Test is where new military hardware goes to wait.
Mike sits down with Jenn Wilson, Head of Federal at Nominal, to talk about test and evaluation, the least glamorous gate between a program and the warfighter.
Nominal builds test data infrastructure for hardware. Founded in 2022 by Anduril, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin alumni, it reached a $1 billion valuation in March.
Jenn’s take is that acceleration comes from optimizing what you test for. Cutting test points is the wrong lever.
Topics include:
Test and evaluation as a mission enabler
High rate, multimodal test data
Real-time telemetry and closing the test loop
DARPA CIPHER Forge and digital twins
Closing the sim to real gap
The F-35 crowdsourced flight data program
Knowledge parity between primes and government testers
Links
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Nominal homepage https://nominal.io/
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Nominal LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/nominal-inc/
Jenn LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-t-wilson
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Chapters:
00:00
00:32 intro
01:47 why this, why now
02:32 test is not sexy
03:47 test as an afterthought
05:40 more data, less insight
07:18 where the name comes from
07:54 the founding story
10:43 Mike is a user
11:16 streaming telemetry in real time
13:14 design of experiments
15:17 the Fid Labs acquisition
16:31 DARPA CIPHER Forge
19:35 closing the sim to real gap
20:21 the commercial side
23:31 lessons from Ukraine
25:00 F-35 crowdsourced flight data
27:15 fleet bugs found in days
29:07 combined test force
31:50 experimental operations unit
32:34 speeding up test
33:09 the pilot taking fire
34:21 knowledge parity with the primes
35:18 a billion dollar valuation
36:03 hiring at Nominal
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