CameronMcCord

LubaCameron, thank you so much for being on the show.Link

CameronThank you for having me.Link

LubaCongratulations on the Series C. Super exciting. Really exciting news. How do you feel?Link

CameronGood. I mean, we seem to be in a pattern of not having to really go out to fundraise, which is a good place to be.Link

LubaThat is a great pattern to find yourself in.Link

CameronYeah. And so I think, I mean, the market's really good right now, and we have a lot of big ambitions. So it made sense to bring in more capital and continue to partner with folks. So yeah, we're feeling really good.Link

LubaYou have a really fascinating background, which we're going to get into in a bit. I want to start with Nominal. Tell me, what is Nominal and what is it not?Link

CameronOh, I love that question. So we build a hardware intelligence platform. Basically, we're handling a lot of the plumbing, as I call it, that organizations that build and test and validate hardware need: all the infrastructure they'd otherwise have to build to make their systems work.Link

The intelligence aspect comes in because we have more and more agent workflows. Things that a structures engineer or a thermal engineer or a mechanical engineer used to do very manually, with sort of antiquated software, we're helping them do first in an automated manner, and now by building agents that they can train to do those tasks better, faster, cheaper.Link

LubaAnd what is it not?Link

CameronWe're not a simulation company. In the physical AI space, there are a lot of companies that produce models and simulation. It's a really hard problem, and a really important one. We ingest the outputs of those products, but we don't do that in a first-class way yet.Link

The other thing we're not is an observability platform. When we started out, an easy way to explain what Nominal was doing was to say we're kind of like Datadog, but for hardware. And there are a lot of analogies there. But as we matured the product, there are a lot of areas where that doesn't fully hold. People think of observability and monitoring. We have capabilities that do that, but we're so much more than that.Link

LubaAnd for someone who's not familiar with the hardware world, with what's actually happening in manufacturing and defense, who exactly are the customers you're serving, and what are some use cases people might be familiar with?Link

CameronAbsolutely. We serve any company that builds a sufficiently complicated hardware product. I always say you probably wouldn't use Nominal if you were testing your Roomba, but you would if you're building a jet, a rocket, a satellite, or running a very intensive manufacturing plant. Systems that generate a lot of telemetry and have a lot of different engineering functions that have to be on the same sheet of music. That's a prime fit for Nominal.Link

To make it a little more specific, we work with a lot of companies in aerospace and defense. So if you're going to build and test and validate and certify a new drone, which is very popular these days, that process requires a ton of testing. The drone generates hundreds, sometimes thousands, of channels of data. Nominal is really purpose-built for that kind of workflow. We can aggregate all the data coming off the drone and present it back to humans, and now agents, in a really digestible format, and help them review that data and ultimately come to conclusions: that the system works, that it's ready to go to the customer. It's really about validation.Link

LubaYou mentioned that Nominal is not a simulation company. And one thing I've heard you say is that physics gets involved. You can simulate all you want in the digital world, but we still need to test products in the real world and monitor that data to understand how different edge cases will perform. What do people who build just software misunderstand about the physical world and data?Link

CameronThere are a couple of things. I think the biggest one is just how brittle the physical world is. If you're building software, you can assume with reasonable confidence that if you code a function, a command, or have Claude do something for you, it's going to work every time. It should be very deterministic, repeatable. But in the hardware world you can do all of that and physics still gets in the way. Sometimes the tolerances of two mechanical parts are just off, so every 100,000th instance something goes wrong. Or the electrons are acting sporadically, or the voltage is just off slightly. What people don't really get is that stuff happens all the time, so testing and validating is really, really important.Link

The other thing is that it's very much a solved problem today to test and validate software. So many companies have been built to tackle that. But it's very different in hardware. I learned very early, working on hardware teams at Anduril, how many different engineers and how many different functions all need to come together. There's no such thing as creating a hardware product branch. That doesn't really exist.Link

LubaWhy is that?Link

CameronEvery time you create a branch, it's very difficult to parallel-path and work on those things. There are so many interdependencies. Companies like SpaceX and Tesla have a lot more cost, a lot more people on testing. Everything is so expensive. So what that did in the hardware industry is that so many functions were, by default, single player, as I call it. You'd federate out a bunch of different tasks, and engineers would work in single player, doing their specific function with their specific data, and then they'd come back at a design review. These are big meetings where everyone presents the thing they did, and you have to mash it all up. That's obviously how it's been done, but it's very different from how modern software is built and shipped.Link

So one of the big things Nominal does for our customers is bring collaboration to hardware development. I think there are a lot of analogies to what it looked like when Figma changed the way people design. The beauty of having people in different functions actually be able to collaborate and understand what's happening in other interdisciplinary functions is something we're kind of first bringing to this industry.Link

LubaSo what has happened in the world that now makes that possible? Why are you and some other people in the industry thinking about that collaborative world, when it wasn't happening ten years ago?Link

CameronA good piece of it is that there's a lot of really hard infrastructure that sits below the surface. I describe Nominal as an iceberg. At the top, above the waterline, there are the visualizations and the application layer. It's pretty, it's aesthetic. Most of the tools in hardware are not aesthetic. It's an afterthought. And engineers feel like they're getting attention like that, because people are building something that's so important. But only a tiny bit is above the waterline.Link

So much of what we've built over the last four years is really, really complicated infrastructure. It's no one single thing, technically. We're a combination of doing 10, 20, 50 things extremely hard from an infrastructure perspective. The rates of data, the frequency of telemetry we have to handle. When you're dealing with a rocket engine or a fusion reactor, it's very different from other technologies built for monitoring telemetry for servers or, as we said, for applications. So we had to build a ton of very specific, fit-for-purpose capabilities for the hardware world. And it turns out that when you stitch all that together, it's very differentiated.Link

LubaAnd then you can build the beautiful, aesthetic piece of it.Link

CameronExactly.Link

LubaAnother thing I've heard you say, and this is something Alex Karp talks about famously in his book, is that for 20 years people were building unserious software. SaaS apps, consumer apps, which is all obviously great and needed and useful. But what has it cost us that so much talent went into that and not into the physical world of hardware and defense?Link

