The Twenty Minute VCWe Built Our Own Salesforce in Months. Here's Why We're Cancelling the $600K Contract | Curative CEO
Episode Details
EPISODE INFO
- Released
- July 18, 2026
- Duration
- 1h 29m
- Channel
- The Twenty Minute VC
- Watch on YouTube
- ▶ Open ↗
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
Fred Turner is the Founder and CEO @ Curative, one of the wildest stories in tech. Fred scaled a COVID testing business from $0 to $5BN in revenue and took the team from 7 to 7,000 employees in just 9 months. They did over 206,000 COVID tests in a single day and signed contracts in the 100s of $Ms with several of the largest states. Today, Curative is a unicorn health insurance business taking on the incumbents for one of the largest markets in healthcare. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:07 – Meet Fred Turner: thrill of winning vs. fear of losing 02:01 – Why he couldn't have built this business in the UK 03:40 – From cattle genetics to sepsis to Covid (the origin story) 07:54 – Pivoting into human diagnostics and at-home STD testing 14:43 – Founding Curative on a sepsis thesis, before Covid changed everything 18:44 – Covid hits: pivoting overnight into mass testing 27:03 – Building an "orthogonal supply chain" to scale testing 10x 30:44 – $5B in revenue, brutal margins, and losing money on vaccines 35:32 – The pivot to health insurance after Covid winds down 41:39 – How AI agents replaced entire back-office departments 45:48 – Is SaaS dead? Cutting Salesforce and 80% of SaaS spend 1:13:06 – Subcritical: building a fundamentally safer nuclear reactor ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465 Follow Harry Stebbings on X: https://twitter.com/HarryStebbings Follow Fred Turner on X: https://twitter.com/FredTurnerBio Follow 20VC on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/20vchq Follow 20VC on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok Visit our Website: https://www.20vc.com Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/contact ----------------------------------------------- #20vc #harrystebbings #curative #founder #ceo
SPEAKERS
Fred Turner
guestCo-founder and CEO of Curative, known for rapidly scaling COVID testing operations and later moving into health insurance.
Harry Stebbings
hostFounder and host of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), interviewing leading startup founders and investors.
EPISODE SUMMARY
In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, featuring Fred Turner and Harry Stebbings, We Built Our Own Salesforce in Months. Here's Why We're Cancelling the $600K Contract | Curative CEO explores curative’s whiplash pivots: COVID scale, insurer reinvention, AI overhaul Turner traces a founder journey of repeated pivots—cattle genomics to human diagnostics to sepsis—before a near-death shutdown set the stage for Curative’s COVID testing break out.
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