Dave Clark didn’t just get some chores done this weekend. He built an entire end-to-end customer prototype, reworked a deck, and created a custom CRM.

“Wildly productive weekend … Three things that used to take months happened in 72 hours,” Clark, the former Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO and one-time Flexport CEO, wrote on LinkedIn. He added: “Crazy what new tools can do to expand your surface area and personal productivity.”

Clark, who is now CEO of Seattle-area logistics startup Auger, said that configuring a traditional CRM proved more painful than starting from scratch. He described how his team abandoned off-the-shelf software in favor of building exactly what was needed.

His post comes amid ongoing hype and attention on so-called “vibe coding” tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot that enable the rapid building and iteration of software.

Responding to a comment on his post, Clark explained that he wasn’t incentivized by cost-savings with his weekend projects. “I did it because I couldn’t see the data I wanted, the communication pipeline wasn’t manageable at the level of detail I expected and it was going to hurt our ability to scale to meet customer needs if it wasn’t fixed,” he said. “So I fixed it. I also got to go deeper on using the tools that will define the future. They were hours well spent.”

Clark’s post drew some skepticism from commenters online. Longtime entrepreneur Steven Cohn, who has sold four startups, asked Clark “why you vibe coded and didn’t just use any of the open source products that are out there and fully developed and completely customizable.”

Clark responded: “Of course I’ve used tons of open sourced. In this case for an internal use app I liked the custom build as the right tool for the job. Others might choose differently. I was struck by how fast and easy it was.”

The post made its way to X, where some wondered about how the weekend project would scale or what resources would be needed to fix bugs.

Well, alrighty then….The skepticism in the comments just shows how wide the gap is between the observers and the builders. Software is a new world every few weeks now. If you aren't getting your hands dirty and experimenting your way through the skepticism, you aren't seeing… https://t.co/nnoHbYygWh

— Dave Clark (@davehclark) January 20, 2026

As we reported last week, Anthropic’s Claude Code in particular has caught fire in recent months, impressing software engineers with its ability to handle longer, more complex workflows. Claude Code is “one of a new generation of AI coding tools that represent a sudden capability leap in AI in the past month or so,” wrote Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and AI researcher, in a Jan. 7 blog post.

Anthropic also just released Claude Cowork, a version of Claude Code that is built for everyday knowledge work instead of just programming. The company said it used Claude Code to build Claude Cowork itself.

But whether vibe-coding tools completely change the way businesses build software still remains to be seen.

“Vibe coding and AI code generation certainly make it easier to build software, but the technical barriers to coding have not been the drivers of software moats for some time,” analysts with William Blair wrote in a report last week. “For the most successful and scaled software companies, determining what to build next and how it should function within a broader system is fundamentally more important and more challenging than the technical act of building and coding it.”

After a 23-year tenure at Amazon, Clark launched Auger in 2024 with $100 million in Series A funding. The company plans to offer an AI-powered system for supply chain operations that unifies data, targets inefficiencies, provides real-time insights and automation.

Satish Thomas, a 20-year veteran of Microsoft who spent two decades at the Redmond tech giant, is taking a new job at Google.

“I’m joining during what feels like one of the most consequential moments in tech history — right in the heart of the AI era,” Thomas wrote on LinkedIn. He did not specify what role he’s taking at Google.

Thomas said Microsoft “shaped me in ways I never imaged.” He began his two-decade run at the company as an intern. “I’m deeply grateful to the amazing people and teams I’ve had the privilege to work with,” he said. “Leaving isn’t easy — but some opportunities are so special and unique that you just have to go for them.”

Thomas spent the past six years as a corporate vice president at Microsoft, where he led strategy, product management, and engineering execution for Microsoft Cloud for Industry. He previously held leadership roles in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource.

— Raji Rajagopalan has a new role at Microsoft: GitHub’s vice president of engineering.

Rajagopalan has been with the tech giant for more than 20 years, joining the company as a software engineer. She’s leaving the Microsoft Foundry Team for the new role.

