Announcing the 2021 Anchor List
Highlighting 29 extraordinary operators in the startup ecosystem building and advising the world's fastest growing companies.
The Floodgate team is thrilled to share our list of honorees for the 2021 Anchor List!
This year, we recognized 29 operators across seven operator categories: product, engineering (newly added this year), design, marketing & growth, sales & business development, operations & finance, and talent. To read more on individual Anchor operators, check out our website at www.anchorlist.com.
Anchor operators transform the trajectory of startups.
As we mentioned in our 2021 announcement post, we’ve worked with enough companies to know that the first engineer, first designer, first sales hire, and so on are super critical to mission success. We’re excited to surface Anchor operators that we believe should have more of a spotlight shown on them. This year’s operators come from a wide range of companies, but four startups stand out as having produced the highest proportion of Anchor operators — Coda, Faire, Hatch, and Webflow. Each of these companies have more than two executives named to our list this year!
Many of our Anchor List alumni returned as judges for this cohort.
More than 70% of our judges this year were Anchor List 2020 honorees! It’s been awesome to see members of the community return and pay it forward. Our judges include day one veterans from Nextdoor, Doordash, Superhuman, One Medical, and more! We plan to integrate alumni into our tight knit Anchor List community through ongoing events (both virtual and, hopefully, in-person) throughout the next year.
Follow us here on Substack to learn more about our Anchor operators.
As you may have noticed, we’ve started featuring stories of Anchor operators through this publication. We’ll be ramping up on stories for the 2021 Anchor operators shortly! We’re committed to building the best community out there for rockstar operators. If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, please ping me at shawn@floodgate.com!