something here, but we don't need to build something here in order to get to market and get it going. So we'll deploy it for now. And by the way, you might have a much cruder, not perfect. And then there's kind of the question of, okay, which things will be ongoing where we're learning our ground truths, where we're getting the data, where this gives us an ongoing substantive competitive advantage about things that we have as unique assets other than just the prospective molecules that we're creating that could be cures for various kinds of cancer.

11:52Then on that list, which of those things do we start right now? which are the things to do later, that kind of gets to a high priority. Now, part of, of course, what we have at Manus that is advantageous that I recommend to try to do to all of our listeners is that I have a very good sense and a very good network of both where AI is now, where new techniques are coming out, where the current trajectory is going, and those kinds of things play in that kind of strategic decisioning. Then that's one of the things that you need to do when you're making these decisions yourself. Now, what happens with everyone in technology, especially in software, is it gets very non-invented here.

12:29So go, well, I should just control my own destiny. I should just do it. The problem is with tech, software tech, is that it's not build once and forget it. Software tech has to be constantly rebuilt, reinvented, rebuilt, reinvented. And if you're not in that theme, your thing will outmode very quickly. It's one of the reasons why most governments around the world have really broken RFPs, solutions for technology, because they go, oh, I will specify the 150 requirements. And then when whoever provider, usually pretty incompetent people, prime contractors, et cetera, when it comes to software, delivers something to you, not only is it not very good at the beginning, but it starts aging exceptionally fastly from the beginning because it's not part of this stream.

13:14So one of the things we think about at Manus, but also one of the things our audience should be thinking about is to say, okay, do I really need something specific for me or can I be benefiting on the weekly, monthly, yearly reinvestment that company X or project group Y or something else is doing on this? Because then I don't have to be using some of my relatively few resources for cycling in the future. And that's part of how we look through it. That's part of the reason why some of the stuff we said, hey, we're just gonna do that the standard way an AI person does. Or hey, we're gonna just do that the same way a drug researcher does or a drug developer does, we're just going to do that the same way.

13:53Because doing that the same way gives us the ability to be deploying that, not having risk, not having to invest in it. And you have to be very choiceful, even as large companies, about which things you're investing in for proprietary reasons. More with Reid on how he's using a lifetime of scale lessons to supercharge his new company in just a minute.

14:33Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

15:23And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

16:07So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free.

16:21Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel.

16:29One of the things that struck me, Reed, when you first told me about Manus was this beautifully complimentary meeting of you and Sid and your skills and your relationships and your access, your knowledge. You're also entering a category where there are a number of companies already using AI to do drug discovery and to solve critical medical problems. And you all raised a lot less money than most of these companies have raised. How are you able to do that? What's the competitive advantage that you have? And I appreciate it's mission-driven, but still you're entering a market where there are already folks who are steps ahead here.

17:06Well, we don't think they're steps ahead. Okay. That would be a different question. Fair. Part of it is, so some of these projects tend to be to raise a whole bunch of money and throw the money at either the kind of classic AI stuff or the classic drug discovery stuff. Yeah. So part of the thing that we're doing with the financing of Manus is to start in a classic Silicon Valley way that I find to be most successful and how it drives, which is start with a really focused project, a Series A investment, and move to you're going to raise more money from your Series B and then from your Series C.

17:45But it's as you accomplish things, you go. One of the things that is frequently challenging and frequently counter predictive for successful projects, in my experience, has been when you raise way too much capital initially. And that then says, well, it's because we're going to try everything and go really bold and do the whole thing from the start. And that actually makes you, even with a lot more capital, much less likely to be successful. So we will need to raise more money. We will need to raise it for clinical trials and a bunch of other things. We'll really need to raise a Series B for some of the technology, but we will do it based on having achieved some interesting outcomes.

18:23Yeah, it's one of those interesting parallels between art and startups where constraints actually produce better results often because it requires focus and discipline and choice making. Reid, you're entering a space with Manus that is extremely highly regulated. In the case of drug discovery narrowly and healthcare more broadly, do you see regulation as a constraint? Is this an area of concern? Can you work within the existing world? How does that factor into your analysis here? Well, one of the reasons why I very rarely invest in regulated businesses and would be normally very cautious about co-founding them is that regulation always massively slows down innovation.

19:08And regulators like to say, well, in certain cases it accelerates, which is true. And they like to say, well, but if you do it really smart, it doesn't really. And actually, no, it isn't because the natural thing for regulatory agencies is say, I get penalized every time an error happens and I get no upside for things working more efficiently or working more on target or anything else. So I just throw in every possible thing that could be answering a negative. And that's how it works over time, whether it's in the FDA, whether it works in the SEC, whether it works in the banking industry, et cetera.