CameronI think we had two decades lost, essentially, in terms of building software for the physical world. The positive side of that right now is that the gradient is extremely steep, because there's so much to catch up on. I often describe our first maybe two years of the company as bringing the industry from early-2000s technology into 2022 technology. We still, frankly, do that with so many of our legacy customers, who've existed for 20, 40, sometimes 60 years, on their digital modernization efforts. The first part was getting people to that 2022 era, and we had to do that because no one had been building for this serious industry. But now we have the opportunity to take the industry from 2022 to 2027 and into the future. That's the really exciting part.Link

To summarize, there's so much happening, and it's really fun. It's also very complicated to run the business, because we have to run a bunch of different things in parallel. We have a ton of engineering efforts where you might look at them and say, wait, why are you doing so many things? Isn't that a solved problem? In some other markets and industries it might be, but that capability doesn't exist here. And it's very foundational to being able to bring this agent future to our customers. If we can do that at scale, I think we'll have a massive impact.Link

LubaSpeaking of an agentic future, AI is now moving from our screens into robotics and manufacturing. What are people missing about that shift?Link

CameronI have a really strong opinion here. I don't think it's necessarily different from what some people think, but based on the journey we've had with our customers, I really believe humans are going to play a really important part in this transition, far longer than they will in other industries.Link

We compare ourselves, in a very positive way, to companies like Harvey or Legora in the legal industry, or OpenEvidence. They've solved really hard problems where there's a ton of human manual labor, a data problem, and an agent opportunity. What makes hardware a little different is how much engineering judgment is involved. That's a term that's used a lot. When you describe what an engineer does, well, why do you have to have a PhD? Engineering taste. It really is. So many of the decisions that get made when someone's building a rocket engine aren't just "is the telemetry below a certain numerical threshold?" That's easy. That's just data science, and you can do it at scale. A lot of it is, have I seen this phenomenon anywhere else in my data? And that's very human.Link

So one way I describe Nominal today, and I was just telling our team about this, is that we're going to be an agent-authoring experience. What does it look like for human engineers to perform their work and author what an agent does, in a way that builds really high trust and confidence? Because, to your earlier question about what makes building software for the physical world different, the stakes are really high. People get hurt. Things blow up. Safety, reliability, mission criticality are so different. So I think humans are going to play a really key role here. We think about designing a platform for both humans and agents to operate in the same engineering town hall, at enterprise scale.Link

LubaFor some reason I imagine a room where people are sitting and making decisions, and agents in some sort of physical representation are also sitting in there.Link

CameronThat is honestly a really helpful way to put it. Our main agent is called Analyst, and it's really cool to see our customers entrust it with more and more work. But I absolutely think that's right. You talk about a design review, getting 10, 20, 30 engineers in a room to say, does my drone work? What did we accomplish this week? I love that personification of ten of those people being agents and contributing to that function.Link

LubaAnd it also makes me think of what you said about the physical world broadly, that there's so much unpredictability. Before we've collected all this data from the physical world, and before robotics is at a place where AI has human eyes in the physical world and can see what's happening, human judgment is going to be super important.Link

CameronAbsolutely. I really do believe that, for so many of these mission-critical areas where you need certification and validation. To break that down a little more, many of our customers have to submit their products to some external regulatory agency. It could be the Department of War, in the defense case. It could be the FAA, in an aviation case. It could be any body that governs consumer electronics. So we think a lot about how to build Nominal in a way that can empower and meet those extremely high regulatory and validation guidelines.Link

If you build that way, it's a little different from the more haphazard robotics tinkering and hobbyist use cases, where people are doing incredible things with model development and training. But those systems are fundamentally still very unreliable. There's a lot that needs to happen before that body of work will match the level of precision our customers, at least currently, demand.Link

LubaLet's briefly talk about defense tech.Link

CameronI wouldn't put Nominal exactly in the defense tech category.Link

LubaI think you guys have been kind of roped into defense tech as the hot thing, but obviously it's convenient when it's convenient.Link

CameronYes, exactly.Link

LubaSpeaking of convenient when it's convenient, defense tech is super hot right now. One of your lead investors, Trae Stephens, said that the music is only going to play for so long. What happens to Nominal when the music stops?Link

CameronIt's a good question. It's one I ask myself a lot, and I think any good founder in this industry should. I really think of us as a pickaxe-and-shovel business, frankly, amongst multiple gold rushes. We have a defense tech boom, which I think the music will eventually stop on. We have a physical AI boom, and even more of a traditional industrialization boom. All those things are colliding at once, and our customers are in that entire ecosystem.Link

We're very mindful that not all of the customers we serve today might exist in five years. Any good CEO needs to embrace that reality, especially when you're serving customers that are startups, not established yet. But some of them will be incredibly successful and grow. We're catching these companies and industries at a time when it feels very obvious to me that they're rising really quickly, and they're going to establish. From a business perspective, that's really important for us.Link

And then the other thing is that Nominal's value directly to the department is very different from that of the companies I just mentioned. Many of our customers build physical products, capabilities, weapons systems, drones, rockets. At the end of the day, Nominal provides a service. It's software. But we help organizations more efficiently and effectively test, validate, and field those systems. So we're actually very attractive under a lot of scenarios where efficiency, from the department's and the government's perspective, is paramount.Link

If you think about a potential administration change, with priorities shifting a lot, the way to look at Nominal is: we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on test and evaluation of all these weapons systems. What if you could get 10, 20, 30% more efficiency on that? Wouldn't you purchase that capability? So I think we're insulated from a lot of potential turmoil or budgetary shrinkage that might happen. That's how I think about it.Link

LubaOkay. That's a good place to be.Link

CameronIt is a good place to be.Link

LubaThis also makes me think of selling to governments. One of your investors, Paul Kwan, said there are a lot of companies in defense tech right now, but it takes a certain sales team and a certain skill to be able to sell to governments. And you've been very successful at building a stellar government sales team. So what does a good government sales team know specifically about how to sell to those entities, versus how you sell to startups?Link

CameronIt's a really great question. There are a couple of things that make government go-to-market different. This is actually something I learned at Anduril when I was there. People often talk about the government sales motion as having three, sometimes four, customers. There's the person who's going to use your product, the end user. There's often an acquisition official or authority, a program manager, the person who's paying for it, but they're almost by default separate. Then you have a contracting organization. You need someone to actually write the paper that gives you the capability. And sometimes you have a senior general or admiral. So there are four different people you have to get on the same page.Link

