Stephen Slattery of Nominal explains to Molly O'Shea why hardware testing software can now scale horizontally across previously fragmented industrial sectors.
“One of the things that's made nominal possible now, or say three years ago, is that there is this crunch happening across all of these disparate industries in terms of the data types that they are using.
Where, 20 years ago, if we were going in and trying to integrate nominal, either connect or core,
At N different companies, we'd be looking at N different potential data integrations because everything was so bespoke.
But as everybody's migrating to more common data models, and you have also this diaspora of SpaceX and role engineers going out into the world and bringing these best practices to industries like nuclear, like maritime we can go and plug into these, you know, previously fairly unique workflows in an equitable amount of time.
And then everything downstream from that also looks quite similar.
The data management problems are the same.
The analysis problems are largely the same across industries.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
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More from Stephen Slattery
Opinion
Slattery: Nominal's early team surpassed engineering groups at SpaceX and Anduril
“Meeting the initial folks at Nominal, it was evident from those conversations that this team was above and beyond even those groups I had worked with at Andrel and at SpaceX, so that was extremely exciting.”
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AssertionNot checkable as stated
Slattery: SpaceX always checks to buy before deciding to build
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Insight
Slattery: Custom hardware toolchains rarely generalize to subsequent product lines
“They might have built a tool chain that worked very well for product one, but almost always what we're seeing is that it's typically over tailored to that system in terms of the data types it supports, the analysis workflows, how commoditized it is. And then t…”
Stephen SlatteryJun 12, 2025▶ 29:34Sequoia Leads $75M Series B Into Nominal | Alfred Lin Joins Board · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Insight
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“What we're seeing, you know, maritime, nuclear, aerospace, is that we're not getting bombarded with a million different maritime-specific feature requests. Right. We're seeing a lot of commonality across these industries. Folks want the same answers. They want…”
Stephen SlatteryJun 12, 2025▶ 58:58Sequoia Leads $75M Series B Into Nominal | Alfred Lin Joins Board · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Slattery: SpaceX has invested millions into custom internal software toolchains
“Going to SpaceX, they've invested millions in their tool chain, everything from ERP to fleet management. To data analysis, obviously.”
Stephen SlatteryJun 12, 2025▶ 13:06Sequoia Leads $75M Series B Into Nominal | Alfred Lin Joins Board · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
“Once you find that vendor, the next thing that happens is testing. If I'm, you know, previously was buying my brushless motor from China, and now I'm gonna buy it from a US vendor or a Czech vendor, whoever it might be, that is a test campaign that needs to go…”
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