McCord: Hardware development is shifting to tight continuous iteration pioneered by SpaceX
Cameron McCord · Sequoia Leads $75M Series B Into Nominal | Alfred Lin Joins Board · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Jun 12, 2025 · at 15:52
Cameron McCord, CEO of Nominal, explains the macro shift in hardware engineering from static waterfall production toward continuous iterative cycles.
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“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 manufacturer, 10, a hundred, a thousand, a million of those. Sometimes you won't even do it. You will just outsource it to someone else to do it. And the world is very much like Steven mentioned SpaceX, but even now Anderil and other places have sort of Tesla flipped that paradigm where the power in hardware development just comes from like how tightly you can iterate between those two things.”
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