Cameron McCord spent 484 days underwater. As a submarine officer in the US Navy, he learned to run a reactor in a space where the crew sees you 24/7, even brushing your teeth, and where there is no “later” to sort out a disagreement. He still calls the Navy the single biggest influence on how he leads. After the submarine came Capitol Hill as a Navy congressional liaison, then early Anduril, then Saildrone, then a stint in venture at Lux Capital. Each one was a deliberate move toward starting a company.
That company is Nominal, a connected software suite that is changing how the world tests and operates hardware. Three years in, Nominal is valued at $1 billion, has raised $155 million in ten months, and counts four of the five largest defense contractors as customers. The team has grown from around 40 people to 170 in a year, across offices in LA, Austin, New York, DC, and now London.
In this conversation, Cameron walks through the operating playbook underneath that growth. Why he still interviews everyone and looks for people who are “three layers deep.” What it means to “earn the right to stand the night watch.” How he imports intentional ambiguity from early Anduril and a critique culture from the submarine. And where physical AI is actually going.
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Cameron McCord is the co-founder and CEO of Nominal, a software platform for testing and validating hardware systems, founded in 2022 and valued at $1 billion. The company has raised over $180 million in total. Nominal serves aerospace, defense, automotive, and energy customers, including four of the five largest US defense prime contractors, and in 2026 made its first acquisition, Fid Labs, to bring AI agents to hardware engineering. Before Nominal, McCord served as a US Navy nuclear submarine officer and then as a Navy congressional liaison, and held roles at Anduril, Saildrone, and Lux Capital. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
In this conversation with Cameron McCord:
00:00 Who is Cameron McCord?
01:34 What did 484 days underwater teach him about leadership?
10:36 How do you "earn the right to stand the night watch"?
16:28 What was so special about Anduril’s culture?
28:39 What is the "power of ambiguity"?
31:29 How does Cameron think about recruiting?
37:39 Can you recruit “killers” who are also low ego?
46:50 What was the broken old way of testing hardware?
50:50 How do you actually crack selling to the government?
55:12 How did Nominal land four of the five largest defense primes?
1:01:33 What does "physical AI" actually mean?
1:18:14 What is Cameron still working on in his inner game?
1:23:22 Quickfire: military movies, leadership books, and a favorite office?
1:25:07 What advice would Cameron give to his 25-year-old self?
Cameron’s sharpest lines from this conversation:
On why the weakest link defines the team:
“Even if you’re the person turning a wrench on a pump, if you don’t do your job, the team could be at risk, because everything has to come together.”
On what he recruits for:
“The biggest gift, and frankly the thing you look for in talent, in recruiting, is people that are fit to stand the night watch… a safe pair of hands.”
On asking a team to do the impossible:
“It is always worth going the extra mile to draw the thread between the impossible task you’re asking someone to do and the outcome for a customer.”
On what it takes to win:
“Do one thing and do it really, really well… in practice, you need to do something 10 times better than the current way.”
On the inner game of leadership:
“Being comfortable in your own head is so powerful, and it’s the biggest gift I can give to Nominal.”
On a mantra from his submarine captain:
“Stress is the body preparing you for greatness.”
Where to find Cameron:
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Where to find Audacious Ventures:
Full Transcript: Cameron McCord on Knuckle Up
Cameron McCord:
Things go wrong on the submarine, you’re operating high-stakes, nuclear reactor, people at sea, but this is the game. You earn the right to stand the night watch, being picked to be the officer that the captain has enough trust, and confidence in to actually try and sleep. That is such a critical trait. These quiet operators who you know are just safe hands. A lot of founders and CEOs are performing. They act a certain way in front of parts of their company, and then that’s not really who they are. And so I think earnestness and leadership, just like being yourself, is incredibly valuable, stress is the body preparing you for greatness.
Nakul:
Cameron McCord spent the first decade of his career inside operating cultures most founders never see. Five years as a U.S. Navy submarine officer, 484 days underwater, then on Capitol Hill as a Navy Congressional liaison. Then early at Anduril, Saildrone, then a stint as a VC at Lux Capital before he started Nominal in 2022, which is building the data infrastructure, and testing stack for hardware engineers. This is a software powering the physical AI revolution that’s coming. Not surprisingly, within three and a half years of founding, Nominal is already a unicorn. Today we talk about what operating and leadership influences Cameron carried from the Navy, how he’s scaling Nominal’s culture through a fast ramp, his read on physical AI, and how his unique background has prepared him on the inner game of being a founder/CEO. [foreign language 00:01:32] Cameron, welcome to the show.
Cameron McCord:
It’s great to be here.
Nakul:
So, before any of this in your life today, you spent 484 days underwater as a submarine officer. What did that embed in you deeply as an operator and leader that you still carry with yourself today?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah, it’s really good. It’s a good question. I think, I think about probably three main things. The first that I learned sometimes the hard way on the submarine is earnestness in leadership is what I call it. And so I think the submarine, it’s too small of a place to be hiding anything. People see you 24/7. They see you in all sides of your life. They literally see you when you’re brushing your teeth. And what I found is I think a lot of founders and CEOs are performing a lot of the time, and they act a certain way in front of parts of their company, but that’s not really who they are. And so I think earnestness and leadership, just being yourself is incredibly valuable, and I’ve certainly lived that on the submarine. I think a second one that really comes to mind is being direct in conflict, direct in disagreement.
That’s something that I learned on the submarine. It’s too small of a space, again, to say, “Ugh, I disagree with that person, but we’ll sort it out later.” That just there’s no later and you have to be direct. And so that’s something I’ve tried to take into company building, into leadership. And then I think the third is maybe a more classic takeaway, but certainly you are only as strong as the weakest link. And so when you get to a submarine, you’re kind of embodied with this mentality of it takes everyone on the team performing at a world-class pace. Even if you’re the person that’s turning a wrench on a pump, if you don’t do your job, the team could be at risk because everything has to come together. And I think that’s so relevant to building an amazing company.
Nakul:
Is it a stressful environment through and through, or does it have a rollercoaster of normally it’s calm but then suddenly the stress spikes because of some situation?
Cameron McCord:
It’s a really good question. It’s definitely the latter. I mean, there’s always an underlying stress, but this is something I learned. I kind of thought it was going to be nonstop, but actually when you’re on mission is what they call it, you do a lot of training, a lot of preparation, but when you’re actually out there doing the high-end missions that submarines do, you’ll go often multiple days, maybe even a week with it being pretty steady state. I think there’s some learning in there as well, which is like building a company is a marathon. And so not everything needs to be dire. But on the submarine, I think there are definitely these instances where you would try to bank up on sleep and rest, because at a moment’s notice external factors would contribute and you would have to potentially stay up for 16, 20, 30 hours.
I’ve stayed up for I think over 30 hours a couple of times because humans are the limiting factor on a submarine. And so you can’t just go grab someone else. You are often the person that’s doing that. And so there’s this rollercoaster that you have to be ready to surge towards and then be smart about conserving energy.
Nakul:
Taking a slight step back, you went from the Navy to Capitol Hill to Anduril, then Saildrone, then the VC before starting Nominal. I want to double-click on each of those and what those environments left with you. Let’s start at the big thing. So you grew up in a big Navy family with a three-star uncle. When you got started at the Navy, were you going to be a Navy lifer, or did you plan this life out pretty intentionally right at the beginning?
Cameron McCord:
I thought honestly that I was going to do what my uncle did and kind of rise through the ranks. He served 38 years, amazing career, decades of service. I look back at it, I was three years old, five years old, seven years old when he was doing some of the most important things in his career. I reflect back and I think as a little kid, I honestly had no idea what he did. I knew he was in the Navy. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I describe it as like you can feel when there is, someone has a sense of purpose. I think you can feel even as a young child what it looks like to be fulfilled, and certainly what it looks like to command respect. I think those things are just like universal. And so I always looked up to him and I was like, “I kind of want that. I don’t know what it is, but I want that.”
And I think that the realization making a multi-decade journey succinct is the world that I came of age in is different than my uncles. And I think one of the main differences is technology and software. And so I think I realized I went to MIT and I got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug there. I don’t know if I would’ve called it that at the time, just tinkering and with friends that were very generative and like building new things and being disruptive. So those two things I think really converged, and I had a realization that I could have the impacts that my uncle did on the things I care about, the mission service in this broader sense, but I could do it potentially a lot faster, potentially at hyperscale in today’s modern world using technology and those things came together for me.
Nakul:
What was your role like on a day-to-day basis as a submarine officer?
Cameron McCord:
There’s really interesting kind of learning. So every submarine officer is nuclear trained. And so what that means is, so all of our submarines are nuclear-powered. Country submarines, some of them are diesel powered, some of them are electric, hybrid-electric, but all nuclear-powered. And so every officer spends the first part of their time on the submarine as an engineering officer. I think that’s kind of a profound differentiation. So you spend your time back in the engine room operating a nuclear reactor, this kind of symphony of hardware, software, electrical systems, buses, power supplies, steam engines, turbines, oil, high pressure steam. It’s this crazy environment. But you do that, and only then after doing that for maybe a year and a half, two years, you kind of earn the right to go to the forward part of the submarine, is what it’s called. And that’s where you actually fight the ship, is what the Navy calls it.