The thing our government sales team is really good at, and I actually did this physically when I was working at Saildrone, a maritime autonomy company, is this. I used to literally fly to DC and physically go from the Pentagon, where often the acquisition official and maybe the admiral or general was, to the other agency to meet with the end user, sometimes to the Hill to talk to Congress about budgets, all in the same day. I'd spend seven hours going from A to B to C, because what you understand as you do more and more sales here is that the department is so vast that people are not on the same sheet of music the way they are when you're selling to a startup. You need to talk to the end users, and there's—Link

LubaBut in a startup they're all the same. At least the same incentive.Link

CameronExactly. So it's much easier to get them on the same page and have those conversations. It's just very different at government scale.Link

The other thing I've realized is that you want to get this sort of impedance match. To have any successful sales outcome, you need to generate excitement and get real users in the mix. And you need to get the senior official, the admiral or general, excited about the vision, which could be mapped to any enterprise sale as well. But what you have to get right is getting those people excited at the same time.Link

So the art of the perfect government sale is this. If you get the end users excited too early, you can get to a place where you're ready to transition to a production contract or a program of record, but it's going to take a lot of time to educate the person who's going to cut the check. The deal fizzles out. And the opposite can be even worse. If you get the senior official all excited and they say, okay, show me the results, show me the users, and you're like, no users, no results, just give us another couple of months, that's even worse. With those timelines, it's very hard to do. But our team is very well conditioned to be masters at synchronizing those two demand signals to arrive at the same time. So that'd be my answer. It's a little bit of art, a little bit of science.Link

LubaAnd I would imagine you spend a lot of your time coaching that sales team, because you've spent time in the Navy, in the government, at startups, as a VC. So you understand that art as an insider.Link

CameronYeah, absolutely. We have a fun and interesting business where around 30 to 40% of Nominal is B2G, the government and federal business.Link

LubaSo around 30 to 40% of your revenue is government?Link

CameronYeah. And the other part is our commercial business, our B2B. As you said yourself, I come from a world where I understand B2G very well. So I spend a ton of time with Jen Wilson, who leads our government team, whether it's coaching, mentoring, or just going back and forth on things. I really love that, and it's an area where I have a lot of prior experience.Link

On the other side, I don't come from a background of commercial or enterprise sales. I think there's an art to deal making and understanding how to get things done, and that's one where I'm constantly seeking, reading books, trying to understand. Our head of revenue, Javier Molina, comes from MongoDB. He's really seasoned, so I learn a ton from him on sales enablement and onboarding and ramp, and all the traditional software stuff.Link

LubaAnd you must read books if you want to sell.Link

CameronYeah, I love them. The one on my nightstand right now is Frank Slootman's book, *Amp It Up*, which is about leading at scale and with urgency. Snowflake is obviously a really good example. There are a lot of good tidbits on how to build a high-intensity sales culture. I mean, if you can do that, you'll be successful.Link

LubaSo let's talk about you. What does your typical week look like?Link

CameronFirst, there aren't a lot of typical weeks. I'm on the road a lot, but I live in Los Angeles. We recently opened an office in London, almost a year old now, and I am—Link

LubaWhy London?Link

CameronI'm just a big believer in Europe, particularly in aerospace and defense and reindustrialization. Everything we've seen stateside over the last three years or so, all the signals are there in Europe, and we've been able to recreate that momentum really quickly. I don't know how hot a take that is. I do think it's easy, and Silicon Valley likes to trope a little on how the contracts are smaller in Europe and it's slower. Those things might be true, but they're true for good reason. And a lot of the industrial megacompanies, you think about Bosch, these types of companies, hail from Europe. So we're actually seeing demand for some of our biggest commercial contracts coming out of here, which is exciting.Link

I brought up the London office because I wake up, normally somewhere between 5 and 5:30, and I'm triaging a lot of European stuff. So that's the first thing I do. I joke that I'm very unhealthy: the alarm goes off and I immediately open Slack. If I can, I'll try to do a morning routine. I'll try some yoga.Link

The team jokes about this, and it's a guilty pleasure I have, but I love ordering coffee. We have a beautiful coffee maker in our house, and my wife teases me, but I always order from Blue Bottle.Link

LubaI love Blue Bottle.Link

CameronThere's a Blue Bottle five minutes away that opens at 5 a.m., so it's always there. I get my Blue Bottle quad-shot latte, which gets me going. There's something about ordering coffee and not making it. I think it's just a treat. It's totally psychology, but it shows up at the door.Link

I normally try to get into the office early, probably around 7 a.m., 7 to 7:30, which I've found out is super early for a tech company. It's the military in me, I guess. A lot of my day is talking to customers, and a lot of time now goes to our growing leadership team. We're 220 people, and so much of my job is becoming empowering the 10 or 12 executives around me to run the business, which is exciting.Link

There are a lot of dinners and events in LA, particularly for recruiting. It's fun. There are so many events around defense tech or physical AI or industrial things, and Nominal is in such a great place because so many of those centers are useful, since they have our customers or potential customers. If you're a company that builds a missile system, the only customer you have is the government. So you get invited to all these events where there's nothing for you from a business perspective. On the Nominal side, every opportunity I have to be at an event, to shake hands, meet a customer or someone who's not a customer yet, and understand their business a little more, is always useful. So I do prioritize those events.Link

And then, to round it out, my wife and I are religious about going to Barry's Bootcamp.Link

LubaHow many times a week do you go?Link

CameronWe go every Saturday and Sunday. I love it. And then sometimes I'll sneak in one or two during the week. We go to the Barry's in Venice Beach, which is very fun. It's very LA, but it's sort of my ritual, my routine.Link

LubaIt's funny, with the industry you're in and what you're doing, it's very, very different.Link

CameronIt is. And that's what I love. We were talking a little before about what it's like to be in LA. I grew up on the East Coast, so I'm a very on-time, East Coast, Type A, organized person. I was in the military. But I love LA, and I think for better or for worse, I spend 80 or 90% of my time with the people at Nominal, whom I happen to have hired. And I love that, and then on the weekend I get to go to Barry's and get an Erewhon smoothie.Link

LubaAnd what's your favorite?Link

CameronThe Hailey Bieber. I'm not too ashamed to admit that. But no, just live, I think, and enjoy the weather. Being in Southern California has been super nice.Link

