How Nominal Turned the Pentagon’s Slowest Gate Into a Growth Engine
Featuring Cameron McCord, CEO and co-founder of Nominal
About Cameron
Cameron McCord has seen the defense ecosystem from more seats than most. He started his career as a young submarine officer, operating, in his words, with “the best of 1980s technology” and learning what it feels like to be beholden to antiquated tech when the mission is on the line. He carried that frustration into operating roles at Anduril and Saildrone, where he watched fast-growing hardware companies scale and saw the same testing problem appear at every one of them. Then he went to Lux Capital, where he saw the same pain across a thousand more companies and turned a hunch into a thesis.
Today, that thesis is a company called Nominal, one of the fastest growing, well-capitalized, and highly touted defense tech companies in the industry.
About Nominal
Nominal is a software and data platform for hardware testing operations. The hardware test market is a bit anathema for us non-technical folks. But the reality is, anyone who builds anything in the real world, whether for a commercial market or the warfighter, has to test and validate it. Until recently, that was mostly done via spreadsheets, MATLAB scripts, and hard-to-reach data. Nominal took many of the processes that befuddle founders and seasoned executives alike, and automated them. The company was incubated at Lux Capital. They intended to serve both commercial and defense customers from day one. And they’ve been on a tear, recently announcing a sole-source $53 million IDIQ for the Air Force Test Center. Today, Nominal is active in the Navy at Pax River, developed partnerships with MIT, and has some exciting news with DARPA.
What follows are the five ideas from this conversation worth stealing.
1. It’s time to stop arguing about “speed versus quality” and just make risk a number instead.
Today, when a program wants to put a new weapon on an old aircraft, the default answer is to rerun the same three thousand test points, because in the absence of better information, nobody can defend doing less. That takes three years, sometimes five, at a couple million dollars per sortie.
Cam’s vision is to replace that with a single, defensible number. Imagine a program manager opening Nominal and seeing that a weapon system is at TRL 8.45 today, backed by every individual data point, every packet of telemetry, every log behind it. Run next week’s tests, burn down four or five test points, and the platform projects you to 8.72. At which point a leader can look at the cost of chasing the last fraction and decide it is not worth it.
The ability to quantify how much risk you are actually retiring with each test unlocks a totally different decision calculus in the boardroom, in the Pentagon, and on Wall Street. The job becomes eliminating, with maximum rigor, the test points you can prove you no longer need.
2. The customer who criticizes you is sometimes worth more than the one who loves you.
We all want to be loved. But in the early days of Nominal, Cam learned to chase the opposite. The most valuable champion in Nominal’s early life was a Brigadier General who would send long, direct emails laying out exactly where the product was falling short.
That feedback became the company’s product roadmap.
Though they found themselves having to go through a crash-course in aerodynamics and modeling to speak their customer’s language, the early Nomineers benefitted immensely from finding someone who cared enough to tell them when they were wrong.
As the old saying goes, the opposite of love is not hate, but ambivalence.
This has been a recurring theme among valley crossers: “The worst thing that can happen is you get death by yes. You just keep getting told it’s great, yes, and then you kind of look and you’re like, no, like no one’s using this. They’re just saying yes to the PowerPoint.”
The definition of a champion is someone willing to try, and who cares enough to tell you the truth.
3. Slowing down is death in venture-backed defense.
Cameron has a specific warning for the wave of veteran founders entering defense tech. The exact discipline that makes operators excellent, their ability to quantify and manage risk, becomes a liability when it turns into taking endless baby steps.
“Pretty much every time I have convinced myself into slowing down at Nominal, I’ve kind of regretted it.”
Cam occasionally found himself talking himself into pushing a raise or a decision off two or three months, then watching how fast a performing business actually moves and wishing he hadn’t waited.
NOTE // caveat emptor: not every defense business is a venture-scale business, and the reverse is just as dangerous. The skill is not simply “going fast” but knowing the market, understanding the opportunity cost, and building the kind of business that attracts the kind of movement you need to be successful.
4. If you stumble into dual-use, you have already lost.
“I generally think if you stumble into a dual-use business, it’s probably a bad idea.”
Nominal was architected to serve commercial and government customers from day zero, because the decision shapes everything from how you build the product, to how you sell, to how you handle feedback.
Although “dual use” continues to be a hot investable category, it’s pretty precarious on the inside. What happens when the systems get out of whack? When commercial customers flood you with feedback, feature requests, and bug reports as usage starts to grow? In an accidental dual use company, that may mean pulling resources from the federal side, and delaying growth.
A company architected for day one dual use must build to survive that asymmetry.
For Nominal, the strategy was to start small, narrow, and focused, to build to the bigger vision. Nominal’s first government work was a small Phase I SBIR with the Air Force Test Pilot School. They knew that this institution that was never going to be a massive revenue source. But they solved one very narrow, very real problem, turning students who spent ninety percent of their time as data engineers into students spending ninety percent of their time as test pilots. And that single, specific win became the foundation for a $53 million enterprise deal.
5. If you make the requirement testable, the competition runs itself (much more effectively).
As we’ve seen in recent months, defense acquisition is (finally) moving away from the white paper. Programs like Drone Dominance and the hypersonics effort from the Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) and T-REX, to name a few, are putting vendors on the range and asking blunt questions that are answered by performance.
Cam (like many of us) is bullish on this shift, and Nominal has a particular vision for how this will play out.
Challenge-based acquisition is great, but there’s a way to go even faster than getting every company out to a range. Let’s say you have five vendors competing for the same contract. They all say they can do the thing. They show up with data to “prove it” - but it’s in different formats, using different metrics, and they each have a different way of describing their performance. Short of architecting an exercise (which remains a bit more time intensive), the government still has to figure out who is actually telling the truth. If you can’t wrangle all the engineering data into something comparable, that final decision still gets made with a surprising amount of subjectivity.
Cam’s answer is to make the requirement itself measurable before anyone competes. The government writes down what it wants a system to do, and that requirement gets translated into a concrete set of outputs: workbooks, checklists, defined test points. He calls it digitizing the Design Reference Mission.
It’s a vision worth keeping an eye on.
After speaking time with Cam, I left convinced that Nominal really is going after the single biggest (remaining) roadblock to meaningful acquisition reform. If we don’t solve test, we cannot meaningfully shrink the divide between cool ideas in R&D and capabilities that are validated and safe to deploy. If we’re entering a tech boom cycle (and if you’re even a slightly AI-pilled reader, it’s not hard to imagine that we are), then the need to quantify risk, readiness, and the value of a test (especially one you can skip) becomes a whole lot clearer. Cameron’s whole approach is a bet that the way across the valley of death is not to test less or test faster in a vacuum, but to finally be able to prove, with data, exactly how much testing is enough.
For more on Nominal: LinkedIn | Website | X
For more Crossing the Valley: valleycrossers.com | YouTube