19:41Now, that's all part of the reason why I tend to have this maxim to say, look, you should do regulation when bad regulation is better than no regulation, whether it's an industry, whether it's a specific kind of thing. But you shouldn't delude yourself that you're super smart and a technocrat and that you know how to do this regulation in a way that's so great for the industry that you're going to detail this all out. And it's one of the reasons why, for example, the Europeans have a super large problem with regulation, not just within technology, but also everything that goes to labor and a bunch of other things because they go, no, no, no, we're going to have it as a multi-page detailed thing.

20:24Like, this is not at all saying society is better off without regulation. This is not at all saying that parts of the FDA are absolutely critical in anything from food and drugs and other things to do. It's just that you need to have a certain epistemic humility and kind of going, hey, we should be very focused versus trying to be, we are the genius technocrats. And so that's the reason I generally stay away from regulation. And I only get into the areas where there's regulation when I think, hey, this could be so great. This could be like industry transformer. This could be something that changes many thousands of human lives.

20:59And you could see its impact on a society basis of helping elevate society. Then, okay, regulation is a huge risk like other risks. But that huge risk plays out against that. And that's part of the case in Manus. Right, right. Good regulation is really hard, but it's not an oxymoron. Yes. How fast can manis go? Curing cancer has been a moonshot concept since we had a concept of a moonshot. How quickly can this happen? Well, I mean, we're early days. Obviously, we did this because we think we can accelerate greatly. We think we can get a lot more targets into the early process than the standard process would have.

21:37We think we have ways of evaluating those targets and molecules at a much faster rate than tributarily happens. We think we can be getting into clinical ground truth things at a speed that is a larger number and much faster. How fast it is is still TBD. And I think this is one of the things where Sid said, hey, welcome to a regulated industry. Don't quote numbers when you're talking to outsiders. right so here i am following sid sage advice and not quoting any numbers most of the time when we're having conversations on masters of scale it's about a company that has already scaled we're having this conversation because you are the og master of scale and this is as important as anything that you know we could be talking about in terms of the effect on humanity when we come back a year from now and have a follow-up conversation what are the markers that will determine whether you feel like madness is on the right track?

22:34We already have some of those markers internally. We've already had some prospective molecules. We've already had some of our technology development show things that we think help build secrets that we think no one else knows. So we've already on track on some of that. But I think what we would be saying to the world while we're on track will probably be like a couple of the pieces of technology saying, hey, these are delivering these things. We might be saying we have a set of interesting molecules for triple negative breast cancer, other kinds of things we're looking at. And our process has in fact gotten us there much, much faster than the traditional drug pharma startup company.

23:20That would be some anticipated positive signs. You're obviously using AI to assist in the discovery process and the testing process, et cetera. I would be stunned if you're also not using AI in the day-to-day operations of the company. What's different about how you and Sid and the team are building the company with AI that is applicable to other companies and other categories from the other companies that you founded or have been a very active investor in? Well, this will obviously scale as we get to it. I mean, right now we're in kind of raw tech development. So it's tech development and also kind of scientific development.

24:04So I would say it's today is probably a little bit more like some other companies, which is it's a research assistant for various kinds of things we're looking at. It's a communication and productivity assistant for generating flow of information decisioning between us. and it's a coding assistant for building certain kinds of code. If you're not in those basic things as a company right now, you're well behind the AI curve and therefore well behind the curve. So all of those things I think are things that every company should be doing. And now there may not be a science research assistant in your particular company, but there should be research assistants of some sort, global supply chains or competitive analyses on products or whatever whatever that thing may be.

24:51And so those things, I think, are things are not new and unique things. Now, obviously, as you get to questions around, like, say, for example, hey, we have got a drug and part of the issue is really maintaining complex compliance to the drug, then you can see how AI might actually help with complex compliance to a drug. And there may be some things that kind of get to specific things that are still significantly in the future. Reid, before we wrap, I want to ask you a broader question about what's happening in the world of artificial intelligence. In your book, Super Agency, you talk about the doomers, the gloomers, the zoomers, and the bloomers in terms of the categories of how dystopian and utopian people are in their vision of AI.

25:38When you lean into the bloomer side, into the more optimistic vision of what AI can be, what are you seeing today that we may not know about that has you more optimistic, more excited, more leaning into the AI utopian vision of the future? I'll use an example of, I was hanging out with Atul Gawande. We were talking about his new book that he's working on. And I was like, well, have you used deep research? He's like, no. I was like, okay, let's go. We went to my account in ChatCBT, you know, and we did the deep research prompt on kind of, you know, surgeons applying anesthesiology and improving their practice.