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Fred Turner

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127
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2026-07-18
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2026-07-18
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  1. “I think one thing that I have learned is to always try and get a lot of different perspectives on a problem. I think I would historically have sort of approached things from like one scientific viewpoint. And sometimes people would say, no, like take a step back and think about that problem more broadly. And one of the things I learned during the curative COVID push is we had to bring together a bunch of people from very different backgrounds. We hired a bunch of former military people who were just like incredible at deployment, but they speak a different language. And then we're trying to get them to talk to scientists. And then we hired a bunch of Silicon Valley developers. And they all like think about the problem. They're all trying to solve the problem, but they all come at it from a completely different perspective. And a lot of times I wouldn't have considered that point of view on doing it. And I think what I've found is that the more of those perspectives that you can kind of get on a problem, the closer to ground truth you get. Like you're never going to one of those people is going to give you the ground truth. But if you hear”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Was yes. But to get, I mean, he'd been through YC and had a successful company, and it was just awesome to have someone like that take a bet on what you're doing coming from the UK, where I was used to the cold shoulder and no one was interested in what I was building. And, you know, no one wanted to take a meeting.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “He was like a month into the YC batch, like came by the lab and was like super supportive of what we're doing. And I think just coming from the British background, we couldn't even get meetings with investors.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think when I first was getting started, there were a lot of people that helped make it be possible to move to the US and kind of like made a bet on a kid coming from the north of England to come to Silicon Valley, like some of their earliest investors, the guy Josh Buckley, who was one of the first guys who invested in his during the YC batch just because he liked what we were doing and he thought it was cool. But being willing to kind of take a bet on a kid.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, I think that that's like the workflows will be people are going to be deploying more agents than engineers and they're going to keep the same number of engineers. We're just going to build a lot more.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, because I think the way, I mean, the way we're driving workflows is that you have one senior engineer managing a bunch of downstream agents that are actually doing the work. And then we're now getting to the point where we have like mostly unsupervised agents taking feedback from the team on things, implementing features. And then the engineers are coming in and actually checking that what it built makes sense. So they're becoming more the reviewer and like the architect. And then you have these downstream agents doing the work.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Have to have some kind of burden for passing regulation. There needs to be some penalty. Like right now, you pass a regulation. That's like, okay, you did a good job. Like the goal is to pass regulation. There has to be some penalty. If you pass regulation, your country must pay some tax, additional tax for having passed that regulation. Just adding and adding an adding without refining what you've got today and like really going and digging in how is this regulation affecting things on the ground, like just more additive regulation is bad. You need to be looking at the effect of what you've done and refining it and iterating on it and not just trying to add some new landmark regulation.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yep. Dude. I think probably a year ago I have changed my mind that there are workflows that can't be done with the models, with today's models. I think today the current gen models can do every back office task we have at curative. It's just a matter of deploying them. Like getting them set up, getting them configured, having the right policies. And I think a year ago, I thought there was opportunity. I thought there was things we could do, but I don't think I would have said you could do every single one of our current back office flows.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “You should definitely have kids. Don't wait. I mean, I think there's too much sentiment of people, oh, you know, live your life and wait until you're in your late 30s and then have kids. I think, you know, like have kids early when you have the energy and can run around and not sleep. And it's one of the best things you'll ever do. You should just get on with it.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So we're very well matched. I think it's one of the things we basically never argue. And that's how I knew very early on that it was meant to be is we're always on the same page about things. And so it's actually very easy to run a company together because we usually see eye to eye on like how something should be done.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Each one of our deployments would be about a billion dollars of construction cost for a 300 megawatt facility. But it's not, you know, it wouldn't be the same like you wouldn't raise that as equity. It would be a mix into the plan of equity and debt. It's more infrastructure build financing.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah. Well, that's why we ended up starting subcritical. Very busy running curative, but that was an idea that was just too important to pass up. And there was nobody else. So only one that is under like active construction of those systems is in China based on a US design from the 2010s that the US stopped working on after Fukushima.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “But it's another place where we sell code gen as a solution. And I think, you know, this is one of the bets Anthropic made, and they're totally right on. You can generate really good CAD models by having it write Python to make the CAD model. Like it's not good necessarily good at 3D space visualization or outputting a drawing as vectors, but it's really, really good at generating plausible Python code that can draw that part.