Nomineer Spotlight – Craig Schwartz, Legal
Former General Counsel & Head of InfoSec at Covariant; former Lead Counsel, USG at Palantir
Q: Tell us about your professional background.
A: After college, I worked in New York for real estate developer, Edison Properties, as a business strategist building tools to track KPIs and dynamically price based on customer website behavior. I then went to law school with the idea of using similar data-driven technology to further national security.
After law school, I clerked for two years in federal court before working at two D.C. law firms, Baker Botts and Arnold & Porter, in their corporate national security practices, which involved assisting clients with CFIUS and antitrust clearances for deals, helping defense contractors in their dealings with the government, and advising on export and sanctions compliance.
I then joined Palantir to help build the legal and contracting side of its USG Business, and to lead the national security compliance program. Among other things, I was lead attorney for the company’s Intelligence Community business and Army TITAN program, and I helped build the USG Partnerships team. I also worked on its public listing and subsequently led various scaling efforts.
Most recently, I joined Covariant as its first attorney. As General Counsel and Head of InfoSec, I matured the company’s cybersecurity and data privacy programs in anticipation of a sale, developed the company’s IP, data, and partner strategies, and helped negotiate its successful exit to Amazon.
Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?
A: At Nominal, I’m excited to build a best in class legal and compliance org focused on enabling U.S. national security and industrial resilience.
This includes high-velocity contracting and being a responsible, compliant company, while also being a leader in surfacing regulatory hurdles that product-driven defense innovators face. These hurdles can act at cross-purposes with the broader mission, and I am eager for Nominal to be at the forefront of making positive change in this area.
This is also a particularly eventful time for USG <> infosec, with the final CMMC 2.0 rule taking effect this December. I’m pumped to be here in advance of that as we shape Nominal’s approach.
Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?
A: First and foremost the leadership, the team, and the culture. But also a growing market with a need for innovative new entrants native to today’s software-defined approach.
I know it’s cliche, but I think culture trumps strategy in 99% of cases, even if, ideally, you have both. In looking across startups, I knew I wanted to be in defense tech but, more specifically than that, at a company oriented around real outcomes to solve meaningful challenges in the national security space. I had seen the evolution of software-defined hardware at Palantir, and saw the real challenges of iterating on novel hardware solutions at Covariant using legacy tools from an analog era. I love Nominal’s laser focus on solving test and validation using modern data science techniques. Especially as the defense and space ecosystem, enabled by cloud data infrastructure and lower cost launch services, grows to meet the significant national security needs of the present moment.
Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?
A: My first impression of Nominal is this is a team that sweats the details! Having grown with Palantir from a private company, through the listing process, to the scaling stage afterward (during Covid no less), I have some perspective on right-sizing operations, workflows, and processes to meet the work of the company and what it needs to optimize for at a given moment in time. I appreciate here that there’s a lightweight but thoughtful Notion or Google Doc covering key operational topics (e.g., comparing the distinct but overlapping data security regimes we work with, specifying a schema for Slack organization etc.). As a new employee, it makes a strong positive impression that within a high-performing, high-velocity startup in a hard technical area, the leadership and team have still prioritized investing in these types of detailed resources. It gives me a lot of confidence that we are prepared to meet scaling challenges as we continue to grow fast.
Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?
A: I love the unique cocktail of emerging company legal work in the national security space, where the mission is second to none, the regulations are old and vague, and velocity is paramount.
Q: How do you stay grounded?
A: Spending time with my wife (Melissa) and three daughters (Alani, Devyn, and Perri). Tennis, skiing, and hiking where there is time outside of shuttling said daughters to their various activities. And lastly, travel! While we’ve been all over, there will always be a special place in my heart for Santander, Spain where I spent three summers growing up and remain close with the family from my initial high school exchange program there.