What does it take to hire, lead and keep the best engineers in the world while your company grows faster than you planned? Bryce Strauss, co-founder of Nominal, went from flying NASA's Juno spacecraft at Jupiter and working on the InSight Mars lander at Lockheed Martin to building the testing software behind rockets, aircraft and energy systems.

Nominal has raised $182.5M from Sequoia, Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Lux, and reached a $1B valuation in 2026. Host Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, asks him how he hires, how he leads, why he turned down a near-perfect hire after one dinner, and why he tells every candidate the risks of joining.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

The leadership rule a Sequoia partner gave him: be the most demanding and the most supportive leader people have worked for
Why "talent arbitrage" is the way Nominal plans to win
The hire he turned down after one dinner, and why it mattered
Why he asks every final candidate to stack-rank the risks of joining
Call signs and bomber jackets: celebrating a year at the company
Holding the bar: performance reviews built on values and tempo
Why big institutions now trust a vendor, not the AI labs, to bring them AI
Why the next ten years belong to mechanical, electrical and aerospace engineers

CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open
0:57 Welcome to Truth Works
1:35 Introducing Bryce Strauss
3:36 From rural Texas to aerospace engineering
4:39 Lockheed Martin, Juno at Jupiter and InSight on Mars
6:42 Nights and weekends: the seed of Nominal
7:18 Harvard Business School and building a company from scratch
8:00 Why mechanical engineers have been underserved
8:45 $180M raised and a $1B valuation
10:06 The Reed Hastings parallel
11:41 What's hard about building and scaling
13:46 The talent arbitrage machine
15:03 Sponsor: Manifest Law
16:40 The hire he had to turn down
20:59 Putting engineers in front of customers
23:04 People systems are products too
25:15 Leading as an engineer
26:07 Most demanding, most supportive: the Sequoia lesson
29:11 Ground truth
32:19 Honest interviews: "we're getting a C in this"
34:27 Stack-ranking the risks of joining
35:14 Rituals: lunch, call signs and bomber jackets
38:52 Celebrating people, not tenure
41:04 Holding the bar
45:51 The hardest problem right now: the AI moment
50:11 Something inspiring for the week

ABOUT THE GUEST
Bryce Strauss is co-founder of Nominal, which builds software for testing and operating hardware, used by aerospace, defense, energy and industrial teams and by the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School. Before Nominal he spent seven years at Lockheed Martin Space on NASA's Juno and InSight missions.

ABOUT THE SHOW
Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal. Each episode is an honest conversation about why work is hard and how leaders can make it better.

This episode is sponsored by Manifest Law, the AI-native immigration law firm.

#TruthWorks #Leadership #Hiring #Startups #Engineering #Sequoia #Nominal #Aerospace

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