So that’s when you actually get to drive the submarine, you get to sort of command it so to speak, you get to operate it, think about fire control, weapon systems, torpedoes, all the amazing things. But it’s so important because the submarine is this incredibly interconnected system, and I think it was a really, really strategic move to have officers have that full training. And I think about a lot of that in terms of company building today. Getting started, when we were three co-founders. I was deeply embedded in the product and building it and I think it’s like so important to understand how the engineering and product pieces of a company work when you’re out fighting the ship, so to speak, when you’re the CEO, when you’re out front, like kind of alone and unafraid in many cases like moving the rudder. If we want to really pull the analogy of the business and sort of understanding, “Hey, how stressed is the team? How redlined are we?” It’s kind of like how much reactor power is in the nuclear reactor if I want to make that kind of connection.
Nakul:
Give me an example of a tough day at the office in a submarine?
Cameron McCord:
I think one that comes to mind is, I think the toughest days really were when I had to ask my team of sailors, to do frankly, the impossible with, limited time and resources. And that’s a generality, and I really think about that in company building now, but this specific example, I think when we would have something break, like submarines break all the time. I mean, there’s thousands of systems. I think it’s true that the International Space Station is number one, and then submarines are number two, in terms of some generic metric of like the most complex interconnected systems we’ve built, and things break all the time. I think really the bad days were as an officer you’re not the one that is by definition turning a wrench or a screwdriver or cleaning up the oil or doing those things.
There’s this hard separation, and there’s good reason for it. But you have to be this authoritative figure that is looking out for your team, but also kind of pushing them often past their limits and that’s the purpose of the job. But I think that the instances where things would go wrong, and you would feel I think as a leader helpless, and you just have to sort of push your team and tying back to the points on earnestness, I think the only way that you could do that is showing that you care. And so many, many days I would just sit next to my team and my crew and they would say, “Mr. McCord, sir, go to bed. There’s no reason for you to be here.” But a little bit of a show of solidarity, but just sit there with them, and talk to them, ask them about their family, their wives, their kids as they’re working 24/7 to fix this thing that’s critical so the submarine can go on and do that.
Nakul:
Is there a story you repeatedly tell your team today from those days?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah, one story that I often reference for the team is this phrase that’s caught on a litle bit at Nominal, “But you earn the right to stand the night watch.” What that means on a submarine, it’s 24/7 operating. There’s normally three different crews, three different shifts, eight hours each, and the night watch is what it sounds like. It can be different times, but from midnight to 8:00 a.m., say. And the captain of the submarine, the singular captain of the submarine, that’s normally when he or she is sleeping. You want to always be the junior officer, the person that gets called upon to be the one to be the number two in command during that time. And it’s really interesting because often during the day is when the most intense activities are happening, high-stakes, things are kind of going on, but it’s often like the flashier time to operate, being picked to be the officer that the captain has enough trust and confidence in to actually try and sleep and know that you’re the one out there that is just like alone making those decisions.
And when he or she wakes up at 8:00 a.m., hopefully, and you do a turnover report, it’s just, “Hey, a couple of things came up, some things went sideways. They always do, but here’s the sort of decisions I made and I handled it.” And I think I use that for the team. I call it a Nominal, sometimes safe hands, but the biggest gift and frankly a thing I think you look for in talent and recruiting is people that are fit to stand the night watch. So there’s people that are high performers and they want to help the company and they want to do stuff, but it’s often flashy, and it needs a lot of attention from you as a founder, you as a CEO.
And I think there are then these quiet operators who you know are just safe hands. You can give them any project, ambiguity, you can go off and spend two weeks doing another key thing in the business and come back and get the status update and be like, “Wow, the quality was phenomenal.” And they had ambiguity and risk and they made all the right decisions. I use that phrase a lot because I think that is such a critical trait to find people that are comfortable and will seek out the night watch.
Nakul:
So you then went to Capitol Hill as a Navy Congressional liaison.
Cameron McCord:
Yeah.
Nakul:
Was that a sharp contrast from the Navy? Was that a cultural shock for you, or it wasn’t as surprising you were prepared for it?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah. So I went and did this really unique job where you are kind of a legislative liaison is what it’s called. So you are kind of an undercover agent for the Navy. You wear a suit and tie, so that was one of the biggest differences, no uniform. And your job is honestly to kind of blend in on Capitol Hill. So I was in an office that was actually in Rayburn in one of the House office buildings and it was an incredible shock. At the submarine, you’re operating at some of the most tactical levels of the Navy, and then you come to the Pentagon, and its interface with the legislative branch is some of the highest, most strategic, in rooms where they’re debating billion-dollar, hundred-billion-dollar budgets for the submarine force, as an example, in the future. And so it’s just crazy to go from the in the trenches, so to speak, to the highest kind of level.
I think one thing that was a big cultural shock or differentiation as well was you learn on Capitol Hill, I think like how things get done. The submarine was very tactical and it was KPIs and metrics and numbers and engineering constraints and there’s little room for argument if it was the right engineering answer or the right tactical answer, like that always went out. And I think on Capitol Hill it is quite the opposite. Take a positive frame on that, it’s very positive-sum. I think to get any legislation done and people always think about one side of the aisle, Democrats, Republicans always arguing and always zero-sum, but it’s actually not. It’s actually very positive-sum, I think to get complex legislation done. Both sides have key issues, they have constituents they have to represent.
And so I got a front row seat into this like incredible governmental deal making apparatus, and I learned so much there. Certainly that’s been helpful in building Nominals with this federal business, but really just like eyeopening I think to see how these budgets and these bills and laws made an amazing experience.
Nakul:
Then Anduril, which again, would be a sharp contrast just because of the pace at which it probably moved, how was that experience in contrast to the prior two experiences?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah. So I think the biggest difference there was just not being in the Navy. The first time, and I kind of use it, the first time I think I really felt like unbridled and that is like such an important part of culture to build at a company and I think Anduril did that incredibly well. When I got to Anduril, they were maybe 80 people, 85 people. So very much a startup. It’s fun to say now, people didn’t know if the company was going to work out and amazing business has been built. But I think the thing that they got right was incredible autonomy, incredible authority, and it was so inspiring to me, having come from this environment and you can hear I speak so positively on the Navy, but I think the things that are drawbacks are you constantly strive to reach the top level that you can, and then you have to wait to be promoted, and in startup world and certainly at Anduril, I was able to move as fast as I could.
And I was there for 15, 18 months ultimately and I probably got, I’m using quotations, “promoted,” I don’t know, six times, right? But you just run at the opportunities, and if you’re doing well, people will give them.
Nakul:
You also said in the past, in some podcast interview I was listening to you that the culture of Anduril instantly clicked with you. What was that instant click about in terms of culture?
Cameron McCord:
It’s some customer obsession, and I think particularly around the mission. And I think it was so amazing to me to see a private company, this startup that still cared so much about the mission of their customers. And the project I worked on specifically, the customer was the Special Operations Command, the Army, and this was like quite literally do or die. I mean, having to build a product that could impact and protect against drone strikes, drone attacks, and the clock is ticking. And I was so impressed no constraints would stand in the way of like delivering an outcome to the customer and that was just really infectious when I experienced it, and I loved it. Anduril is an amazing culture
Nakul:
And then Saildrone, then VC stint at Lux Capital from the outside it looks like a very well-constructed education to finally get to Nominal. Are we reverse engineering that, or that was at the time one opportunity leading to the next?
Cameron McCord:
I think it’s always a little bit of both, but a word that has been used to describe me by many folks is intentional. And so I think I wanted to start a company for a long time, and I set out when I left the Navy in a very structured way and said, “I don’t think I’m ready.” I talked to a lot of veterans who are really excited to do this, and I often sort of work with them and kind of advice them on the skills and the tools and the toolkit they’ll need. And I did that same exercise. I said I wanted to work at a hyper-growth company. I wanted to experience venture. I wanted to learn more theoretical academic business education, Harvard Business School, those things. But I wanted to do all that. I wanted to do it quickly, but I wanted to be able to have that experience.
And the reason why is because I think I had this notion that I was going to be converting all of this potential energy into kinetic. It’s kind of the frame I use of like what it is to start a company, because the great founders I think pull from all these past experiences, but like once you hit go, it is all consuming. That is what you were doing. I spent four or five years and I was doing a bunch of different things and learning and just that was my optimization factor is like, how much can I learn? You hit that switch and when that all sort of becomes vectored at Nominal. In the early days, it’s just this kind of concept of Nominal. It’s like so much can happen, and so much can happen so quickly. And so all those experiences have contributed, and I think have made Nominal partially what it is today.
