YouSaid · the spoken record

Fred Turner

lines on the record: 127
first: 2026-07-18
most recent: 2026-07-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“If I say yes, I don't want our anthropic rep to double our pricing. But it would. It would work. It would be fine. Yeah. So it costs with people, it costs us about $1,500 to $2,000 on average to do a contract. The average with Gwen has been about $70. So it would still work fine. And so that's what we've seen is partly why the token use has exploded for us.”
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
“Doesn't go to zero. We've refocused that team to work on these bigger contracts, right? Because some of these deals we can do entirely over email. This agent is email only, and some of these providers will work completely over email to enter into an agreement.”
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
“Of how much are they getting paid? Find their email address from Zoom info, reach out to them, and then basically ping them repeatedly until they answer her with custom emails, like, hey, I know about your practice, I know what you're doing, like customized content to them. And then when she gets their retention, negotiate the rates back and forth, usually over like multiple rounds of negotiation, negotiate and redline the language. And that's another place where we found Python is great. These models are terrible editing Word documents. But if you tell them to write Python to edit a Word document, they're great at it. great hack and then sign the agreement. And so she now signs the agreements with my signature. She'll open up the document link and then click the button and it's my signature on that agreement. So this has taken us from doing about 100 contracts a week to about 100 contracts a day. Last year, as an entire team, we did 2,300 contracts so far in about the last eight weeks, the agent alone has done 3,500. And so what this is letting us do is like that 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
“A lot of work to go out, get their attention, do a negotiation, get them to sign an agreement, load all of their data and have them in your network. And this has been one of the biggest pieces of staying power of the big health plan businesses is they built that over a hundred years for Blue Cross and over like 50 years for United Signer and Etna. And so they did it slowly over a long period of time. If you're trying to from scratch come in and start a new health plan, you've got to reach out to all of those doctors and negotiate. And so we have a team of about 45 people who do those network contracts and they reach out and they negotiate. What we launched earlier this year is an agent called Gwen. And Gwen does the same workflow. You give her basically a lead. Hey, there's a primary care office over here. Here's the address. And she will google it, research them, learn a little bit about the practice, figure out what other payers are paying them because there's a lot of this data out there and these transparency files.”
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
“Yes, so I mean, this is one of, I think, the kind of leading indicators for us is that our anthropic cost over the last six or seven months has 6x every month from a base of a couple of tens of thousands of dollars now up to millions of dollars a month. Eventually we're going to have to stop that spending increase because it'll get unreasonable, but we just keep finding new things to do with it. And then the other thing we found that's been fascinating, we're seeing a lot of areas where it's not that we are necessarily replacing the team. It's that we're repurposing the team and they are now so much more productive. And so one area that has always been like a particularly challenging thing that makes it hard to build a new insurance company is we have to build this network. So the network is all the doctors and all the hospitals and all the people that we have to contract with. And there's about 1.2 million of those in the US that you want to have contracted. That ends up being like 60, 70,000 contracts that you have to do. That's just”
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
“So, this was part of Obamacare, and it's one of there's some good things in Obamacare, but there was a lot of things I think like the second order consequence was not considered. It sounds like a great PR thing to say we've capped insurance company profits, right? That sounds good, but it's BS.”
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
“Insurance is a very low margin business. So 85% of your premium that we collect must go out the door to pay for care. So if we get in a dollar, we've got to spend 85 cents pay half. By law. If less than that goes out the door, we have to give it back to the employer, which is another thing that's broken about US healthcare, because that drives completely through wrong incentive, where actually from an insurance company standpoint, if your profit's capped at 15%, the only way to increase profits is to increase total spending, which is not what you want your insurance company incentivized to do.”
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
“I think some of the biggest insurers will struggle. They will not be able to keep up from a margin standpoint with where we can get to with agents. I think some of them do have technical expertise. It's more operational and kind of people ops. If you've built a company of 100,000 people and in order to get this margin improvement, 50,000 of them have to be laid off. Somebody's fiefdom just got a lot smaller. And so they will do it slowly over 10 years. It will happen, but will it happen quickly? No. And will we be able to compete more effectively in the meantime? Yes.”