“My goal is to help GitHub continue to be the place loved by devs, where innovation happens and human-agent workflows thrive, as we move into this new era of AI-driven development,” Rajagopalan said on LinkedIn.

— Katie Bardaro is senior VP of customer experience at Avante, a Seattle startup building software to help companies decrease HR administration workload and reduce overall benefits program costs. It also offers an AI assistant designed to provide benefits guidance to employees.

“What drew me here is the opportunity to work at the intersection of data, AI, and total rewards, all while helping companies and employees navigate one of the most complex (and impactful) parts of the employee experience: benefits,” Bardaro said on LinkedIn.

Bardaro was previously chief customer officer at Syndio, a company that analyzes workplace pay equity issues and provides strategies for fixing disparities. Prior to that she was at Payscale for more than a decade.

— Vivek Sharma is leaving Stripe for a cryptic new venture focused on “AI’s potential to fundamentally change how people work.”

Sharma, who has held executive roles at Microsoft and Meta, didn’t provide further details about the stealthy startup in a LinkedIn post, but did name his collaborators:

• Tore Hanssen, who was a founding engineer at Statsig, the Bellevue, Wash.-based startup acquired in September by OpenAI. He previously worked at Meta.
• Robert Masson, a senior staff data scientist at Meta’s Seattle office, clocking nearly 11 years with the company before going to Atlassian early last year.
• Calvin Grunewald, who spent nine years as a Facebook director of engineering, based in Seattle. He was most recently at Stripe.

“More details coming soon,” Sharma said of the startup. “But if you want to be an early adopter or just want to chat, please reach out!”

— Jeff Carr is now CEO of Atana, a startup building workplace training content that incorporates behavior-based learning and development. Carr joined the Bellevue company in August as president. He succeeds Atana co-founder and former CEO John Hansen, who will remain as executive chair.

In announcing the news, Hansen said that Carr “aligned with Atana’s vision immediately and has been instrumental in bringing us into new opportunities and new strategic relationships in a very short period of time.”

Carr has held multiple CEO roles in the past, including leadership of workforce training company Inkling and at the HR company PeopleFluent.

Atana originally launched in 1993. Hansen, a startup veteran and longtime lecturer at the University of Washington, acquired the business in 2016 and oversaw the expansion of new learning content.

— Longtime Microsoft gaming leader Larry Hyrb shared on LinkedIn that he was laid off from Unity after 18 months on the job.

Hyrb, known by his longtime handle “Major Nelson,” left Microsoft in 2023 after more than two decades in corporate communications, promoting the launches of games and other products. He was the host of one of the company’s earliest podcasts, Major Nelson Radio, which later became Xbox Podcast.

At Unity, a San Francisco-based gaming company, Hyrb worked with the Community and Advocacy Team, supporting connections among creators, developers and gamers.

— Serial tech entrepreneur Jay Bartot is now a technical advisor and chief technologist for TheFounderVC, a Seattle-based venture capital firm that launched in 2024.

Bartot is also co-founder and CTO of the software startup AirSignal, an affiliate professor at the UW, and a startup mentor at Creative Destruction Lab.

Bartot said on LinkedIn that he looks forward to working with the TheFounderVC team “to help exceptional early-stage founders build the next generation of great Vertical AI companies and products.”

— Auger, a startup building logistics and supply chain software, named Tucker Reimer as principal of supply chain innovation. Reimer joins the Bellevue startup from the Johnsonville sausage company where he served as vice president of global planning and analytics.

Dave Clark, the former Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO and Flexport CEO, launched Auger in 2024 with $100 million in Series A funding.

— Lucas Dickey joined Stripe as a product builder focused on Stripe Atlas, a tool that helps entrepreneurs incorporate their business.

Dickey said on LinkedIn that he has used Atlas four times to start his own companies and aligns with Stripe’s goal of “making the administrative layer a breeze — and helping new companies start strong from day one.”

His startups include Deepcast, a podcast platform, and Fernish, a decor-focused business that was acquired.