Startup lessons Silicon Valley won’t teach you
Cameron McCord · Co-founder & CEO, Nominal
Cameron McCord spent 484 days underwater. As a submarine officer in the US Navy, he learned to run a reactor in a space where the crew sees you 24/7, even brushing your teeth, and where there is no “later” to sort out a disagreement. He still calls the Navy the single biggest influence on how he leads. After the submarine came Capitol Hill as a Navy congressional liaison, then early Anduril, then Saildrone, then a stint in venture at Lux Capital. Each one was a deliberate move toward starting a company.
That company is Nominal, a connected software suite that is changing how the world tests and operates hardware. Three years in, Nominal is valued at $1 billion, has raised $155 million in ten months, and counts four of the five largest defense contractors as customers. The team has grown from around 40 people to 170 in a year, across offices in LA, Austin, New York, DC, and now London.
In this conversation, Cameron walks through the operating playbook underneath that growth. Why he still interviews everyone and looks for people who are “three layers deep.” What it means to “earn the right to stand the night watch.” How he imports intentional ambiguity from early Anduril and a critique culture from the submarine. And where physical AI is actually going.
Cameron McCord is the co-founder and CEO of Nominal, a software platform for testing and validating hardware systems, founded in 2022 and valued at $1 billion. The company has raised over $180 million in total. Nominal serves aerospace, defense, automotive, and energy customers, including four of the five largest US defense prime contractors, and in 2026 made its first acquisition, Fid Labs, to bring AI agents to hardware engineering. Before Nominal, McCord served as a US Navy nuclear submarine officer and then as a Navy congressional liaison, and held roles at Anduril, Saildrone, and Lux Capital. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
The most quotable moments from Cameron McCord
A lot of founders and CEOs are performing. They act a certain way in front of parts of their company, and then that's not really who they are. Earnestness in leadership, just being yourself, is incredibly valuable.
You earn the right to stand the night watch. The biggest gift in recruiting is finding people who are fit to stand it: quiet operators who can take any ambiguity and make all the right decisions while you're away.
The journey of a company is you have to find product-market fit every three months. It's not one-and-done. So how do you build a culture that's willing to throw a big portion of what you've built away when you learn something new?
Silicon Valley is built around structured bets: here's a thesis, here's the resourcing, here's the kill criteria. The willingness to turn things off is something the military could learn.
We want people who are three layers deep. You keep asking why, and you realize the thing that motivates them is a chip on their shoulder. Those are the people who last when business gets tough.
Being comfortable in your own head is the biggest gift I can give to Nominal. On the submarine you're lonely, so I learned to have an inner dialogue in the moments where you're scared or spent, and I trained that like a muscle.
Stress is the body preparing you for greatness. I reframe a stressful moment: I'm anxious because physiologically my body knows this is high stakes. But this is the game.