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “We're also seeing AI on the nuclear side and the design because design is like traditionally a thing that is done by a whole bunch of people sitting doing drawings and mechanical engineering and the models have gotten really good at that. And so we're seeing that you can do the design with far fewer people using AI to optimize a lot of the design parameters, where historically you might have needed 100 mechanical engineers to design every single nut and bolt and part. You can do it with 20 really good mechanical engineers that are designing the critical pieces, the important pieces, and overseeing the AI on like, oh, well, I need a little bracket that joins this piece to this piece that doesn't need a human to design that.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “They're both I figured out the tam thing. No, they're both like trillion dollar opportunities. If we execute right, yeah.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I mean, I think any power from coal will mostly go away. I think you're still going to see a lot of gas just because, particularly in the US, it's cheap, it works, it's fast. But I think coal is going to go away. And then you're just going to see more of everything.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yes, I think what we're seeing kind of all across the supply chain and nuclear is a push to get more nuclear online. And I think Subcritical is kind of leading the way there with a faster path to market than any of the other players. But there's a lot of people working on deploying a lot of new nuclear power.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “What you do to it, the vision will never run away. Even if you put in 10 times as much power from the accelerator, it will never run away. There's nothing you can do to it to cause it to go critical or to have a criticality accident. And so it's a fundamentally safer way of doing nuclear fission that is just approaching it from a different angle.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Control. And so I was initially pretty disheartened. I was like, well, we're not going to get new nuclear power. This is not going to work. And then I stumbled on this idea of what's called the energy amplifier. And it's not a new technology. It's been around since the late 80s, early 90s. It was really pushed by a guy at Kalarubia who used to be the CERN director. He was a Nobel laureate in physics. And the idea is you always operate below that 1.0 threshold. So we are designed to operate at 0.97. So that means you never have enough neutrons to keep the reaction going. The reaction will always fizzle out. So no matter what you do, it's going to fizzle out. But normally that would mean you get no power output. What you do in the energy amplifier is you point a really powerful particle accelerator at that fuel and that puts in the extra neutrons to drive the reaction forward. But if you turn that accelerator off, all of your energy output just stops. And so you basically have this big on-off switch where you can control fission and you can guarantee that no matter”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Nuclear, that is very hard to guarantee. In traditional nuclear, one of the reasons it's difficult, you're basically balancing on this knife edge. So in a reactor you have what's called criticality, right, which is where you have to produce enough neutrons each generation that they go off and do exactly one more reaction and it keeps itself going. If you get too much of that, too many neutrons, it's a bomb, right? It will be a runaway reaction and it will blow up. That's very bad. That's only ever happened once by accident, which is Chernobyl. All the others have been not criticality events. So you don't want that. If it happens not enough, then it just turns off. So if you go too far below this exact 1.0 threshold, you get no power out. And so you're trying to balance perfectly on that knife edge of exactly 1.0 where you can control it. And that is a hard problem to guarantee. And this is the fundamental issue with nuclear regulation. How do you guarantee under no possible circumstances will you deviate from that perfect?”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That it is very safe and that it's not a science or engineering problem. Like, that was when we started looking at companies to invest in, that was for me that the thing that I was sort of disappointed by is everybody was approaching it as if nuclear is this massive engineering challenge. And sure, like the engineering is hard, it is complicated. But fundamentally, we have built safe nuclear reactors since the 60s. They work great. The technology has not really changed or progressed since then. We know how to build these. That's not the problem. The problem is that due to a lot of the anti-nuclear push in the 80s, we have had a regulatory environment that has been incredibly restrictive and difficult to get new nuclear reactors built, particularly in the US, but also worldwide. There's been this push to say, how do you guarantee that under any possible circumstance, like once in a million year events, that you'll never have anything go wrong? And in traditional”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Makes sense, yeah. So I do carry the ginger jean. I know if she had carried the ginger jean, that would have been a deep concern. But she luckily doesn't. And so that was one of the key tests. You progressed.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, that was a concern. My brother is ginger. I'm sorry. So I carry the ginger jean. My brother is ginger too. Yeah. Yeah.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I make a gear flashing. On our first date, so after our first date, we both shared our genome files with each other, our VCF. And so she said she'd done this before, and the guy thought it was really strange. And we both, oh, we should share our genomes and then compared and check that we were compatible so that it was worth having a second date. And we were both totally into that. So we knew it was meant to be. We were compatible by genome. We had two beautiful kids. We knew it was meant to be. I'm sorry.