drone—It seems as though just about everyone has heard of Amazon’s audacious plan to deploy flying delivery drones. Some are calling it a PR stunt, but Amazon actually has a team of employees working on a project called “Amazon Prime Air.”

Now we know who’s on the drone team. AllThingsD reports that there are five Amazonians on drone duty, including two former Microsofties: Gur Kimchi and Daniel Buchmueller. Kimchi was a manager for several years at Microsoft, working in mobile, MSN and Virtual Earth. Scott Green, Amir Navot and Rita Troup round out the group.

Skype CFO Bill Koefoed is now with Portland's Puppet Labs.
Skype CFO Bill Koefoed is now with Portland’s Puppet Labs.

Puppet Labs, which helps system administrators efficiently manage data centers and computing networks through automation, has hired Skype CFO Bill Koefoed to be its chief financial officer. Koefoed previously headed up Microsoft’s investor relations department.

Puppet Labs, which has several big-name clients like Twitter, Zynga, and Disney, is one of Portland’s hottest startups and has raised $46 million in total funding after a $30 million investment earlier this year from VMware.

We recently took a tour of the company’s sweet office space is Portland’s Pearl District.

—Seattle-based home improvement startup Porch.com has hired three executives. Peter Baltaxe, former CEO and co-founder of RedEnvelope, will become Porch’s VP of Product Management. Kiran Akkineni, previously at Zulily, is now the Director of Analytics at Porch. Finally, Craig Cincotta, who worked at Microsoft for the past seven years, has joined Porch as VP of Communications.

Matt Ehrlichman of Porch
Matt Ehrlichman of Porch

“Since our September launch, Porch has grown rapidly,” CEO Matt Ehrlichman said in a statement.
“It’s exciting that we will quadruple the size of the company over the next year, but much more exciting to see a clear path to transforming how people everywhere improve and maintain their homes.”

Porch, which recently raised $8.2 million of a $27.6 million round, is looking to transform how people use data to make better home improvement decisions. It currently employs 70.

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