Nakul:
Did you know you were going to be an entrepreneur at Anduril, or was it closer to Lux, where you were seeing other start? When did you know you wanted to start your own thing?
Cameron McCord:
I think it really was the day that I left the Navy. That was the journey, and I told myself that I was going to, like I said, I was going to try to cultivate advantage and think long-term about what it would look like to start a business, not force myself into it. And coming from the Navy, you’re so used to making sacrifices. I think this is an interesting thing. Your life is not your own. You’ve signed up for this oath, and you’re so used to just doing whatever it takes. I mentally was like, “I need to continue that mindset as long as I can until I get to this moment where I feel like I’m kind of ready to start something.”
Nakul:
Ship gears towards your leadership style, and how all of these experiences have shaped you. Of all those places, do you feel like one shaped you the most in terms of the leader you are today?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah, it would have to be the Navy. And I think I never thought that to be true. I always sort of thought, a lot of people are like, “Nah,” that’s kind of trite to say, “Oh, I was in the military, how similar could a submarine be to running a Silicon Valley company?” But I think upon reflection, a lot of the things I do, I think sort of organically or innately I did learn in the Navy, and it definitely formed me into who I am. I think the power is combining that with, whether it’s Anduril, or Applied Intuition, having a front-row seat to how some of these companies run and operate and then being able to pick maybe the best bits in my mind of those and sort of merge them into what is Nominal culture going to be and what is the leadership style that’s going to work for Nominal? Yeah.
Nakul:
You talked about earnestness and some of those aspects that you’re still carrying as an operator, but in terms of leadership specifically, are there traits you’re carrying from the Navy then?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah, one that I might circle back to is this incredible directness. And it’s not directness in like, I’m going to constantly offer pointed feedback and be looking over your shoulder. That’s not what I mean. But I think feedback is a gift, and I think that directness is a gift, and the amazing people that want to do that and can receive it well will perform so much better. And so I think that is a thing that I learned, and I’ve learned that I think a lot of people not coming from maybe some of the military background and stuff, that doesn’t come as natural to them. It’s something that they hold back in those moments. And so I think directness is certainly one. And then I think I often describe leadership, the earnestness piece to unpack it a little bit more is I think people that are joining an early-stage company as it’s growing, they’re betting on you as a group of founders, you as a CEO to figure it out. I don’t think anyone that joined Nominal would have looked at me three years ago.
Cameron McCord:
... would’ve looked at me three years ago and said, “This guy’s got it all figured out. He’s seen everything. He’s taken a company public, he’s done this, he’s sit on boards.” No, they’re looking at you to hopefully be many steps ahead, but at least always be on that journey. And you get paid the big bucks, so to speak, but to be out there being vulnerable and learning what it takes to build a business and a company and seeking advice, doing this, getting counsel. And so I think that comes across if you’re willing to just be really open and frankly stand in front of a group of people and say, “I don’t have an answer for this, but my job is I’m spending the next 30 days, next 60 days getting world-class advice and council and ultimately I’ll make the decision. That’s the job.” But I think every stage of company, that kind of happens. And I think if you do that and you’re very open, I think you will have people that will fight alongside you forever.
Nakul:
Let me ask back a question that might be slightly challenging to that idea that the Navy is such an... One would imagine that there’s a lot of order. There’s hierarchy, there’s order, there’s preparedness for every situation versus a startup by nature is so chaotic because you all didn’t prepare. You all come from different walks of life, the founders, the employees, the product market fit is dynamically changing. I guess that is similar to how maybe situations change in a submarine, around a submarine. But there’s still a preparedness that the Navy has and that leads to order versus a startup is supposed to be thriving in the chaos.
Would you say there are things about learning your leadership style at the Navy that actually you have to suppress now as a CEO?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah. I would agree with your point. I think there’s a joke at Nominal or almost an understanding, and it’s one that makes me smile and it makes investors, I think, smile. I do not worry about the thing that would keep me up at nights, the things that sort of worry you. I do not worry a bit about Nominal’s short term execution. We are world-class at execution. We are world-class at planning, annual plan and hitting the... Those are things where the team is built to do. And in many ways, I think it’s an embodiment of the things that I...
But the areas where I’ve had to help adapt is that can come at a cost. You can over-optimize there. And so particularly now as a business, as we’re growing and scaling, making sure that pockets of the business can stay really flexible and really agile.
I love a quote or framing by Qasar Younis of Applied. We have gotten close from my time it Applied, he said, “The journey of a company is you have to find product market fit honestly every three months.” It’s not this one and done journey and there’s these concentric circles of building product. And so how do you build a culture that is willing to kind of throw everything away if it needs to or throw a big portion of what you’ve built away if you have another opportunity or you learn something else about the market and go do that.
And so it definitely has been a balance of making sure that we’re not over optimized on, I call it, the left foot right foot, the execution moments, the every second of every day, like clock speed. Those things are really, really important, but we’ve had to learn and sort of restructure and organize around how do you just keep looking over the hill and building in that direction.
Nakul:
Is there something that now being in Silicon Valley for the last five, seven years, maybe longer, that you actually feel the Navy could learn from Silicon Valley?
Cameron McCord:
Absolutely. I think the simple word would just be risk, like an understanding of risk. The military certainly understands and has operated in some of the highest risk environments, but I think the ability for Silicon Valley to just move really quickly and understand structured bets, like what makes a bet, and the ability to turn things off. I think the best companies can say, “Six months, here’s some headcount, here’s a product lead, here’s an engineering lead, here’s a thesis, here’s some resourcing, here’s some success criteria.” We call it the double downs or the kill criteria for an effort, and Silicon Valley is made around doing that. And I think that’s just a thing that the Navy and the military has demonstrated is really hard, and they’re not good at. There’s a huge sunk cost fallacy that gets propagated.
And so that’s definitely something where I think because I experienced the sum cost fallacy, honestly, I have a more of a willingness to be like, “Hey, act it. No, we’re not going to do that.” Maybe it’s like quantified and sort of measurable risk is a thing that I think the Navy could learn from Silicon Valley.
Nakul:
What about the opposite question, which is, what can Silicon Valley learn from the Navy?
Cameron McCord:
I would say building a culture of intense sort of retrospection on things. On the submarine we would do these, we called them, critiques. So things go wrong on the submarine. Sometimes very serious potential casualties you’re operating, high stakes, nuclear reactor, people at sea, people can get hurt. And you build this incredible culture of what’s called a critique, but you go through and you ask the five whys. So this structured approach to understanding so-and-so, missed a step in a critical procedure and you kind of ask, “Why did they? They can read.” And maybe it’s like, “Well, oh, they were distracted by something else” and, “Okay. Well, why were they distracted?” And you kind of go through this thing and you might come to the end root cause analysis that’s completely separate from the fact that they didn’t follow the procedure. And you might actually realize that a key issue is that this person hasn’t been able to sleep the last three nights because there’s a fan above their rack, the bed that they sleep in that is like violently... It’s rotating because the screw’s loose.
Those are the types of things that you might actually come to. And you only get to those real root cause analyses of how to actually fix the full spectrum by doing these critiques. It’s a thing we’ve taken and we really try to do it at Nominal if there’s an incident, the product goes down or something happens or expectations with a customer not met, something like that. Really trying to have this intense critique culture where you kind of get to the root of the cause. And I think the reason why Silicon Valley has been traditionally bad at that is it’s just moving so fast. And so I think there’s this idea that we don’t have time to go fully unpack that or we can take a surface level answer for what happened because we’ll just build it again or we’ll build it faster, we’ll move. And there’s lots of positives in the mentality, but I think that’s one where bringing more of that deep, deep understanding, seeking behavior would be powerful.
Nakul:
Yeah. We’ve talked a lot about the Navy so far, but any key learnings from Anduril, Applied Intuition, Saildrone, I mean, these are excellent, excellent startup journeys and you’ve been part of those.
Cameron McCord:
The thing I learned at Anduril, I kind of call it the power of ambiguity. And it’s a very nuanced kind of concept, but I think Anduril nailed in the early days sort of intentionally limiting the amount of structure in the organization. And that only really works I think if you hire these type A people, but they will sort of self organize to achieve outcomes. And it might be stressful. And if you hire people and you have intentional ambiguity around that, sometimes sharp elbows can come out and people... It’s not a perfect schema, but it was so critical, I think, to early Anduril and to moving fast.
And so what I’ve sort of taken from that to Nominal is I think there’s a moment in time where you have to start putting more structure around an organization and sort of setting, doing whatever, things like leveling or just having a management structure and things like that. But intentional ambiguity, even if it’s a new bet within a broader company is really, really powerful, I think. So force people to get out of the comfort zone of wanting to have a hierarchical structure or clear understanding of that. That’s a learning from Anduril.
