Intro
On November 9, Nominal announced a $240 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by Insight Partners. Previous investors include Founders Fund, XYZ Venture Capital, Lux Capital, General Catalyst and Redglass Ventures. I sat down with Cameron McCord, Cofounder and CEO of Nominal to discuss the origins of the company, lessons from his time in venture capital and what being underwater for over 400 days taught him about leadership.
A test can produce sensor readings, video, and logs. If those live in separate tools and the analysis runs on one engineer’s laptop, the rest of the team has to reconstruct what happened before it can decide what to try next. Nominal started by bringing that evidence together so engineers could compare runs and make decisions from the same data. Cameron and I talked about why he chose testing as the starting point, what happens when suppliers still exchange specs as PDFs, and where AI agents can help once the data is accessible.
Cameron spent 484 days underwater over the course of his Navy service. He told me that on a submarine, there’s no room to let a disagreement go unspoken: you live and work alongside the same people, and you still have a job to do together. That experience helps explain how he thinks about direct feedback at Nominal, and why he sometimes gets personally involved in a problem instead of creating a new process for it.
What we cover
Why faster hardware development depends on learning more from each test.
How Nominal used a narrow starting point and early design partners to build its product.
What makes industrial software hard to adopt, from supplier PDFs to factories that can’t simply move to the cloud.
How word of mouth and founder-led sales build trust in a market where customers know one another.
What submarine service taught Cameron about handling disagreement and leading a growing team.
Watch on YouTube
Chapters
00:00 What submarines and startups have in common
00:34 Meet Cameron McCord
01:10 What Nominal does
04:06 Why hardware test data gets stuck on laptops
06:17 The PDFs that still run industrial supply chains
11:07 Why factories can’t simply move to the cloud
16:09 Starting with a narrow problem
18:52 Learning from the first design partners
23:19 Building for commercial and government customers
29:42 AI and the problem of passing on engineering knowledge
31:09 How Nominal built its brand
36:42 Getting engineers to spread the word
43:39 Making bets on different timelines
47:20 How culture changes as the team grows
50:47 When a founder should step in
54:48 What 484 days underwater taught Cameron
58:24 Why you have to surface disagreements
1:01:29 Choosing to become a founder
1:03:41 What Cameron learned at early Anduril
1:09:16 Why trust matters in enterprise sales
1:12:36 Where Cameron changed his mind about using AI
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