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yes, so there is a company that I co founded with my wife, Subcritical, in the nuclear fission space based on an idea that I had a few years ago that we need more power and that nuclear is a really good way to do this. It started off actually as looking for an investment. This was like one of my first times I was like, we should find a company that's doing nuclear power and try and invest in it and see if we can make it go faster because I kind of thought I'm pretty good at making things go faster in really regulated spaces. Like that's kind of what I'm what I'm good at. That's your thing. Yeah. That's my thing. Everybody's got to have a thing. And so you're a young.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Outside of curative, I invest primarily in companies of people that I know and I do very little investing if I don't know the founders.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I think that's why we've seen them double down, right? It's like they made money with us before. And so this last round was led by insiders.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “No, no, we haven't sold any secondaries. There was a dividend at the end of COVID. We paid out some, all the investors got 10x their money back before we started the health insurance company. And then they still have their shares today.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I think things that have some regulation around them and are like complex industries, yes, they're going to see the advantages of the models, but they're not going to see competition from anthropic open AI.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Like health insurance. Like, how do you grow health insurance earnings? Or you go chase government business and you pay a bunch of lobbyists to get the government to overpay for care? That's all now backfired and all the government business, Medicare and Medicaid is now like a bad business and they're all losing money. Everybody has insurance. So unless you're going to increase the total spending, how do you go earnings? Well, if you can make it more efficient, so you're not spending 9% of your premium on admin tasks, that's a way you can grow earnings without having to deliver a worse product.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I'm quite bullish now because I think a lot of what's going on in AI is going to massively boost earnings in other areas of the economy that have struggled to go earnings any other way.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Think empowering agents to do things on your behalf. Like we've seen internally getting the team, I think like Isaac, our CTO and co-founder and I have like trusted the agents faster than most of the team and we're okay like giving the agent authority to do things. Like it was a big internal dispute getting the agent to sign these contracts. So the agent opens DocuSign and clicks the sign button and it's legally binding and it has my signature on the page. And getting that figured out internally was very it took a lot of rounds of convincing people that that was okay and that we can do that. And so I think it will take time for people to trust these agents with stuff like give it your credit card and let it go book a holiday, right? Like getting people to trust it acting on your behalf I think will take longer.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Right. So these are not like it's not like you're taking some like super aspirational thing away from people. I think these are jobs that will look back and say, God, I can't believe we had people doing that kind of work. That's crazy.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I think we have to build the social structures that give those people purpose and meaning outside of work because I don't think that we're going to have, I don't think that's a bad thing. Like a lot of these mid-level jobs that are being replaced are awful jobs. They're people sitting at a desk with like fluorescent lamps shining at their face, reviewing random paperwork. That's not what people like, you know, when you're little and you say, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to sit in an office and rubber stamp insurance forms. Like it's not a good job.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “I think just play with the models. Like, I think a lot of people severely underestimate what they're capable of because maybe they tried ChatGPT two years ago. Like they're moving so fast and they're so much better than they were even six months ago that if you're not like relentlessly trying them, then you're going to significantly underestimate. And then also like where they are today is not where they're going to be clearly in a few years. So you got to skate to where the puck is going to be.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Like if we ever get mythos and it costs $100 per million tokens, you probably wouldn't use it for the coal workflow, but you could maybe use it as a supervisor. But how you actually manage those agents at scale with the volume of exceptions that they generate? Because you don't want them just rubber stamping yes or no either way. Like you need a more nuanced decision there.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “One of the things we found that's been a bottleneck is when you launch these agent workflows, there's always things that they don't want to let it do everything, right? So like with our contracting, our sales workflow, like there's a certain margin threshold where the sales agent can't promise a client that will do it at that margin. But we don't necessarily want it to say no. We want to make a business decision about whether this is the right thing to do for that client. And so you end up generating this like massive list of approval requests that is now much longer than it would have been because you're doing 10 times as much work. So you're now getting, even if you're only getting an approval request 1% of the time, you're still getting 10 times as many as you were last year. And so one of the things we found is like actually how do you manage all of those exceptions that now become a really high volume? So we tried agent supervising agents, which I think works to a degree and maybe as the models get better as well, you can also have like a more expensive.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “In jest or like figure out that data, you can just feed that data into a model and let it figure out how to stretch it going forward.