Applied often, Qasar always talks about speed above all. I think I saw incredible execution and clock speed and how powerful that can be and living it. Sending an email on Thursday morning vice Thursday lunch, like might get you an email back Friday morning. Those things compound. You hear it, but once you live it, this sort of concept of like, look at Qasar’s calendar and you’d have 10-minute blocks for things. And it was the first time I was like, “10 minute block? It’s like a lawyer, right? It’s like, “Are you billing this?” But the pace that he was just sort of working at and sort of constantly able to sort of jump between those things and move at clock speed.
And I think at Saildrone, I love Saildrone. I had a front row seat there to just building out parts of the early federal business. And that was being very open, that was a test for myself. I had learned the theory of that by being at Capitol Hill and I had watched it at Anduril, but to be very open, I was not the one leading all of that function. I was part of the system at Anduril. And then at Saildrone was really the first time to say like, “Hey, can I do this?”
Richard, the CEO, amazing. He gave me all the authority, all the autonomy, resources, headcount, everything. And you own the P&L, like, go do the thing. And I think I was able to see kind of quick early success there. I think that has given me a lot of confidence and now even though we’ve done a lot more at Nominal obviously, but yeah.
Nakul:
So so much of execution ultimately though comes down to not just you, but the extension of the team, meaning the team around you. What’s your overall recruiting philosophy given the varied learnings you’ve had from all these places?
Cameron McCord:
I still interview everyone at Nominal.
Nakul:
How many people at Nominal?
Cameron McCord:
We’re now 170 with signed offers. And so a lot of those are happening Saturdays and Sunday mornings now.
Nakul:
And year ago it was around 40?
Cameron McCord:
40, yeah. It’s been huge, yeah. Incredible growth. A lot of those interviews are happening Saturdays and Sundays now because the weeks kind of fill up, but people that are... It’s one of the easiest litmus tests, is, if you’re not going to come up to a Saturday, Sunday morning, you’re probably not a good fit for Nominal.
The team laughs. I have this framing I call like, we want people at Nominal that are three layers deep. People are like, “What is that? Three layers deep?” So much of my interview is... And I tell people this directly, I say, “I’m going to ask you about your experiences. I want to ask you about the decisions you’ve made to get to this path. I want to ask you what’s exciting for you about Nominal, what questions you have for me.” More classical structure, but I’m saying that... I’m asking that and I’m leading you to the answer is like, I want to understand what motivates you.
The team at that point has assessed all the... I have the full report. I know that they’re fit to be the Nominal bar, but the thing that I want and I think is so incredible when you assemble it is people that are really, really authentic and have a reason and are in touch with their own understanding of what motivates them. And so three layers deep is you might ask someone like, “Why do you work so hard? Hey, you are the leading product manager at this company for five years and you went to this amazing university and stuff. Why?” And people will give maybe surface level answers of like, “Oh, I love engineering and I always wanted to just outperform and stuff,” but it’s like, “Okay, but why?” And then you sort of see you’re like, “Oh, my dad was my hero. He was an engineer.” And then you maybe unpack that a little bit and then, “But why?” And it’s like, “Oh, well, he was an immigrant. And he came here and had to learn everything and sacrifice so much.”
And you kind of unpack this and you realize that person is this incredible, almost complex, but the thing that motivates them is they have this deep sense of whether it’s a chip on their shoulder or they want to prove themselves or they feel this incredible debt to someone in their life, those are the things that make incredible people. And I think people that are in touch with what that is for them and can vocalize it are just the types of people you want. And frankly, you get a little bit of an indication is like, will someone play that game with you or will they kind of shut down? Because when things get tough in business, things get tough at a company, you want to know that someone is going to be willing to sort of be open at that level, otherwise they’re not going to last.
Nakul:
Actually, first of all, that’s great because believe it or not, that is my question also at Audacious because I kind of come towards the end of the process. And so I also try to get deep into what really, really, really drives you, and it’s often a personal answer, something in your childhood or teams that got determined-
Cameron McCord:
It so often is. Yeah.
Nakul:
Let’s extend that to culture and management. So what have you kind of instituted as culture or values at Nominal that define the company today?
Cameron McCord:
We have six company values. And I’ll pull on a couple that are, I think, some of my favorite.
I think one that we really love is promote clarity. We have a little Slack emoji, promote clarity and people will do it. But I think we have invested early, like we have offices all over the place. So we’re 170 people, but we have an L.A. office, an Austin office, New York, D.C, now London. We’re in person. People are coming to those offices, but we’ve found incredible advantage by being able to be kind of distributed. There’s some talent and hiring arbitrage, but that comes with a little attacks of communication. So really early in the company we said we have to lean into incredible documentation and promoting clarity.
And so at Nominal, what it really means is like going the extra mile or just taking the extra minute often in some cases to write good notes or document something or fully explain. I love this piece because I often bring it back to time on the submarine where communication, kind of called two-way communication, is so important.
And I’ll give this specific example that I really have tried to promote is two-way communication basically just means if I say, “Hey, can you go talk to the customer and show them this thing and the product?” Just you being able to say, “Got it, Cameron. So you want me to go talk to this customer and show them this thing and the product?” Easy moment to get full clarity is really quick to kind of do. And that could be verbal or even if it’s in Slack or kind of moving around. So often, shorthand, things get skewed, right? And you’re moving so fast, clock speed matters. And then that person should go do that thing. And then close the comms loop, close the communications loop, kind of come back and just say, “Hey Cameron, I spoke to that customer and I showed them this thing in the product. Here’s what I learned.” And then the final thing is then I need to confirm that, right?And it sounds so simple and it’s just normal 101 communication, but so often it doesn’t happen.
And so for the first, I don’t know, two years of the company, I would be in Slack and sort of see these chains that just sort of ended openness and kind of poke and urge to promote clarity. I think now we have this incredible machine that sort of does that. And I really do think that compounds and you can spot issues and sort of solve things. So promote clarity is one that we love.
And then I think stay grounded, stay humble. I think Nominal culture, if you kind of look at it, I think we have an incredible talent bar, incredible people. And we also just have really good people. And I know that sounds subjective. And sometimes people think, “Oh, good people. Oh, they killers or they whatever.” They are, but we’ve also really filtered, I think, for people that are going to be low ego and be really collaborative. That is really an embodiment of Jason and Bryce, my two other co-founders are, some of the most high performing and low ego people and they really like bring that into [inaudible 00:37:39].
Nakul:
How do you recruit for that? Because I agree with you the easy thing to say is, are they a killer then? And often being a killer comes with this ego or some chip on the shoulder and that can manifest itself in some edgy ways. How do you kind of balance this idea of has to be a good person at the core of it, low ego but also a very high performer?
Cameron McCord:
Two answers. I try and push so much of that out to the team. And I think that is just there’s transitive properties there. I think good people can assess good people and they have longer interviews than I do and they get a lot of surface area. And that’s where I think I learned it Applied. It’s important to have the breakfast or the coffee or the lunch or the duration and surface area with the candidate to just sort of experience them in different places.
And then I think one that we do a couple times is I think it’s powerful to sometimes insert some friction into the interview process. I’m making lots of submarine stories now, but this is one where intentionally starting a little bit late or potentially having an IT issue, not being able to set up... They’re small things, but it can get someone really flustered. And you can really easily, I think, see who can take a deep breath and kind of roll with the punches and stuff. And so if we have a suspicion maybe from a phone screen or some earlier things, we’re kind of like, person’s amazing, but are they a little too rough around the edges or are they going to be too bombastic or are they going to be above Nominal in some way? You can actually sort of, I think, seed situations and scenarios on an interview day where you can sort of suss out how that person will respond.
Nakul:
You also talked about the founder roller coaster being lonely, but one could argue that coming from the background you have, does being a CEO even fluster you at all as a leader? Are you a pretty calm leader in and out from what employees see you?
Cameron McCord:
I think the team would say I’m pretty calm. I’m pretty even keeled. I think they can tell when I’m stressed, but I hide that really well and I think I absorb it well. It’s sort of the duck with the feet moving under the sea really quickly.
So in general, I think it doesn’t fluster me. The thing that’s different certainly from being in the military and being in a company is everyone that’s at Nominal has taken a different kind of risk, but like the opportunity costing, right? I think deeply about the things that make me so excited and some of the highest moments in the rollercoaster when I know that Nominal is getting to this next level as a business or this next outcome or this next thing. And everyone who’s taken that risk to join early on, like when we go to events and I see people’s families, that’s the stuff that is the most fulfilling to kind of know.
And often sometimes as the CEO or the founder, you know when again... And fundraisings and things are very material moments in time of marking progress. Progress is continual. But often you sometimes know those things are happening kind of before and you kind of know what that’s going to mean to someone. And so those are the really, really high moments.
And on the rollercoaster, yeah, I think there’s plenty of low moments. Being a founder, you will have the highest highs and the lowest lows in the span of hours. I mean, every day is... A customer you didn’t expect reaches out and loves the product and it could be hugely directional changing for the business. And that candidate who is about to sign and totally lead some amazing team and some new effort [inaudible 00:41:08] or does something different. And that happens within the span of minutes. And I think your job as the founder and the CEO is to always just take it because it’s a marathon. It is absolutely a marathon.
