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From Submariner to CEO: Cameron McCord's Journey Building Nominal
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In this episode of Building the Base, Hondo Geurts and Lauren Bedula reconnect with Cameron McCord, Co-Founder and CEO of Nominal, two years after his first appearance on the show (linked here). Drawing from his unique journey from submarine officer (484 days underwater) to defense tech entrepreneur, McCord discusses building software to accelerate testing and validation of mission-critical systems. He shares insights from his time at Anduril, Applied Intuition, and Saildrone, and how these experiences shaped Nominal's approach to modernizing test and evaluation processes. The episode concludes with exciting news that Nominal recently announced a $75 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital and co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Five key takeaways from today's episode:
- Entrepreneurial success, according to McCord, requires falling in love with the process itself rather than just the initial idea, as markets, technology, and competition will force constant adaptation and iteration throughout the journey.
- Testing and validation software in defense hasn't been meaningfully innovated in decades, McCord explains, creating massive opportunities to modernize from "2002 to 2019" standards using basic automation and data practices before advancing to AI capabilities.
- The most valuable customer conversations, McCord notes, evolve from incremental efficiency gains at the engineer level to strategic business impact discussions about reducing 24-month test campaigns to 18-20 months for major defense programs.
- Rather than leading with confidence, McCord advises asking genuine questions to allow customers to reveal what's truly valuable to them, while learning when to say "not right now" instead of forcing poor fits often leads to higher revisit rates.
- Cross-functional experience across military service, government, startups, and venture capital has provided McCord with invaluable perspective for navigating complex stakeholder environments and understanding what success looks like from multiple viewpoints.
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