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I think if you approach it in the right way, then the cleanliness doesn't really matter that much because the models are so good at cleaning up the data if you give them the right context. And so that's one of the things we found actually with migrating away from some of these SaaS vendors is we moved away from Looker, right? Google's Looker product for visualizations. It's super expensive and we moved to do it in Snowflake. And it's been a lot cheaper. It's worked really well. Part of that migration is moving all of our dashboards and all of the things that fed from Looker would have taken like probably like a year and a whole bunch of engineers and data scientists. We did most of it with an Agentic workflow that would spin up, find the next dashboard, figure out how to convert it into what we needed, and then close it down on the looker side and boot it up on the other side. And it ended up being like a project for one or two people and it took, it still took a couple of months, but it was a lot more doable because we didn't have to have some”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “And the response time, the response time is so much better You get a response back in a few minutes. That's the usual place where we see people ask Gwen if she's an AI when she responds to your email within five minutes. Because in healthcare, if you get a response same week from an insurance company, you're doing so well.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Somewhere around there There's some aspects of the business that are clinical workflows. So, all of our members get a care navigator who stays with them for their entire journey. And that is just going to grow linearly with our membership. So we want you to have that human point of contact that is available. But the Care Navigators are now getting significantly more useful because they can actually use the agents to do a lot of the follow-up on their behalf and they're not having to remember to reach out to this diabetic member every week about X. They can kind of manage it at a population scale. And so there we're like keeping the same headcount relative to our membership growth, but just letting them do so much more than they could do before.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I think it's a mix. I mean, I think there is definitely some of that. You know, it's also coming to seeing valuation boosts by doing it. So that's incentivizing maybe bad behavior. But some of it for sure is that these workflows are changing.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “That works so well in sales, and the best salespeople will do that. But it's really hard to scale that. And you end up getting people that reach out three times, then give up. And when you're trying to scale something up, if you can scale up that relentlessness, that is really valuable.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Yeah. Because I think you just find all these new things that you can do that you just couldn't do before, that it wasn't possible to do. So Gwen is sending on average 15,000 emails a day. Customized emails to providers that know about their practice, that know about their work. And one of the things we found is like that relentlessness of the follow-up is what works. A lot of providers will get them on the ninth email. There is no way that a human is going to email them nine times because people, that's like you have to kind of have no shame to reach out that many times.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Yeah, but I think you'll see it work differently, though, where, I mean, what we're seeing with Gwen is we had a contract, a standard template contract that was drafted by a law firm. And then we have kind of like guardrails for what Gwen can agree to. But she just redlines it and then signs it. It doesn't go to a law firm for a review. Like we're signing hundreds of these contracts a day. It would be too encumbering. It would be too slow. And they would just be reviewing it with AI anyway. So we kind of trust the agent to do that legal review within certain parameters.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “And most of these contracts, right? Most employers, even our smallest employers, it's a million dollar contract at least.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “In some aspects, yes, because I think in some aspects that's kind of becomes the foundation of trust. And it's like almost the scarce resource, right? Of if you want to do a deal that's important, then you're going to use your scarce resource of people to manage that.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Relationship with that provided group that we're providing a chunk of your revenue. We work with you, you work with us. There's a relationship aspect there that has to be maintained, particularly for the larger groups by a person. And then on the sales side, we sell through a broker. And that broker wants to have a finalist presentation. They want to go to dinner. They want to go and play golf. And so what we've seen is on the sales side, like that relationship is, if anything, more powerful.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “So, what we've tried to kind of differentiate at curative is there's like two areas where we're really investing in people. That's technical skills and relationships. Those are two aspects that I don't see going away anytime soon is we still have a team that are actually deploying all of this AI. They use a ton of AI in all of their day-to-day work, right? They're not writing any code anymore. They're not even reading the code anymore. They're deploying all of this with cloud code or codecs and seeing like incredible results out of one senior engineer now is so much more productive than they were a year ago that we're investing in having those people. At the same time, there is a side particularly to health insurance that is relationship driven that I don't see as going away anytime soon. Ultimately, we insure a member and that member wants to be able to call and talk to a person. We have a lot of AI they can talk to. The AI is great. They love talking to the AI, but there has to be a person somewhere in the loop. We also work with these provider groups. We have a relationship.”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “It would still work what they're betting and what also we've seen is you don't just displace the labor. So here, like I think contracting is a perfect example. We've not said, okay, we're doing 100 a week, so we'll get the agent to do 100 a week. What we've done is said, well, now that we have the agent, we can do 10 times as many contracts this year as we could do last year. So we're going to do 10 times, and then we're going to try and do 20 times. And we would just do a lot more volume than you could possibly have done with a human team”

    2026-07-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source