Slattery: SpaceX has invested millions into custom internal software toolchains
Stephen Slattery · Sequoia Leads $75M Series B Into Nominal | Alfred Lin Joins Board · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Jun 12, 2025 · at 13:06
Stephen Slattery, an early employee at Nominal, reflects on the differences in internal software tooling between SpaceX, Sierra Space, and Anduril.
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“Going to SpaceX, they've invested millions in their tool chain, everything from ERP to fleet management. To data analysis, obviously.”
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“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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“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…”
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“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.
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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…”
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