Anchor is a small startup, but our team has a combined 70+ years of experience building software. Over the years, we’ve learned some important lessons:
What developer audiences need
How to build good products
How to have a successful career as a developer
Today, we’ll explain why the best way to accomplish all three is actually giving a damn (and how you can use this in your own life and career).
We Started Anchor Because We Gave a Damn (And So Do You)
One of the main reasons we started Anchor was because, like you, we’ve witnessed software development become more complicated, especially in terms of how many different tools, frameworks, and open-source projects there are to manage.
And just like you, we found our teams thinking about internal TLS too late. Deploying encryption brings significant upfront and ongoing costs, so most teams put it off. “We’ll get to it later”—but later quietly becomes never.
The trouble is, once your services are in production and serving real customer traffic, retrofitting encryption isn’t just inconvenient; it’s risky. And when encryption stops being optional—because of compliance, legal pressure, or customer expectations—it becomes far more painful and expensive to bolt it on to a rapidly scaling and evolving system.
We knew there were developers like us—who saw that the day would come when their team wouldn’t just own the codebase, but also application security. Devs ready to take ownership now, instead of waiting until TLS becomes a painful, last-minute scramble.
That’s why we built Anchor: to make TLS accessible and manageable from day one, with tools and UX purpose-built for developers.
(And when we saw how hard it was for front-end teams to get HTTPS working locally, we built lcl.host too.)
How Giving a Damn Gives You Better TLS Coverage (and Gave Us a Co-Founder)
From day one, we envisioned Anchor as a complete certificate management solution—providing both internal certs via private CAs and publicly trusted certs as a public CA. But bootstrapping a public CA is an expensive, years-long process—one that’s completely out of reach for a small startup.
So, like many teams, we told ourselves, “We’ll get to it later.” And, honestly, later was starting to look a lot like never.
Until something changed. (Call it giving a damn.)
Our founding engineer, Wesley Beary, found a way to deliver publicly trusted certificates—even without a full-blown public CA. Instead of sticking to his own PRs and project queue, Wesley saw the bigger picture—and cared enough about Anchor’s mission to solve a problem we didn’t think was solvable. With no roadmap, no mandate, and no one asking, he independently cut years off our product timeline.
The result is Anchor’s ACME Relay: a streamlined, developer-friendly ACME workflow that makes it faster and safer to provision public certificates. It works seamlessly with Anchor’s hosted private CAs, too. That means you can use public certs for your data plane and internal certs for your control plane—all in one service. Or use a private CA in development, then switch to public certs for staging and production—without changing your tooling or code. (Read more in our docs.)
By giving a damn, Wesley showed he was far more than just a talented engineer. He’s been a key contributor in shipping product and delighting users from the day he joined—and now, he’s also shaping strategic direction for Anchor. We’re proud to share that Wesley is officially joining us as a co-founder.
We’ve seen this pattern many times in our careers: being a dev who takes pride of ownership leads to better products, makes products more useful to more developers, and even opens new career opportunities.
If you’re interested in faster and safer public cert management, sign up for the early access waitlist here. Attending RSAC Conference 2025? Join us for our afterparty and say hi to the Anchor team.
And keep giving a damn, because it works.
