Crossing the Valley · 2026-06-03 · 47 min
How Nominal Turned the Pentagon’s Slowest Gate Into a Growth Engine Featuring Cameron McCord, CEO and co-founder of Nominal About Cameron Cameron McCord has seen the defense ecosystem from more seats than most. He started his career as a young submarine officer, operating, in his words, with “the best of 1980s technology” and learning what it feels like to be beholden to antiquated tech when the mission is on the line. He carried that frustration into operating roles at Anduril and Saildrone, where he watched fast-growing hardware companies scale and saw the same testing problem appear at every one of them. Then he went to Lux Capital, where he saw the same pain across a thousand more companies and turned a hunch into a thesis. Today, that thesis is a company called Nominal, one of the fastest growing, well-capitalized, and highly touted defense tech companies in the industry. About Nominal Nominal is a software and data platform for hardware testing operations. The hardware test market is a bit anathema for us non-technical folks. But the reality is, anyone who builds anything in the real world, whether for a commercial market or the warfighter, has to test and validate it.