LubaWhat's your astrological sign?Link

CameronI'm a Cancer.Link

LubaI've heard you say that every time you've slowed down in your life, you've regretted it. When was the last time you slowed down?Link

CameronIt happens all the time, and I really try to fight it. I think particularly in the Nominal context, when I reflect back on the journey thus far, four years in, it's very easy psychologically, when you're on an exponential, as I call it, to feel that when you look forward it's incredibly steep, and when you look backward it feels relatively fine. So when you're growing a company as quickly as we are, it can be very easy to think you have more time in the future than you do, particularly around hiring.Link

That's always the one I've had to trick my brain on. If we perceive a bottleneck and it's something we need to hire into, start the search yesterday. Leave that meeting and immediately start talking to our recruiters and talent team, and write the JD. Because three months from now, given how long it takes to hire a good person in today's market, the problem is only going to get bigger. So I really try not to slow us down on those things.Link

I think another big one is that so many companies I'm chatting with these days that are building agentic products are rethinking and restructuring pricing and packaging. It's this constant journey. We've been on a fun evolution of trying to meet existing customer demand with our current pricing strategies, but knowing that eventually we need to shift to different, more flexible ways of pricing and packaging. The business is growing so quickly that it's a question of when the right time is. There's never a good right time. You just gotta do it and embrace the ambiguity. So those would be two I think about: do we speed up, do we slow down.Link

LubaWhat about the common phrase that you've got to slow down to speed up? Which makes me think of taking a step back, reflecting, thinking about where you're at as a company, as a person. Do you do that, or is your foot always on the throttle?Link

CameronThe part of "slow down to speed up" that I really do resonate with is that I think it's helpful to assess what you've learned that might have been causing an issue or a challenge. Take stock of that, sort of retrain your model, and then go forward. So I definitely agree with that.Link

The part I always tell the team is that, even at our scale, action produces information. The worst thing you can do is just sit in the room thinking, frankly, for an hour, and not talk to customers. When in doubt, go talk to a customer. It's sort of the answer. It's really easy to get tricked into thinking the answer might be inside that four-sided whiteboard room at Nominal. And maybe it is. Maybe critical thinking and the team getting together can solve a problem. But contacting reality, contacting the market, going to talk to a customer: action produces information. We have a lot of customers, even existing ones, and we just ask them, do you like what we're thinking about? How would you think about X or Y or Z? Do you think that's valuable?Link

I really think it's kind of like a shark. Sharks have to swim. And I really do think the worst thing you can do is not take action, because you're never going to get the answer.Link

LubaSo this is true for everything in your life, not just building a company. There are a lot of narratives of, oh, I'm going to start doing X when I get better at this, or I'm going to... A common example: I'm going to start dating when I work on myself. But it's like, you are collecting information constantly, and you've got to see how the world reacts to it. That's how you can readjust your own course and get better.Link

CameronYeah, I think that's so true.Link

LubaI heard you've worked with a lot of coaches. You've been working with exec coaches throughout your career, which I love. I think anytime you can hire someone who's better than you, why not take that advice? So I'm curious, what are you working on right now?Link

CameronI love working with exec coaches. I think about what the job of a CEO-founder is. There are a couple of different definitions, but if I'm not getting myself a year, two years, three years into the future to be the CEO Nominal needs at the next stage, I'm not doing my job. And it'd be hypocritical of me to give feedback or advice to the executives around me if I'm not also investing in that. I think sometimes that stuff can get a stigma, but I love it, and I think it's really good.Link

One thing my exec coach has really helped me with, and honestly it verges on more general therapeutic help, is this. One of my big advantages is that I'm really good at thinking through every combination and permutation of a scenario. I think it's the physicist in me, from my prior life. That can be really useful for predicting the seven different ways a scenario can go, and I'm ready for any of those. But it's also a lot of wasted energy. So a lot of what I work on in my own mental sphere is where it makes sense to do that and where it's just wasted energy.Link

LubaAnd how do you decide? What's an example of you actually stepping back and saying, I'm not going to run these simulations?Link

CameronExactly. I love that you call them simulations. That's exactly what the executives would call it. We developed a common language around it. We called it the maze, and my exec coach described it as: you're trying to figure out the end of the maze before you've even gotten into it. Sometimes it's helpful to get a little oriented and visualize success. I think manifesting in that way is really powerful. But it can come at a detriment. So a lot of it is just understanding myself. During the course of the day, if I find myself slipping into that pattern, I'll say, oh, I'm in the maze. Just being able to call it something has worked really well for me. It's a very personal thing that I work on.Link

LubaIs there also a certain discernment about what the stakes of the problem are on which you're running a maze? Because if it's a high-stakes decision, then perhaps running all possible simulations is useful. But if it's like, which Erewhon smoothie do I get?Link

CameronOh man, that is high stakes. No. I'd say yes and no. The stakes certainly affect how much you should run those simulations. But more than that, I think the learning has been being objective about how much I can actually control the outcome. That's maybe the more profound takeaway. It could be one of the most important decisions of the company, I don't know. Think of something like a high-stakes pitch, or a really boring customer meeting. If I've done the preparation, going through the scenarios again and again and again, there's only so much I can do. That's been a really helpful personal framing.Link

Then, in how I appear and act outwardly, a lot of what I work on with the exec coach, which sounds very simple but is so important in leadership, is being really clear about expectations. So many problems solve themselves. Communicating expectations to those around you, in this case the other executives at Nominal. Early on, I realized I'd voice a lot of, this person's not doing the thing the way I think they should, so I'm giving them feedback. Taking a step back, I'd ask: do you honestly think you've communicated those expectations to that person in a way that's black and white? Absolutely crystal clear? In so many cases, the answer is no. Even if you write it down, sometimes you have to go the extra distance. If you start from a place of grounded expectations, everything else builds off of that: giving feedback, constructive criticism, performance. It seems simple, but at the pace and scale of operating a company, it can be helpful to have a reminder of that.Link

LubaThis is also great life advice.Link

CameronYes, it is.Link

LubaYou can apply it to relationship stuff, too.Link

CameronIt goes for everything.Link

LubaLet's talk about your background. It's just fascinating. You grew up in a family where your dad was a federal prosecutor and your mom was working with special needs kids, and your team told me that in your family a very common dinner question was, how were you a force for good in the world? Tell me more about your family and that environment.Link

