Welcome to LORE: The Podcast. Think of LORE as the How I Built This of comms, delving into the philosophy and backstory behind the major narrative-building moments that accumulate over time into generational companies. If you’re not already subscribed, you can do so here:
Today, we’re talking to Bryce Strauss and Cristin Culver. Bryce is a co-founder of Nominal, a software platform for hardware engineers that just closed an $80 million Series B2 acceleration round backed by Founders Fund, valuing the company at $1 billion. He spent seven years as an aerospace engineer before setting out to build the tools he wished he had. Cristin is a communications consultant and strategist, formerly of Opendoor and Trulia, who came on to help Nominal tell their story last year.
What makes Nominal interesting is that they don’t need to run the consumer software playbook. By their own accounting, Nominal needs maybe 10,000 engineers and 4,000 customers to know they exist. (OGs will recognize this philosophy as comms that don’t scale.) So where other companies are optimizing for the impressions on their launch video, Nominal is sponsoring marathons in Pax River, Maryland. And while the timeline devolves into slop, Nominal developed a physical product catalogue — an artifact of lore designed to stand the test of time (after all, lore is the antidote to slop).
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Here’s where to find the best stuff:
The Nominal origin story [01:51] — Seven years as an aerospace engineer, a recurring frustration with the tools available, and the realization that the only way to improve them was to build.
How Cristin got pulled in [05:03] — Introduced by investors, instant yes. The founder who has a lot to say but needs someone to help do more with fewer words is kind of the secret sauce.
Why they waited too long on the rebrand [06:30] — For the first two years, Nominal genuinely believed their customers didn’t care if they had a website. In retrospect, this was a mistake, and the rebrand was about taking credit for two years of hard work they’d never properly surfaced.
Your customers are better at pitching you than you are [10:03] — The moment they asked customers to pitch Nominal back to them, two phrases kept coming up unprompted: “everything connected” and “data supply chain.” Neither came from inside the company. Both ended up as the foundation of the core story. This is emergent lore in action — narrative you discover rather than invent.
Why the Series B2 happened when it did [12:51] — Customer demand was through the ceiling. Founders Fund had been watching from board meetings at portfolio hardware companies as Nominal kept coming up. When the call came, the relationship was already there.
Building the announcement [19:13] — They built a literal table, with messages in rows and channels in columns. They had the discipline to restrict each channel to a single(ish) message.
The catalog [21:00] — McMaster-Carr sends hardware engineers an annual Holy Bible-sized yellow book that’s waterproof and durable, designed to last in the field for a year or more. Nominal made their own version, full of Don Draper-style ads designed to be photographed and shared.
Impressions vs. income statements [30:00] — The launch video that would’ve done numbers had 6,000 cuts and told no story. The one they shipped was slower, designed for the single most important customer or candidate who’d actually watch a fundraising video. Bryce optimizes for business fundamentals — income statements and balance sheets — not impressions.
Talent and customers as the same audience [34:29] — The people who thrive at Nominal want to serve this specific customer base. Tell customers’ stories well enough and you’ve made the case to customers and candidates simultaneously.
Writing as survival skill [42:10] — Nominal has “promote clarity” as a company value, uses it in performance reviews, and almost got a Notion case study written about their meeting notes database.
Apply here to join Nominal as a Communications and Content Lead.