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
“Some of it's like that. Some of it's like very insurance specific software. So, like our claim system, for example, right, is this massive off-the-shelf platform that we just migrated to a few years ago? This is, again, why like, if I'd known AI was coming, we would have probably approached things differently. And it's just, it's very hard to use. Their API barely works. It's hard to get the data out of their database. They won't let us manage it. But that's how insurance companies are running things. And so we've built our own claim system completely from scratch in-house that's now, we've migrated most of the workflows off will be fully off in July.”
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
“We're cutting about 80% of our SaaS spend this year. Wow. So we had like in one of our internal meetings, we have a slide of when are SaaS contracts due and whose job is it to tell them that we're not renewing this year?”
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
“So, we're seeing a lot of back end stuff like Sentry stuff like that, right? Where it's like kind of become part of your infrastructure. Slack has been notoriously hard internally for us. So many people have built integrations and workflows that are now working in Slack. I think that while they keep putting the prices up, if they put the prices up too much, then eventually it'll make sense to replace 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
“Yeah. Wow. And so we're seeing, you know, there's pockets of software that I think persist because they are more infrastructure based”
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
“The maintenance is definitely one of the most challenging pieces. I agree with that. For most businesses of any reasonable scale, yes, it is worth it. Now, whether they will have the tech resources to do that soon, I think that's like the bigger question is kind of when will this happen? But when you build those things custom to your workflow, they work better. Like most of these big systems, you're paying an administrator. Like we had a full-time Salesforce administrator. You're paying people whose sole job is to manage this archaic software platform, not that Salesforce is archaic, but you know, we have a few other internal apps that we were paying for, like industry software that is taking multiple FTEs to maintain it. You can transition that into one great engineer. And then whenever you want a custom feature, you just go build 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
“Because I see the number of contracts we're canceling. Like we just recently canceled our Salesforce contract because we have an internal CRM that was vibe coded. Gone to zer”
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
“Around, and it's now a model writing Python code to do that same thing. And then every single time you throw that Python away and start from scratch.”
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
“Python to get these files into a standardized format because they're not very good at parsing files, but they're incredibly good at code gen. And so you can tell it to write a Python script to convert any random file into this known format and then test it and loop and iterate on your script until it's working. And then you throw away that script. And so it's single-use code that never gets used again. You just generate that code one time and then throw it away. And that works so well. And so now brokers, providers, employers, when people are sending us files, we always used to like insist oh you have to use our standard format for this and they'd hate it and they'd get mad because somebody's sitting there in a provider office like manually reformatting these files into our spreadsheet. Now send us whatever you've got, whatever format, it can be scribbles on a napkin. It doesn't matter. The model will figure it out. The model will convert it into our standard format. It will do it in about 15 minutes. And so you build these data ingestion pipelines that used to be hundreds of people sitting moving spread.”
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
“We've seen a lot on that claim side, claims processing used to be a very manual process where claims comes in and people like manually tweaking and editing it and also on the underwriting side. Underwriting, you know, the process used to be a broker comes to us with a group, an employer that they're looking to insure and they ask for competitive bids from multiple different insurance companies. And what that means is basically sending us an email with a bunch of PDFs and spreadsheets attached of who are the employees, what current claims do they have, what's the current insurance look like. And you'd think that over time they would develop like a standardized-ish format for how that should run. But no, every single one is like a different spreadsheet format, different PDF, and we tried to sort of solve that problem with software and build like universal importers and universal intake. And it kind of worked, but what we found works amazingly is literally to give the files to an agent, tell it to write.”
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
“That one wasn't that large. I think there was like five or six people. We've had a few other departments that have shrunk more than that with the.”
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
“For credentialing somebody, and it costs us about 20 cents. And so this is like a mind numbing process that payers have to do, which is important. We want to know the doctors in our network, right? Are validly licensed to practice medicine, but it historically has always been kind of terrible, and payers have been bad at it. If you're a doctor and you join a network and it takes three months before you can see any patients, it's just bureaucracy, right? Like they don't, doctors hate that. And it's not actually adding the value that it should be adding. It's just creating paperwork.”