CameronIt's one of those things I didn't realize until a little later in life: this is not how every kid grew up. We grew up in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. A lot of the extended family around my parents served in the Navy. I didn't talk about that a lot.Link

LubaYour uncle? Your granddad?Link

CameronYeah. Brothers and sisters, uncles, great-grandparents. So really a family business. All that to say, I grew up in a household that really celebrated and cherished this notion of service. For many of my family members, that service was being in the military, but notably neither of my parents were in the military. So there was also an understanding that there are a lot of ways to serve. That was really helpful for me as I was growing up and made the decision to serve, but ultimately to get out of the Navy.Link

We grew up really being reminded that we were very lucky to grow up in a Virginia suburb outside of Washington, D.C., in the United States, at this time in the world. I'm a big believer that the time in the world we exist in right now is so fortunate. There's so much opportunity, and I remind myself of that pretty much every day when I get up and go work: how fortunate I am. And if I can do anything to give a little back in service, it's really the core motivator for me.Link

LubaSo as a kid, what were some good ways to be of service, and what were some bad ways to be of service?Link

CameronIt's really interesting. I think my parents really tried to instill that the spectrum of service is very broad, and to live, I'd say, the good life. You can aspire to be of service on many different levels. To break that down: if you're a senior government official, you have all this influence, you're making big, impactful political decisions. That's certainly a service. But if you're neglecting your community, your friends, your family, the people around you—Link

LubaIt starts with yourself and your...Link

CameronExactly. And just making sure you don't lose track of one or the other is really important. So that was always something we thought of: it starts really small. Just being a good person, being good to those around you, helping. Very golden rule. I think that's actually really, really important.Link

And then we often had a notion of, if not you, then who? You've been given so much opportunity, so much privilege. If you're not going to assume this risk... and that was particularly relevant to the decision to serve in the Navy. Neither myself, my brother, nor my sister needed to. But it was something we all independently chose.Link

LubaYour sister as well? How many brothers and sisters do you have?Link

CameronOne brother, one sister.Link

LubaOlder brother? Sister?Link

CameronYeah.Link

LubaYour older brother was Brendan, right?Link

CameronYeah. He was a submarine officer as well, five years older than me. And my sister went to medical school, was an ER doctor, and then served as a combat doctor and deployed to the Middle East. So we all made those decisions independently. I was just going back to that notion of, if not us, then who? Who else will raise their hand and take that on and go do it?Link

LubaWhat did the decision to serve in the Navy look like when you were deciding what to do after college, after MIT?Link

CameronIt's actually a decision, in hindsight, that you make when you're really young. I did ROTC, Reserve Officer Training Corps. Basically the Navy paid for my undergrad education. You had to apply independently, to MIT, to college, and get in, and then also apply for the ROTC scholarship. This is all stuff you're doing when you're 17. So I knew I was going to be in the Navy. You owe all that back for the education. I knew I was going to serve four or five years afterwards. Maybe a more interesting question is that I had an intuition that I wanted to be a submarine officer.Link

LubaWhere did that intuition come from?Link

CameronIt started in eighth grade. I read a book called *Blind Man's Bluff*. I would highly recommend it. It's a good airplane read. It's short, and it's basically a compilation of Cold War–era submarine stories. At the time the book was written, I think it was still considered classified, or it had just been declassified. Sometimes people say, oh, you should read that. It was one of those that's now out in the open. It was the first time a lot of what submarines actually do was written about, and I read it as an eighth grader and thought, that is exactly what I want to do.Link

What I resonated with was the notion of engineering being put into warfighting. If I can engineer better than the other guy, as an engineer, that was really exciting to me. And so much of technology and innovation and science went into running a nuclear reactor, as part of the advantage. That really resonated. And submarines, they call it the silent service. That also resonated. It's a very behind-the-scenes, strategic, covert part of the military. A lot of the folks I resonated with, I didn't want to be flashy or out there in the limelight. That's not really my personality. So it was really cool to pursue that.Link

LubaSo that's very different from what you're doing now, because now you're in the limelight. Doing dinners, doing podcasts.Link

CameronExactly. My wife and I talk a lot about the definitions of introvert and extrovert. I very much go to the core definition: does it bring you energy or does it drain your energy? I think that's different from whether you can stand in front of an audience and give a speech, or speak to 210 people in the company and motivate them. I think that can all be true and it can still drain you.Link

LubaDrain you.Link

CameronBut this is not draining me. So much of my job is to be the face of Nominal. And as you think about getting our story out and understood by the world, by our customers, by our potential employees, doing that stuff is really good.Link

LubaSo it makes me think you're doing it in service of the mission.Link

CameronI think that's a good way to say it. I consider myself a service leader. I know this stuff is really important, so if it's one small thing my position as CEO can give to the company, I'm glad to do it.Link

LubaYou famously spent, correct me if I'm wrong, 484 days. Was it 484 days?Link

CameronYes.Link

LubaIn the submarine. Underwater?Link

CameronYeah.Link

LubaWhat are some things you miss about it?Link

CameronOh, wow. It's funny, people often ask what things you didn't miss. I would say the simplicity. In some ways, the life I live now has so much happening externally, Slack everywhere, constantly doing a hundred different things, getting pulled in. Nominal is the main thing I'm doing with my life, clearly, but there are so many different directions. When you're on the submarine, there's this extreme clarity of mission, and there's no other external distraction. It's the feeling you get when you're pouring 100% of yourself into a certain mission without any other distractions. It's really special. And I've not felt that in the same way since.Link

There's a phrase people say when they leave the military: I don't miss the circus, but I do miss the crowds. And I think that's one. I look back nostalgically on my time in the military, and I think about it a lot.Link

LubaThe circus being the Navy in general?Link

CameronYeah. But the thing I miss most is the people. I worked with some of the most service-oriented, humble, good, and frankly talented people I've ever worked with when I was in the Navy. So I miss them.Link

LubaAre you able to hire a lot of them?Link

CameronYeah, it's great. We have a lot of veterans. I always want more veterans, so if you're listening to this and you want to apply, we would love to have you. There's a great program called SkillBridge, which basically allows people who are transitioning out of the military, in the last six months or so, to actually work in an industry and get a taste. We've had a lot of success with the SkillBridge program, so we love it. And I think the world is coming around in a big way, particularly in hardware and defense tech, to how good veterans are.Link