Nakul:
I want to go back to a recruiting related question. When you were describing your stint at the Navy, one of the things you said was the toughest days are when you are asking your team to do the impossible. I would imagine that the ability to ask somebody to do the impossible is that they are so bought in on the mission themselves, not just from a recruiting perspective, but also the training perspective.
At a startup though, we live in a world where things are fast, meaning every person has so many offers, you have to make offers fast, OpenAI, Anthropic, all these companies. It can sometimes feel a little transactional. Have you been able to put in the recruiting process culturally also where it’s all very mission-driven and accordingly your ability to ask your team at Nominal also to do the impossible exists or you feel like that is just not replicable at a startup given the marketplace of talent we are in?
Cameron McCord:
I do think it’s possible and I think we do it really well. The thing I bring to that equation is I think it is always worth going the extra mile to draw the thread between the impossible task you’re asking an engineer to do or someone on your team to do and the outcome for a customer. And I think so often people gloss over that. And if you only push on one side of the equation, you don’t spend the time to sort of translate to the outcome, no wonder why people would get frustrated or not find that fulfilling.
And so for Nominal, the crazy talent market right now, as you sort of said, highly competitive, where we win every time is I can genuinely look at engineers who are considering Nominal versus another company and say, “In the span of a week, you’ll get to work with a company who’s building nuclear reactors, humanoid robotics, advanced transportation systems, rockets, drones, planes, maritime systems. And you’ll be on a boat off of Massachusetts helping them test their submarine systems. You’ll be in Seattle watching someone get really close to fusion. And you’ll be at a test range watching a jet at 400 knots.” And for the folks that like that, it’s an easy yes. They will say yes every time because that’s not something that is replicable in so many different companies.
And so that’s the type of mission-driven commitment that we want, is people that frankly sometimes have said, “Hey, I’ve spent years building software where I have not had any ability to understand that thread from the feature I’m building to the real world outcome, real world outcome.” And at Nominal, it’s so apparent. And that thread is so short that I think people just love it.
Nakul:
Do you feel though that recruiting-
Cameron McCord:
Just love it.
Nakul:
Do you feel though that recruiting bar to find those mission-driven people who are performers, who are also good people, comes under pressure as your hiring requirements grow and grow? So you went from 40 to 170 people last year. The next day, you might go from 170, 350.
Cameron McCord:
Yeah.
Nakul:
More people, more hiring managers trying to fill their roles because otherwise, they’ll fall behind. Do you worry about this bar slowing down or lowering, and how are you proactively addressing this?
Cameron McCord:
It’s a great question. And I think the thing that makes a mission-driven company... and I’ll use that. I’m not suggesting all companies have missions and mission statements, but I think in the context that we’re describing here, a mission-driven company different from potentially a more transactional software companies. Recruiting is a full-team sport. It is in many companies, but it really is when you’re assessing mission-driven talent because at a transactional company, there’s sort of a goes in, goes out formula. You can hire more recruiters, help you have more eyeballs on more resumes, help you do more screens, help you do more framing of equity packages to...
It’s a machine, it’s a process and there’s parts of that that do exist. I think the thing at a company like Nominal is, we have to fractionally depend on so many of the individual contributors, like the team members there to look out in their network and sort of do that filter and that assessment for folks that are going to be excited by Nominal’s mission and sort of do some of the pre-selling and pre-screening. And I think that my hypothesis would be at a company like Nominal, that ratio of what is outsourced to the team from the early parts of the funnel is higher than at some of these other companies. That’s my hypothesis.
Nakul:
So let’s talk about Nominal now. What’s Nominal’s mission and why does it need to exist?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah. We want to change the way the world tests and validates, and builds hardware systems. That is the ambitious North Star. And we think we’re in this incredible moment where there’s so much catching up to do. Frankly, the last two, three decades of software overlooked the world of hardware and software-defined hardware and autonomy and robotics. And then we’re in this moment where we’re moving into the future where AI is colliding with the physical world in really unforeseen and really interesting ways.
And as most companies do, we started kind of narrowly around this problem of hardware tests and operations. So what does it take to test and validate a piece of hardware? And that could be a robotic machine, it could be a circuit card, it could be a rocket engine, could be a satellite. And we’ve really expanded to this whole concept of, what is the human and the machine and the process of validation going to look like next year? What’s it going to look like in 5 years, in 10 years? And we want to sort of own that entire space.
Nakul:
What was the old way of doing this? Because hardware systems probably presumably had to be tested even before. So what is the old workflow that you’re replacing?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah. Really the predominant, old workflow, which is still so common in status quo in 2026, which is sometimes baffling. It’s tools like MATLAB, it’s a lot of Python, it’s Jupyter Notebooks. Maybe it’s Grafana or other kind of tools, but it’s a lot of non-purpose built software that’s been assembled together to sort of try to accomplish all these different functions that hardware engineers need to go through. They need to observe their data, they need to perform analysis, they need to ingest it and organize it. They need to build reports on it, all of these kind of functions.
Really, I think the industry was really slow to adapt to embracing the cloud and collaboration. And so, I sometimes describe Nominal as, what happens when you bring collaboration in a browser to a huge group of engineering users and a user base that has never had that available to them? And the reason why they didn’t is because these data sets are massive. They are often downloaded locally on laptops and machines. They’re in austere locations where it might not make sense to do a cloud hop from a performance perspective. And what happens when you change that? You fundamentally shift that game up and you let everyone have access to data instantly.
You build no-code, low-code solutions, so you don’t have to be a PhD in avionics to access the data coming off of your system. Anyone can do it, a technician, an operator. That is sort of the status quo into the world that Nominal’s helping to enable.
Nakul:
You started with defense and drones, correct me if I’m wrong, and now you’re expanding to all kinds of hardware. Is it actually extensible? Why then start with defense and drones? Yeah. Can you walk us through that journey?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah. Yes, we started in aerospace and defense and we now have automotive energy. We have both a pure commercial and a federal business. So different ways to segment. Right now today, a third of our customers are not aerospace and defense. They’re completely medical device robotics for example, or humanoid robotics or energy systems, grid monitoring, power electronics. So we really have become extensible to your point, and generalizable. And I think that was one of the first bets of the company, was we can build this amazing product to solve this problem of reviewing data after a test. And we focused on aerospace and defense. And I think this is the canonical... maybe it’s the Peter Thielism, but like do one thing and do it really, really well.
I think sometimes people, they try and boil the ocean and that’s great for the early fundraising slides, but in practice, you need to do something 10 times better than the current way. And for us, the problem Nominal solve was particularly in aerospace and defense systems, the multimodal nature of data, the complexity of the system, the number of data channels really likened itself to, it’s really hard after a test to just organize that data, derive an insight and do it quickly. And that was the thing Nominal solved. And then we’ve kind of proven out, actually the type of work that people do in that, it’s very, very similar to these other industries.
There’s different tools that have been point solutions built, but it’s the same workflow fundamentally that people are doing. We’ve been able to, I think, leverage the fact that the industrial and hardware sector is standardizing. We say, 7 years ago, 10 years ago, every customer might have had a different proprietary data type or format or standard, but the software industry went through this and the hardware world is too, if you work with robotics customers, ROS, ROS 2, MCAP, like these are the standard file formats, if you support those natively, you cover 95% of robotics customers in automotive or industrial streaming protocol.
So we’ve built a lot of the ability to natively support data and the workflows are the same.
Nakul:
Starting with government, because a lot of your business is still government, government selling feels like a mystery to so many folks. Can you unpack as to what was the wedge to get into government sales right away? Was that your background specifically? Is that a relationship-driven wedge, or something else you learned to unlock at Anduril and other places?
Cameron McCord:
So Nominal, as you said, is we’re a dual-use business. I think in most instances, building a dual-use business, both a joint commercial and federal business at the same time and in the early stages, is a bad idea. So I tell most people it’s a bad idea. It’s kind of like, don’t do what I say, but I give advice that that’s a lot. We intentionally picked a product and a market where we knew that the same product with no differentiation would serve both of those markets. It’s very rare. In most cases, there’s heavy customization that needs to happen.
For us now, some of the high-end customization might come later in the business, but people are very willing to pay for that. And so, that’s fine, once you’ve gone through the early parts of de-risking the business. But we wanted to pick something that we thought we would have an unfair advantage in. And my experience, some of the experience of the folks on the team, we were able to assemble pretty early, the rare art of selling to the federal government is something we have. The simple way I describe it is, what makes it so complex is, you really have to do... in some ways it’s not too dissimilar from massive enterprise selling, but you have like three or four different sales that you have to have at a time.
