Cameron McCord
Co-Founder and CEO, Nominal. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperatorinvestorLinkedIn ↗nominal.io ↗
Cameron McCord leads Nominal, a software and data infrastructure platform built to modernize hardware test, evaluation, and validation across defense and aerospace systems. A former U.S. Navy submarine officer, he held operating roles at Anduril Industries, Saildrone, and Applied Intuition, and incubated Nominal during his time at Lux Capital.
1shows
1appearances
21statements
4resolved
3supported
0contradicted
75%fully supported
Everything Cameron McCord said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
McCord: Government AI predictive maintenance claims are largely 'false goods'
“On the government side specifically, I think there's been a lot of like false goods that have been sold, predictive maintenance, prognostic, you know, type things that when you actually get down to it, like the data, the telemetry and the sensor data and the l…”
McCord: Not enough defense program cuts for startups to win big programs
“When I look at the sort of overall budgetary picture, like there's just not, there's not a enough. Of these big program cuts, I think for all of the amazing new companies building out there to like really get the big program or record wins that they want over …”
McCord: Traditional primes do things no defense startup can do
“The primes play a like really key role in national defense. They have resources, they have capabilities. They can do things frankly, that. You know, and say essentially no other startup can do. And so we need to treat them accordingly in that way.”
McCord: Legacy Tools Like MATLAB and National Instruments Fail Modern Hardware Testing
“Scenario A, where you would use really old outdated software. Things like win plot people know, but a lot of MATLAB has used Python analysis, Python scripts, some of the national instruments, you know, tools, things like that to do modern test engineering. And…”
McCord: Software tools like Datadog and Grafana fail hardware testing
“Or you know, have modern technologies that were generally built in a software only world with like no consideration for hardware limitations or constraints. And so you might have new technologies like people use Tableau, right? Or like Looker or Grafana or Dat…”
McCord: Every deployed vehicle and drone is fundamentally a test asset
“Every asset, every drone, every plane, every, ah, you know, ground vehicle, every UUV is a test asset. Fundamentally, it's generating, you know, telemetry sensor data logs, just like you would a hardware in the loop, you know, test stand, or a test cell, or a …”
McCord: DoD is compressing hardware development lifecycles to 24 months
“The DoD is like shifting the way that it's thinking about a lot of these larger programs, trying to get away from 10, 12, 20 year program development life cycles. Like let's build the next exquisite, you know, bomber or exquisite plane or submarine. Right. Tho…”
McCord: Legacy software from National Instruments and Siemens has low NPS
“National instruments, lab use Siemens, you know, massive software, industrial software conglomerates that I've had, you know, billion dollar businesses here for decades. Generally there's like a very low NPS for those products. Like people don't like them. The…”
McCord: Sequoia and Lightspeed co-led Nominal's Series B, Alfred Lin joined board
“The round series B led by Sequoia specifically Alfred Lynn is a partner there who will be joining nominal board. We're super excited about that. And the round is also co-led by Lightspeed venture partners.”
McCord: Sequoia spoke to 100% of Nominal's customers during Series B diligence
“In our case, like they, I think the Sequoia team spoke to, I think a hundred percent. I think they spoke to every customer of ours which was amazing.”
McCord: Hardware development is shifting to tight continuous iteration pioneered by SpaceX
“The world is moving from this like type one hardware development where you will work really hard. You'll iterate on a prototype or a design of something, a widget, a machine, and then you will sort of set that design. You'll lock it and you will print manufact…”
McCord: DoD programs conduct significant unnecessary hardware re-testing
“What we see is like, there's a lot of retests that happens that probably doesn't need to happen.”
McCord: Nominal is the de facto flight testing software for Shield AI's V-BAT
“They nominal is sort of, you know, become kind of a de facto piece of software for experimental flight tests, developmental flight tests how they're going about iterating on, you know, the V bat.”
McCord: Nominal uses the exact same software for commercial and federal customers
“The exact same product serves commercial and federal customers. So there's like zero differentiation with other core connect there.”
McCord: Enterprise and dual-use sales require simultaneous bottom-up and executive alignment
“Building the technical alignment in base case with end users is like a thing you always have to do. And then being able to have this sort of like executive level alignment over what values actually being delivered, you know, if something like nominal is adopte…”
McCord: Nominal signed Series B term sheet 10 days after starting pitches
“It honestly, from starting the yeah, from starting sort of formal, you know, pitches and conversations to signing a term, she was about 10 days.”
McCord: Nominal reduces engineering data review from 24 hours to under 10 minutes
“Things that used to take 24 hours taking, like, under 10 minutes, right? And so, like, When you stack up those processes in an individual engineering layer, like it used to take me 24 hours to just get to look at this piece of data, and now it's 10 minutes.”
McCord: Nominal created 10-page investor RFI responses overnight
“We would put together 10 page responses overnight.”
McCord: Applied Intuition had 18 of the top 20 automotive OEMs as customers
“I, you know, and I worked at applied intuition. They had this incredible Slogan that I think it was just, you know, 18 of the top 20 automotive OEMs in their case, you know, trusted applied intuition, used applied intuition, like crazy stat. They literally had…”
McCord: General Catalyst's Paul Kwan led Nominal's Series A about 18 months ago
“We were lucky to have a pretty fast Series A process as well that was led by General Catalyst, Paul Kwan. That was you know, about a year and a half ago now.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Cameron's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 SOURCERYLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Nominal | 1 | 21 | 75% 3/4 | full record on Sourcery → |