LubaSo what are some main characteristics you would say? Humbleness? The ability to serve a mission that's broader than yourself?Link

CameronHumility. Some notion of service or mission, something greater than yourself. I really think operating in ambiguity is probably one of the biggest. Serving in the military, you're constantly put in scenarios where you have partial or imperfect information, and you're just expected to perform and achieve outcomes. And the last one, I think, would be an extreme orientation toward achieving outcomes and owning processes end to end.Link

There's an anecdote called "A Message to Garcia." You can look this up. Have you ever heard of it?Link

LubaYeah.Link

CameronIt's a really short story, very old, literally maybe 14 pages, a really short vignette. It describes a scenario where a young military officer is given a task by their commander: go into some town, find some specific person, and deliver a message. A message to Garcia. The story is extremely simple, but it walks through the journey this young person had to go on, where that was all they were told. Go do this, give this message. And there was so much ambiguity. So many things happened along that journey where they had to make decisions and act on commander's intent: here's a North Star, here's an objective, I trust you to make all the decisions and deal with the ambiguity.Link

I got that story the first day I stepped on the submarine, because it really encapsulates so much of what it means to serve in that kind of environment. You're going to be trusted with a lot. There are going to be confusing or partial objectives you need to go after. But you're empowered and trusted to go deliver the message yourself. I used to talk about that with all of our early employees. I haven't as much lately, but...Link

LubaWhy not?Link

CameronI think at scale I just stopped. But I'm reinvigorated based on this, so maybe I'll cover it more.Link

LubaSounds like more companies should hire veterans.Link

CameronI absolutely agree.Link

LubaI read somewhere that when you were 20 years old, you were very motivated to be the guy who prevents nuclear weapons from spreading. What happens to that guy?Link

CameronIt's really interesting. My undergrad degree was in physics and nuclear engineering. And mind you, this was at a time when nuclear was going through an identity crisis. I graduated in 2013. For perspective, the incident at Fukushima was in 2011, and I was actually interning at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the summer it happened. It was a crazy internship. Ever since then, I think, the industry had been dealing with backlash. So it's incredibly exciting to see a lot of the customers we support, the nuclear energy industry, have a resurgence.Link

I was a big nuclear energy nerd. My thesis was on both the performance of advanced reactors and, to your point, the geopolitical implications of advanced reactor technology, grappling with this question: can you reliably get and scale nuclear energy, and what do you need to do to prevent nuclear proliferation? If you're going to give nuclear technology to the whole world, what's the verification regime and what standards are needed? I actually dug up my thesis maybe four or five months ago and scanned it again. I think I'd forgotten that stuff. But I'm really bullish on nuclear. There are all these new companies and startups, and I was inspired and took a little trip down memory lane.Link

LubaYour uncle served in the military for 38 years, and my understanding is that when you were about 12 years old, you wanted to command as much respect and service as your uncle did, and you were committed to the idea that you were going to be in the Navy as well. What made you decide not to follow that path, and how did your family react?Link

CameronI love that. I grew up watching my uncle in particular. He was a very senior admiral. This was when I was young, and as a young kid I didn't really know what he actually did. But I think you can tell when you meet someone who commands a lot of respect, who feels like they have a lot of authority but also feels very fulfilled in what they do. I didn't know what my uncle did, but I could sense that he exuded that energy. And I was like, whatever that is, that's what I want when I grow up. It guided me for a long time.Link

I served eight years, not 38, but the decision to get out was one I took very seriously. My uncle, it took him 38 years. He rose through the ranks and had incredible influence. He commanded thousands of people at that scale and really impacted the world, no doubt. I was a little more impatient, and I saw what it would look like to follow in those footsteps. The world is just fundamentally different today than it was in my uncle's coming of age. Technology is very different. It accelerates, and underlying software, nested under that, delivers scale of impact in a way that is new. And now AI is yet another exponential on top of all of that. So I wanted to have a really big impact, and I thought, I can still do that, for a mission I care about, but with a lot of impact, at a lot of scale, and faster.Link

LubaSo talking to you, there are two threads that come up for me. One is obviously the thread of service, and the other is the thread of impatience. Not wanting to slow down, and having to figure out the ultimate place where you can serve the biggest mission possible.Link

After the Navy, you spent about three or four years in total working at four different companies, three startups and a VC firm: Anduril, Saildrone, Applied Intuition, and Lux.Link

CameronYep.Link

LubaAnd actually, one of your investors said you very intentionally felt like you were getting all this experience to ultimately start Nominal.Link

CameronYeah.Link

LubaWhat has this impatience cost you?Link

CameronIt's a good question. I'm a big 80/20 person. With so many things, you get 80% of the value of learning and understanding, and then there are diminishing returns. I think that's true in many, many things in life. But clearly it can come at the cost of truly being a world expert in any one thing. So my answer would be: if I'd stayed at Lux longer, maybe I'd be a little more world-class at venture. If I'd stayed at Anduril, I might have seen an even deeper level of product or engineering problems. But for what I wanted to do, when I founded a company, my framework was very much that I wanted a wide breadth of experience, and then to trust myself and my impatience to teach myself very quickly the things I didn't know. And so far, time will tell, but I think that's true.Link

LubaSo when you were hopping from company to company, is it true that you were gathering expertise to ultimately start something, or is it hindsight 20/20?Link

CameronThe reality is always a little bit of both. But I consider myself a very intentional person. I left the military and said, in five years I want to start a company. I was honest with myself that I didn't feel like I could jump right in. I was like, who am I? I'm an engineer, I've served, I've seen a lot of government, but I didn't feel like I had the experience. So I set out on a path, I laid out a framework, which was: I want to get experience at high-growth, venture-backed companies. And Anduril and Applied Intuition particularly are two of the best to have been a student of. I wanted an academic and theoretical business education, which is funny, it's a good word for an MBA. I don't normally...Link

LubaOh, right. You did an MBA, right?Link

CameronWell, see, I even made you forget about it. I normally don't talk about it.Link

LubaThat's true. But why? Why don't you talk about your MBA?Link

CameronIt's often less relevant. I mean, it is very relevant and useful for Nominal and running a business, I think. Externally...Link

LubaAre you ashamed of it?Link

CameronNo, it's not shame. It's just less relevant. My LinkedIn says MIT.Link

LubaBut you don't have... Oh wait, is that a thing people put in their title if they did an MBA?Link