There’s obviously the end user, someone has to like the product, but you have this separate funding and resourcing conversation. Someone has to have dollars for it and that person, they are never the end user and they’re often never even connected to the end user. So it’s a completely different person. You have to convince the funding picture. Then you have this unique contracting vehicle. You have to have ways to contract and there’s tons of acronyms and learnings there. And then you have to make all of these things kind of come together at the right time period and factor in all this. So there’s this whole sort of dance that kind of has to happen, let alone the congressional side is really important, sometimes injecting funding into the system, so you can kind of work through the early days.
So yeah, it’s something that we’re quite good at. I think we were able to prove, and I think a thing that got investors excited at this moment was, I had some early slides, early framing of, there’s the set of things you have to do to perform as a federal business. They’re non-negotiables. Getting the ability to handle classified data, big bureaucratic administrative process, people with security clearances. I laid out all those things and said, “I understand what those things are and we as a business are going to do them faster than anyone else has ever done them.” And that was the claim.
Because in the early days, I think anyone who is saying when you’re raising a seed or even a series A, that you have this massive book of backlog and customer... it’s not realistic often. And so, you need to be able to sort of demonstrate, we can do all the things to, I said, become open for business as early as possible. And that’s different from some of the smaller grants and non-dilutive funding, the ability to win real production contracts as quickly as possible.
Nakul:
For somebody who’s never worked at the government, can they actually crack government selling? Because you just listed out so many things that were probably... you knew at the back of your hand, even somebody spinning out of Nominal, a sales leader, do they actually know every detail that you just talked about?
Cameron McCord:
I think over time, yes. I think it’s very difficult to learn those things or would be ill-advised to try to learn those things while you are learning so much else in the business. The fact that that was not... And even I saying very humbly, I learned things. I was humbled going through some of the parts of the process, things I’d seen at Saildrone. When I was at Saildrone, I had a team of 10 or 11 folks to go do some of the things.
When you’re a founder in the earliest days, I was the one writing the proposals, the RFPs, so you learn so many things. So I think over time, you can. I just think that’s one massive workflow you have to build, as you’re building a product, you’re assembling a team, you’re fundraising. It’s just you’re adding another risk vector that’s pretty massive. You just have to know that going in.
As we move into new industries, like energy and automotive, I am learning that journey. I’m learning a lot of those things and we’re doing it quickly and we’re hiring. Yeah.
Nakul:
Four of the five largest defense contractors also now running on Nominal, which is amazing. Was the procurement process for them also pretty hard almost equivalent to a government sale?
Cameron McCord:
Yes, it is. It’s very tightly linked. I tell this story of, a huge accomplishment for us to have. That was sort of a breakout metric is, it’s one thing to serve a lot of the growing startup market, but to be able to penetrate the incumbent legacy primes. One of the things that really benefited us, particularly in this dual-use world is progress and certifications and learnings you do on the federal side, are pretty directly transmissible or translatable to the primes, and vice versa. So building comfortability that you understand how to handle secure and classified data, it’s not something you can just walk into a room and say like, “Trust me.”
And so, it’s kind of like, I use left foot, right foot, it’s almost like a marketplace you have to kickstart where you have to go to the federal person and say, “Hey, we’ve had a lot of progress talking to the primes.” “What does that mean?” Which is like, “Okay, well, there’s some interest.” And they might back channel and say, “Hey, Lockheed Martin is interested in this.” And they might then give you a scope of work or a pilot on a federal use case that is really interesting and important. Give you a shot at that. You succeed there, you can take that anecdote, that past performance, let’s say, back to one of the primes and say, “Hey, actually, we did six months of work here and look at the results we were able to give.”
And they might say, “Okay, well, now we want to deploy your software in this more complex bespoke environment.” And then you do that successfully for the commercial company, for the prime. And then you can take that anecdote back to the federal side and say, “Hey, this wasn’t fully in a secure environment, but here’s all the things we learned. We can do this.” And they might say, “Okay, now you actually can do a classified deployment on the government side,” and then you take that back.
And so, it’s a lot of being able to thread both of those sides and build trust and conviction for both sides.
Nakul:
Your customers are really relying on you. They’re running, they’re testing on you. Have there been bad days or hiccups on the product side or the infrastructure side where there’s been bad feedback from customers?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah. I mean, yes. And I think anyone who is building this close to mission critical use cases and workflows that doesn’t have that, they’re not close to it. I think the best days, we’ll talk about the good day, the best days and the things that get me excited, and really it is every day now, we’re often one of the first Slack messages that our customers send. Because they’re relying on our software for some of the most pivotal moments in their business, huge test events, things that are going to determine whether they can fundraise or whether the product... these types of moments. And so, getting that little note that says like, “Hey, thank you Nominal,” is really meaningful.
And sometimes you get the other note which says, “Hey, we were gearing up for a test event doing something and there’s an issue with the product,” or, “it didn’t act the way that I thought it was going to,” or, “we had a reliability issue.” And I think the only way that you continue to earn the right to work with those customers is how you handle those moments. And so, sure, there’s the tactics and the functions of, write up a incident summary, do the root cause analysis, the retro, I said, the five why’s, but show that you’re not just a vendor. The thing you go to isn’t, “Well, let’s look at the SLAs and like talk about...”
People care about that procurement, but the engineer who’s relying on your software, if they’re going to pick up the tool and use it the next day, they need to hear from the engineers at Nominal that will get on the phone and walk through. And in some cases, they need to hear from the CEO that is reaching out to the customer’s leadership. So sure, we have those things, but we’ve only been able to be successful, I think, because we’ve been able to build that trust with customers.
Nakul:
What would have to be true for Nominal to be one of the defining companies of the physical AI era?
Cameron McCord:
I think a big bet we’re making, I don’t know how contrarian it is, but a bet we’re making is, I believe in the short term, the next two, three, four years, one of the advantages for building in this space is going to be the human machine interface and the ability to understand how humans are making engineering judgments about physical systems. I think a lot of people are trying to see if they can leapfrog some of those stages, just build foundational models, build engineering and physics models of the world. And the issue here is that, unlike the LLM data sets available, the data in the physical world is really difficult to get.
And particularly, I think the difficult thing is to get data that’s been enriched by humans. The complexities of what it looks like to operate a nuclear reactor or a manufacturing line. So the advantage I think Nominal has and where we really have investing is, how do we walk down the number of humans that are needed for some of these key functions, but not fully cut them out of the loop? I think the jump to full automation and human out of the loop, I think is going to take time. And so, that’s a big part of the bet that we’re making, in that people are going to pick their heads up two, three, four years from now and say, “That was a really smart call.” They have this incredible data asset that’s being compounded every day in the product.
In parallel from that, I think the thing that needs to be true is that you need to believe that people will find value in hardware-specific agents. And so, we build agents. We acquired this company, Fid Labs recently. We’ve been doing some work with them before and internal, but it’s going to really accelerate those efforts. But we have an agent that helps people perform analysis. We have an agent that helps people plan test events. That is some of the hardest... It is science. And so, understanding, “Hey, I have a rocket engine and I want to test it.” Going from that to, “How often should I test? How should the test be structured? How should it be broken down? How do I translate a requirements matrix into the things I’m testing?”
It’s really hard, but it’s really good for an agent. And so, I think the second big thing is, as that human in the loop curve is kind of coming down, that people are going to pick up the agent curve and that Nominal will have the right to be the software platform that does that handoff. And I think that’s what we’re betting on the physical AI world.
Nakul:
Physically AI is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days. What does the term actually mean? Are there actually a lot of physical AI companies or this is an invested imagination going wild kind of a term?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah, honestly, I think it’s a little bit more the latter. My co-founder, Bryce, worked at Lockheed Martin before Nominal and he was a aerospace engineer academically by training, but fundamentally he built interplanetary robotic systems. So he was the engineer that would design and build a robotic system that’s going to go to the atmosphere of Jupiter and collect a sample, and come back. So incredible things. You could call that physical AI long before... that thing needs to be able to make decisions and sort of operate independently. He often gives that analogy when sometimes people are saying, “Oh, what moment are we living in?”
I think of physical AI as actually building either the models or the agents that are going to help operate physical equipment. That’s my more narrow definition. So certainly Nominal is part of the physical AI moment, but had that term not been coined, I think there’s a lot of just advanced manufacturing or automation, or human machine interfaces. A lot of more basic technology that is still really, really important that people are building amazing businesses on.
And frankly, I am on one side of the camp where I think that there’s so much in that infrastructure layer that needs to get built before the real nirvana of physical AI will be realized.
Nakul:
Actually, can you double click on that? Where is that dream way ahead of engineering reality, the dream of physical AI?
Cameron McCord:
We go to so many of our customers or our potential customers in the physical world right now. They just can’t ask basic questions of their data. I think there’s low hanging fruit to do this, and it will catch up really quickly. But even being able to ask a question of the last 1,000 tests that I ran on my system, did this ever happen? Is a really hard question to answer. And so, much of it comes from the way that existing databases or tools work or even how people just store their data. The data model doesn’t liken itself well for doing that type of comparative analytics or trending.
There’s thousands of examples of that where I think tools have been built for non-hardware centric workflows. And so, we are trying to become the standard language that defines those interactions. Right now, it’s very human interaction based, but we’re already see in our product... the amount of agent calls to our APIs as an example, obviously increasingly going up. So we want to be that sort of system of record that just governs how people interact with that hardware data. And I think that’s a huge problem to solve before again, we have this nirvana of physical AI. Yeah.
Nakul:
You wrote in the letter, I think it was an internal letter around your series B. And I’m quoting, “We are in the middle of an industrial renaissance driven by physical AI, re-shored manufacturing and defense tech that demands speed and reliability.” We talked about physical AI, defense tech has been a thing, but is reshoring of manufacturing actually happening in the US?
Cameron McCord:
I think it is. It’s happening a lot slower than I think it needs to. So I think this is a delayed trend, but I think reshoring is happening in the US and globally. So people often talk about it. Nominal’s a global company. We opened an office in London. I think Europe is a really, really interesting example for reshoring. But whether you like it or not, the world is potentially one of the most dangerous and kind of fragile times in a long time. I think what that does is it is forcing lots of countries to think about their own supply chains and to onshore and prepare for their ability to scale production. It could be production of defense systems, but just productions of their own sort of critical components and things they need.
So that’s happening everywhere. The US is certainly making those investments. And I think the way that that intersects with Nominal is, as you think about building out more manufacturing capacity in the US, there’s this simple framework of when you’re building a thing for the first time, the first tier is engineering-assisted manufacturing. It is the highest quality because you literally have a person who’s spending their entire time doing it, but it is the least efficient. Then you have high-skilled technicians, low-skilled technicians in full automation.
And so, we’re seeing every one of our customers kind of walk down this journey. We’re building products to help with that transition and we do think it’s a transition again. I don’t think it’s a leap to the full automation. So-
Cameron McCord:
And we do think it’s a transition again, I don’t think it’s a leap to the full automation. So that’s happening. Jump across the ocean to Europe, and part of the reason we’re so excited to be there, certainly with a land war in Europe, which I don’t think anyone would have predicted four years ago now, what we’re seeing is, a lot of the European countries are realizing that they might want to separate the ability and reliance on the U.S. They want to build their own defense production and capacity, and so they’re onshoring a lot of these capabilities. I think Nominal fits very well in that narrative. We sort of frame ourselves as, “We’re a software platform and a tool that helps you make your own manufacturing and hardware development processes much more efficient. And we don’t care about borders or things like that. You should, UK, you should have manufacturing within your own borders if that’s what you so desire, but you should use the world’s best software to help you do that.”
Nakul:
What are the structural constraints for the U.S. to become a manufacturing powerhouse again? Because you talked about the government intent and all of that, but is trained labor even available for this to happen?
Cameron McCord:
Oh, I think one of the biggest issues is, we took our eye off the ball for multiple decades, and we outsourced all of this critical manufacturing. Talk about what it takes to build factories, and the sort of CapEx expenditures and things, that’s a tractable problem, it’s an economics problem, and it’s a difficult one. I think though, the know-how, the education, the understanding of how to build some of these systems, that is the thing that we are really suffering from.
And so there’s tons of companies, many of which are our customers, that are trying to build the future of advanced manufacturing. And so much of that is how do you work with more of the blue collar labor from training, education, onboarding? And then how do you supercharge those humans with software, and build repeatable processes where so much of it is just bespoke and manual? So I think we need to do all of this. I think Nominal, it’s a good point to emphasize, I think our product plays a role and a part of that, but really broad supply chain, if you will, but there’s so many things that have to come to bear if we’re actually going to solve that problem.
Nakul:
You referenced the Fid Labs acquisition briefly earlier in our conversation, but when you talked about the acquisition earlier in the sense that when you wrote about it, you said, “When people ask me how AI is changing hardware engineering, my honest answer is it mostly isn’t, not yet.” Why do you say that? And what needs to change on that front?
Cameron McCord:
There’s a lot of really good... And Fid is an amazing company, and we’re really excited about it. I think so much of it is the infrastructure layer is still not fully there. I think it’s one thing to present a user and experience of being able to interact with, we call it an analyst agent, but essentially, the chatbot that can help assist them through phases of their analysis. And so prompt, and kind of recommend, “Hey, you’re looking at this type of data, you might want to run this analysis.” That’s hugely valuable. I don’t consider that to be the revolutionary frontier, and so we’re going to build that, and we are.
It’s a little bit weird to have a world where customers can’t even ask basic questions of their historical data, and then sort of also be having a conversation with them about the future of, what does it look like to just plug in a piece of hardware, and run tests, and it will sort of dynamically scan and observe your system, and kind of run through that. There’s a lot that has to go between A to B. I tell the company a lot that I think what makes a legendary or a generational company, and I think I learned and saw it Applied Intuition, is the best companies are always executing on multiple, I call them epochs, time horizons, eras. And so you need to be able to hold that tension.
And for Applied, I kind of viewed them as they started with this amazing sort of modeling and simulation tooling business. That business still exists today, still is a vibrant business. And how do you go from that to being, “Hey, we want to be the onboard software for all vehicles, automotive vehicles, but just other systems, agriculture, aerial systems, things like that.” But we kind of wanted the OS, the software platform for the actual... And then the third epoch is, we want to be the physical AI company, I mean, they’re branding themselves. And we want to be autonomy, and the autonomy stack for anything that’s going to move in the world. That level of tiered ambition is really hard to help a company kind of move through. I’m not even privy to what the fourth and fifth is, but I guarantee you, Qasar and Peter have amazing vision for where that’s going.
I think for Nominal, you have to start small, and kind of frame that, but always have, like, “What are those tiers?” And I think for us, we’re this data platform that helps people with testing. We’re a tool, we’re a product that they use, and they love. How do we transition into this next epoch? Which is the source of record that I talked about, where everyone that is testing hardware, whether it’s agents, or their own vibe-coded tools, or it’s the Nominal application layer on top, is going to reference our source of truth around the data model that governs the way to just do this work, because you need some way to do it, some standardized system.
And then the third epoch is just we’re going to build all the agents, we’re already starting. The planning agent, the analyst agent, the sort of execution agent that helps you in a control room when you’re operating complex equipment, the test optimization agent. And all of those are going to sort of work as a symphony to help you, one human, maybe test hundreds or thousands of systems, and be incredibly efficient, in a world where so much of the cumbersome parts of testing go to zero. I think you have to be able to hold the company accountable to thinking on those time horizons, and not go insane when things come attention, and customer A just wants feature B on that first epoch, but you also need to think, how does that relate to the big, big vision of where the business is going.
Nakul:
That’s incredible. Yeah. Maybe talk about this other constraint in the physical world broadly, is software companies, they move at software speeds. Physical AI companies, they are constrained by physical iteration cycles, supply chains, and other aspects. How does that change your own operating tempo? I asked Qasar also this question, how do you build a fast-moving company when there are all these other constraints that are structurally slowing you down?
Cameron McCord:
I completely agree with that too. One interesting example is, we’ve been fortunate to say, for customers, it’s really for potential customers of Nominal. It’s not an if, it’s a when. And we’ve had an incredibly high percentage of customers that we might find them at a moment of time, and they’re, “Wow, Nominal’s amazing.” But I’m not really generating that much data, and it’s, “My widget is on backlog.” Or, “My bench test is on backlog.” Or, “I need to wait for this massive contract to come through before I can actually buy the...” So there is that moment. And I think what we’ve had to do is... I mean, there’s a law of numbers. Once you have so many potential customers, I think there is an art to just sequencing and understanding the moment in time when customers are ready to receive your product or your services. This is just a distribution challenge, and distribution problem.
So I think being able to train the company to be really agile in how quickly you can speed up. I mean, customers will come out of the blue and email us, and say, “Hey, we spoke five months ago. We haven’t really talked since then, but the widget came in, and I want to test it next Tuesday.” We’ve got to be able to go. And so our [inaudible 01:13:44] engineers, spin up the product, and meet that moment in time. Because if you don’t, and customers start to make decisions on how they want to go about this, you might not be able to enter yourself. So I think that’s something, is the agility there is really, really important. And then I think there’s something to be said about, I would frame it more, the level of consequence for Nominal software going wrong is really high. We are supporting live flight testing for million-dollar assets, and where humans are in the loop.
And so I think you do have to find the right areas where you push back on the move fast and break things in a mentality of software speed because the stakes are so high. And you frankly need to just build a team that has operated in those conditions. So much of the magic of Nominal is, we have folks who’ve come from maybe more traditional Silicon Valley software, like incredible high scale, huge numbers of customers, maybe consumer background, where every little feature, every little click is something that matters. And then folks that come from the SpaceX, the Anduril, the Tesla, where if the deterministic closed loop control software that you build doesn’t work, something’s exploding, or something is breaking. When those two cultures can merge, it’s... Successfully merge, it’s one of the most beautiful things ever in the product that gets built. But then finding out the pockets where there’s like tension there, and to the directness point, getting people in a room and being like, “We’ve got to hash this out.” There’s value to both of these perspectives, and we need to resolve.