CameronI don't know.Link

LubaDon't worry, I don't know either. Maybe I'll put that in the title of this episode.Link

CameronYeah, exactly. But I wanted to learn business, and I think it's been very, very helpful. One way to describe the companies in physical AI and the software-for-hardware world that are having success is that so much of it comes down to business and commercialization.Link

So I had this framework that I laid out, and a little bit of it is hindsight 20/20. But I was very upfront with everyone along that journey. When I got to Anduril, I told them I would leave at a certain point. I think I was one of the first people to voluntarily leave. I will never forget the day I told Matt Grimm. He pulled me into his office, and he's like, what? You're leaving to go back to Harvard Business School? He called it the Argyle Sweater Club. And I loved it. I sat up all night thinking about it, but I stuck to my conviction that, for me and the plan I was on, it was what I thought I needed.Link

I was very intentional with all of those folks, saying, I'm going to be here and I'm going to do the best work you've ever seen. For someone who might only be here for 12, 15, 18 months, it was never a secret that I was leaving. I wasn't hopping around saying, put me to work. I'm here to learn. I always opted for learning over salary or any of those things. All of this was just a stepping stone. It's phenomenal. I learned a lot in those four, four and a half years, and then felt, you're never fully ready, but ready to go.Link

LubaThis is a great example of communication and setting expectations. So you were very open with them about the fact that you were leaving.Link

CameronYeah, I really appreciate that. Obviously it's funny on the other side now. I'd be hypocritical otherwise. As a CEO, I sometimes get people in interviews who are pretty open about it: hey, I want to start a company, and Nominal is my dojo. It's where I'm going to learn this stuff. And I'm very flattered. I look out at companies that are inflecting and growing, and I kind of smile, because that's how I was watching the process. So it'd be very hypocritical of me to say no. All I ask of those folks, I joke with them, is: I'd love for Nominal to be that for you. Please just be really open and communicative about how you're thinking about the world. And when the time comes, we'll probably try to retain you. And if you're ready to start something, let me write an angel check. So I love it.Link

LubaYou speak very highly of Qasar from Applied Intuition. A friend and an advisor. Qasar is absolutely brilliant. I've had the pleasure of knowing him, not as well as you do. I'm actually with him on Wednesday.Link

CameronOh, amazing.Link

LubaYeah. I'm going down to Applied Intuition. What have you learned from Qasar?Link

CameronA couple of things. Qasar was so foundational in how I thought about starting a company. When I was there, he gave me a formula for building a company that was magical to me at the moment. So many people get it wrong. His formula was: spend 70% of your time finding a co-founder or co-founders, spend 20% understanding a market, a trend, a diffusion, something that's happening in technology that's interesting to you, and only the last 10% on the solution, the product, the outcome, the thing you're going to do differently. Most people do it inverted.Link

LubaYeah, that's very true.Link

CameronI really appreciated it, because it was very clarifying for me to think: okay, who are the one or two people I want to spend the next decade, two decades, building something with? And when you spend time learning about a market, it pays huge dividends later on. What you actually end up building is never a perfect match with what you set out to build, and I think that's been true at Applied too. The more you understand about where profits pool in markets, where money actually flows, and what incentives drive certain behaviors, the easier it is to make micro-pivots as you build your initial product. And understanding that whatever solution or product you build, product-market fit is a constant journey, especially in today's world. It's a constantly moving target. You have it, and then you have to go get it again. I thought that was really, really profound. So I learned that from Qasar.Link

The other thing anyone who knows Qasar understands is the importance of company culture. I think he gave me a lot of confidence just by watching him operate. One of my fears was that I'd be too much of a micromanager. I think I have an ability to hold a lot of information in my head at the same time, so I'm often tracking what a lot of the team is doing—Link

LubaRunning simulations.Link

CameronExactly. At a level of detail that I think is often surprising to them. So I was worried: no one wants that micromanaging boss. But one thing I learned from him is that it's the job of a founder to jump in, sometimes all the way to the bottom, and figure out what's actually going on within the org, because that's the only way you keep a grasp of reality in the company and promote the culture you want.Link

So even at 220 people, the team knows I'll pop up in a random Slack channel that probably no one expected I was reading or following along. I'll make some connection to something else that's happening in the company, or I'll just provide feedback and say, hey, this is not the Nominal way. Why did it take us 36 hours and not 12 hours to get back to a customer? These things matter. And just enforcing those standards, I thought, oh man, at 220 people, is that really sustainable? But I think it's actually been really important, and frankly the team appreciates it and responds well, because they know I'm paying attention.Link

LubaFor my conversation with Qasar, what's one question you'd make sure I ask him?Link

CameronI'd ask him about, and he's talked about this on X, speed above all things. Have you heard of this? Applied has a bunch of company values, and it's the top value, intentionally the top value. I really do resonate with it. Speed is really important. Applied was the first place I'd ever worked where there were a ton of 15-minute meetings. I conceptually like that. The notion of, why would you do a 30-minute meeting? And even some people were doing five-minute things if they could, or it could be an email. Speed is just so important there. My intuition is that Qasar would ascribe a lot of Applied's success to that emphasis.Link

I'd be really curious to hear from him, now that he reflects back on ten years of the journey, whether that was ever a mistake, or whether he ever thought it was not the right first value. I think it's really interesting. He's championed that, and a lot of other companies are now pointing at Applied as the pinnacle of that clock-speed execution. So I'll make sure to ask that.Link

LubaThank you. There's this famous story from your personal journey: ten days before your wedding, Alfred Lin of Sequoia calls you to say they want to participate in or lead the Series B. Tell me more about that call and that story.Link

CameronIt's funny, we joke now with my wife that whenever I try to take time off, or do anything personal, an investor calls. The other case was Founders Fund, who leaned in and preempted the last round. It happened, I think, on December 19th, right before the holidays, catching others off guard. They're really good at that. And it was a really awesome offer from them.Link

It was a conversation around a lot of conviction in the business, and being really excited. I remember saying, I'm flattered. I know how this goes. I've seen this from my time at Lux. Once you start, you're either fundraising or you're not, and there's no in between. I knew that if I started that process, it was either on or off, and it was going to line up so that I'd be walking down the aisle taking investor phone calls, or doing the data room and sharing all that. So I was very open and said, I'm going to do this when I get back, and I'd love to have that conversation. It actually was really helpful, because I think investors appreciate that kind of clarity too. So, setting expectations. I said, I'm getting married. It's not going to be a rush, but take ten, 14 days, and I'm going to show you the business. I'll come back and we'll run an actual process, and you'll be able to look at the business. I think that's just a better way to do it on both sides. It's a funny story.Link

LubaWhat has this rocket-ship journey cost your wife?Link

CameronIt's a really good question. My wife is from the same industry. She worked six and a half years at Shield AI, and she now works at General Catalyst.Link

LubaOh, nice.Link

CameronYeah. She went over to the dark side. I don't think she's long for the dark side, but she's an operating partner.Link

LubaWhat's specific about her role?Link

CameronShe helps companies within Global Resilience, so it's the same defense energy.Link

LubaGot it.Link

CameronAnd her background: she was a contracting officer at Raytheon, so she knows deals, contracts, legal structure.Link

LubaWhich you guys met when you were in the Navy?Link

CameronNo, we met at business school. You know what they say, that people go to business school to find their life partner? If people ask me whether business school was worth it, I did learn a lot, but I met my wife, so 100% worth it. And I met my co-founder, Bryce.Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

CameronSo, check, check. It was very worth it for me. We tell this funny story. I think people assume you meet someone at business school at a club or a party or something like that. We met in the nerdiest way possible: a meeting to kick off planning for a defense and technology conference. She was one of the small subset of people who were really passionate about service and defense and technology. We have a lot of shared values.Link

LubaWhat are the shared values?Link

CameronService, this idea of mission, is a really big one. It's funny, because she's not an engineer, so we joke about it sometimes. She knows exactly what Nominal does today, but for the longest time it was, so what do you guys do? What do you actually do?Link

But no, my wife is amazing. I think people who know her know she's incredibly supportive, but she also has this insanely high bar for me, I think because she sees the potential as limitless. I love it. It's really inspiring, because she can be both a shoulder to lean on and a counsel, someone to provide advice. But she keeps my feet on the ground. She's very like, yeah, this is hard. You're running a 220-person, multi-billion-dollar company. This is not easy. She's very supportive in that way, which is very grounding.Link

And the last thing is that I really try to be present when I'm present. Going back to the coaching point, a lot of that was trying to make sure I don't run those simulations on the weekend, or when I'm spending precious time with her. That's something I've worked on, because it's so important when you're doing this type of thing.Link

LubaSo the rule is presence on the weekends?Link

CameronYes.Link

LubaDo you guys have any date nights or anything like that?Link

CameronHonestly, we do the Saturday and Sunday Barry's, as we talked about. It's the ritual. We also really love the LA food scene. We're both big food people, and there are so many cool restaurants. We really try to, Friday or Saturday, have it feel like a proper date night. And then we really enjoy spending time outdoors together. LA has a lot of really good hikes, so that's a way to combine getting some exercise and just talking. I always describe it as being witness to one another's lives. We spend a lot of time doing that.Link

LubaAwesome. One of our mutual friends, Jake, and a few other people mentioned that it's very clear you want to have a great mission in the world, you want to be very much of service to millions of people, and you're on the path to be one of the greats. If Nominal is just a tooling company, if it's not becoming the great institution you want it to be, what would that do to you?Link

CameronIt's a good question. I think a lot about what that impact will be at scale. I think Nominal has an opportunity to be a small inflection on human prosperity. That's how I think about it. We talked about the forgotten two decades of unserious software. It's such an important time right now, where thankfully people realize we need to build, we need to reindustrialize, fix manufacturing, and build things in the physical world: transportation, mobility, energy, moving prosperity forward. If Nominal inflects that trajectory by even 1%, my mission will be very successful when I look back at what we've done. So I'm determined to do it, to manifest it, if you will.Link

And to answer your question, I think to be an entrepreneur, you have to love the process. The destination figures itself out. It's out of your control. I love every single day. I love the process of building, of hitting adversity and problems, of getting amazing people. That stuff is important to me. I want to have a huge impact on the world, but if I focus on the process, the rest figures itself out.Link

LubaAnd just to wrap it up, what are you still becoming?Link

CameronI'm always still becoming. And I'm feeling very much at this moment that I'm still becoming the CEO and the leader Nominal needs, for the next five years, the next ten years.Link

LubaWhat is the CEO Nominal needs for the next five years?Link

CameronI think a lot of it comes down to the fact that no one likes to go in and disappoint people. But a lot of the job at scale, where mistakes get bigger and bigger, is being the person who will ultimately hold the bar where it needs to be. Companies have inertia. They have a gravity around them. Nominal happens to be really, really good and really high. But more and more I see it as my job to be the enforcer of those standards. It's a little bit of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. And I love the other parts. I love collaborating with people, I love talking to customers, I love all those aspects. It's about coming to grips with the fact that my job isn't to do the things I love. You have to do a little bit of those to maintain that, but it's really to do the things I need to do for the company. So that's a constant process. I think I'm still becoming there.Link

And there's always more, in terms of being more present outside of Nominal, when I have the minutes and the hours. I'm a big believer in giving back to community or causes that are important to you as you start to achieve success, as much as you can, concurrently. Many entrepreneurs I've spoken with, on the other side, look back and wish they hadn't spent the ten or 12 or 15 years they were building their company doing nothing else. They missed so much time to give, whether it's charity or just time and energy for causes they're passionate about.Link

LubaSo what are you going to do about that?Link

CameronBryce, my co-founder, and I talk about this. I'm really passionate about STEM education, specifically getting people into mechanical, electrical, hardware engineering. I think the world's going through an identity crisis of everyone should be a software engineer. But I think that's really important. I'm just a believer in the human spirit and the engineering judgment we talked about earlier.Link

LubaEngineering taste.Link

CameronYeah. So that's a cause I support. And I'm really passionate about veterans' causes, particularly ones that believe veterans make amazing employees and amazing hires. Anything I can do to help transition veterans into industry, and I think veterans may be amazing entrepreneurs. If I can be a voice to say, you have what it takes, go take the leap of faith, from someone who's been in your shoes, that stuff's important to me.Link

LubaCameron, thank you so much for your time. This is awesome.Link

CameronThank you. Luba, this is awesome. Thank you.Link

LubaThank you.Link