Nakul:
Five years from now, what’s the conversation people are not having today in physical AI that would have mattered?
Cameron McCord:
I will underscore, I think there’s a lack of understanding over the types of decisions that... The subjective decisions that humans are making around test data all the time. I think that’s not a well enough captured phenomenon. I think when companies go out to build these types of models, there’s this arbitrage of, “How much open source robotic data can we buy on the internet so that we can put it off somewhere and train models on it?” That’s the type of mentality. Not, “Why are humans making decisions that something passes or fails when there’s incredible subjectivity?” And trying to quantify that engineering judgment. I really underscore, I think that’s difficult. That’s taste, it’s codifying taste in software. And then that is the only way I think we’re going to really pull humans out of some of the most critical loops here, and we spend a lot of time obsessing about that problem, and building a product that makes it easy for humans to impart that engineering judgment, and have it live in a place where we can then pull that off and learn from it.
Nakul:
I want to shift towards the inner game of being a founder CEO. You’ve talked about it, and we briefly talked about it. Some mariners spend months in such a unique environment. There’s no sun, there’s fluorescent lights, it’s kind of lonely. What did all of that teach you about yourself? And what gives you discomfort, what gets at you versus what you’re good at handling?
Cameron McCord:
Maybe there’s some obvious things, which is, the team often jokes, my sense of time is completely skewed. So you could often catch me... Someone having to be like, “Hey, it’s 9:00 PM. Do you know it’s 9:00 PM?” So I think the ability to think and sort of shut your brain off if you need to do a task or get something done is an easy one. But I really think maybe one of the most important things is, it is really lonely on a submarine.
And so I think I learned to talk to myself, basically, like the inner voice, the inner game. But I think you have to be comfortable with it. And I think I tried to almost train it as a muscle. The moments where you’re lonely, or you’re sad, or you’re scared, or you just feel spent, actually have an inner dialogue with yourself, and I think that you build a muscle there. And so I try and train that all the time when it’s been a long week, or that roller coaster happens where that candidate you didn’t... Being comfortable in your own head I think is so powerful, and is the biggest gift I can give to Nominal, is knowing that I’m kind of comfortable in my own head.
Nakul:
What’s in the dialogue you’re still having as a CEO of Nominal these days?
Cameron McCord:
I mean, one that I work on, where everything that can be positive, too much of it can be negative is I love... I work with exec coaches, I love that. I think I’m a work-in-progress constantly, and so my job is to level up. Some of the things that have made me really successful is, I kind of call it the maze. It’s a term that we coined to... I run my own Monte Carlo simulations, I’m constantly... And I think a lot of great... I’m constantly gaming. I’m about to talk to this big customer in five hours, what’s the 100 ways that meeting could go, and am I prepared? Is our team prepared for every possible thing? That’s really powerful for really, really high stakes things, and you’re constantly training.
But it can be really detrimental. And I think learning how to control that when you’re on an interview with a candidate, and the thing that... I say 80% of your CPU is running Monte Carlos for the big customer meeting, and you’re only 20% president for that... That’s not... So a thing that I’m constantly kind of working on is identifying when there’s diminishing returns on that, and being able to have a lot of mental self-control to sort of say, “That meeting or that thing is going to happen, and I’m fully prepared for it, and I’m going to be present in the thing right now, because this person is...” I have a one-on-one, or there’s an important meeting before that.
Nakul:
Despite the Monte Carlo simulations that you probably then also ran through in your head before starting on the founding journey, has there been something that has surprised you about being a founder CEO?
Cameron McCord:
You added the term CEO on, so I think it is lonely being a CEO. And every CEO talks about that once you get to a certain stage. There’s three co-founders of Nominal, myself, Bryce and Jason, this amazing team. I feel so lucky every day to be building Nominal with them. I always joke, in the earliest days, I think being the CEO is the least important job. Bryce was so visionary on some of the early parts of the product, and Jason was quite literally building it, and assembling the team to go build it. That changes very quickly, and I think there’s a loneliness to sort of being the person. There’s so much that I can talk about with Bryce and Jason, but I think sometimes it’s just being external, and having to find another CEO who sort of understands it and gets that. And I think that was surprising to me. It’s such a unique position to be in. So yeah, and it surprises me.
Nakul:
Is there a practice or a ritual you’ve carried from your earlier stints that help you on this journey?
Cameron McCord:
I think a lot of forced reflection. My routine Saturday morning often is the best deep thinking time, and I think it’s really easy to always be looking forward, and that’s a really healthy perspective to have, but a simple ritual I think is just, Saturday mornings, reflecting on the past week. I don’t know, reviewing the week, and maybe even the calendar, but on a different axis. Not the tactical, like, “Was that meeting... Was it successful? Did I cover all the action items? The follow-ups?” Those types of things. But taking a moment to think through and rewind that day, and have an inner conversation around, like, “Would I have done things differently? Would I have changed anything?” And I think that’s a really, really healthy perspective, because the motion of the company moves so quickly that you can find yourself spending a ton of time not improving in a certain area, because you’re not spending the time to introspect on it.
Nakul:
I wonder if you might not be giving yourself credit enough on just stress management, in the sense that you might just be much more trained to forget a bad moment and move on to the next moment. I’m speculating and asking here. Is that true? You have amnesia for the bad moment so that you can power on versus that lingering on and bogging you down to make the next move?
Cameron McCord:
I think there’s probably parts of that that are true. The captain I had on the submarine, someone I looked up to and learned a lot from, he used to always say... Very simple, but he used to say, “Stress is the body preparing you for greatness.” We all know that your mouth, your heart rate kind of jumps up a little bit, but I really think I’ve tried to warp my perception of what is a bad moment, or what is something that was stressful, and sort of really just frame it as, “I am stressed, I’m anxious because my body physiologically just knows that this is high stakes. But this is the game.”
And so I think, really, you can sort of shift your mindset into being, like, “Yep, I’m getting ready for a moment today that is... It’s going to be important. It’s going to be critical for Nominal, but I’m prepared for it.” Because we all have those moments where you jump into something, and you maybe feel underprepared, or you’re not ready to go. And frankly, as a founder, it happens all the time, because so much is happening in a given week. But I think that’s been a really helpful reframing.
Nakul:
All right. Next up is our quick fire round. You ready?
Cameron McCord:
I’m ready.
Nakul:
Okay. Best military movie?
Cameron McCord:
The Hunt for Red October.
Nakul:
Best book on leadership you’ve ever read?
Cameron McCord:
I actually really love Seven Habits of Highly Affected People. Yeah, I actually really have found that book... People reference it all the time, but I think that is a really good one on leadership.
Nakul:
One Anduril practice that you’ve directly imported into Nominal?
Cameron McCord:
Closing bell. This was a term coined by a really amazing early product leader at Anduril, but it basically is, before any major feature release, getting the representative group together, particularly someone who has customer empathy, and kind of running through the full workflow. And I always go to those closing bells. And I think it was just this really good practice of, “If we’re going to release something major in the product, everyone would watch it have a closing bell.”
Nakul:
Favorite Nominal office between LA, Austin, New York, D.C., and London?
Cameron McCord:
Yeah, I’m biased. I have to say LA. We have really good inner office rivalry. But I will say, we did a poll, because the business is growing so quickly in London that we need engineers to go out and support that. And it’s been amazing how quickly people will raise their hand to go do a two-week, three-week, month-long stint in the London office, especially this time of year. So London’s definitely... The stock is rising quickly.
Nakul:
One word your team would describe you as in a high stakes meeting?
Cameron McCord:
Strategic.
Nakul:
All right, closing question. You’ve seen the military, government, some of the fastest rising startups, you’ve been the founder yourself. If the 25-year-old Cameron comes to you today and says, “I want to have high impact in the world.” What would be your advice to him?
Cameron McCord:
I think the biggest and most interesting problems are multidisciplinary. That’s like the stuff I care about, things with proximity to mission and service. And so I think I would urge 25-year-old Cameron, or anyone, to think about, for real things to change, I think there is a lot of... There’s public, there’s private, there’s government is involved, there’s technology, there’s things to learn from startups, things to learn from non-startup cultures. The blending of that I think is part of the greatness.
Nakul:
So just experience a lot of that?
Cameron McCord:
Exactly. Yes. Yeah, to experience a lot of that. I think there’s this urge, I think, to rush into entrepreneurship, because so much of it is time is money, and time is pace and learning. I often urge people to get a bunch of different perspectives on a problem, like be able to look at it from a bunch of different angles with some real experience, and it will pay huge dividends when you’re in the moment going through the company, being able to lean on, “Well, actually, I’ve experienced that a different way.” Or, “I’ve learned that from a different angle.”
Nakul:
Cameron, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on.
Cameron McCord:
Thank you. This was great.