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
“So much of that back office work has been completely changed by AI. We now have entire departments that used to be people like rubber stamping things. The first one that went to zero people was our credentialing department where this is a process that's incredibly labor intensive where you have to check old doctors that join our network have a valid medical license and aren't being sued for malpractice. And this is a person going to the medical board website checking that the license record is there, checking transcripts from their school, checking like a database of who's been sued by who, and then like rubber stamping. And that used to take us two to three months on average and cost about $50. We've now built in-house an agent that runs on Claude that does this end-to-end and it goes to the website, it verifies the license, it goes and reads the transcript, it puts it all together, it stamps it for approval, and we're now averaging about 12 hours turnaround time.”
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
“I think I wish that I knew AI was coming. Like the way we designed the business in 2022 when we first started, we had no idea that this wave of AI and LLMs was coming. Like we were building a health insurance business because we thought it was a good business to build. And we thought it needed to be built. We needed better alternatives in the market for health insurance. And then in the last like 18 months, how we do pretty much everything is now completely different workflow. There's so much of, I mean, all health insurance does is like moving bits around, right? Like we don't have a physical product. We give you a little plastic card. But apart from that, our product is that we move bits around in a database that means care is paid for. That's it. And we do a lot of managing, kind of managing a marketplace. We work with the providers to negotiate prices. We work with employers to negotiate how much they pay. And then we try to work with employees to keep them healthy. If we can get people to stay healthy, we can avoid the long-term downstream cost of care. Essentially, it's marketplace business.”
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
“The US has the access to by far the most cutting edge techniques and facilities and drugs than the rest of the world. And they are willing to spend a lot more in order to preserve life.”
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
“When all of the players are small, when you have smaller payers and smaller hospitals, you end up kind of getting to reasonable negotiations. What's happened is you have these massive payers, like the market is ultra-consolidated. You basically have like four large players that control the entire market on the payer side. And then you get these ultra-consolidated hospital systems because that's the only way for them to survive. If they want to fight with Blue Cross, the only way to survive is to get really big so they have the negotiating power. And then they just reach these loggerheads where nothing gets done and everybody's overpaying for everything and everything's inefficient. And when you have more competition in the market, more smaller payers entering, more smaller health systems, you start to get like an actual efficient market when you just negotiating for like, hey, I have a third of healthcare in the state and I have a third of all of the employees in the state, it's not an efficient market anymore because there's no alternative. You must reach a deal.”
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
“I think you have to break up the negotiating into smaller units, like it's gotten to this point where I think it's quite an efficient system as a market when the counterparties are small, when everything gets very consolidated, it becomes incredibly inefficient. So when we look at, for example, health systems, right? So we pay for care health systems, some of that care you can get in other places. If we look at how much we'd pay a primary care doctor who's independent compared to primary care doctor affiliated with a system, affiliated with a system, they get paid an average double. Same service, you know, same credentials. It's just that this one is part of a hospital system. And that hospital system will use the fact that they have a ton of beds, that they have this ultra special surgery center that you need. Like we need to have that capacity in our network because some people need to be hospitalized. Some people need those services that if you want to get access to that, you got to pay me double for my primary care doctors. And so”
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
“Up a lot of the primary care officers, if you can transform that with technology, can you drive much better outcomes? What we ultimately decided is it doesn't work that well because the payer mix is too broken up. And so as a hospital, your customer is like 50% the government and then a whole bunch of like split up smaller insurance plans and they all want different things and they change their mind every five minutes about what they actually want and you're trying to like keep them all happy. So your ability to really change things from the hospital side is quite limited is what we ended up deciding. And when you come back to it, like we looked at a bunch of preventative care things, we looked at primary care chain. Everything sort of”
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
“Well, it wasn't the first idea. We looked at a bunch of other stuff. We looked at other stuff in the lab testing industry. Unfortunately, it's just not that big an industry. And so even like we had this interesting technology that could theoretically let you do a lot of lab tests, our individual tests today, like as just one single test, which would be scientifically quite cool. But even if you say, okay, I'm going to displace all of Lab Coop and Quest, that's about 30 billion of market cap. So that's like the largest company you could possibly build is about 30 billion. That is a big company, but coming out of what we did with COVID, I wanted to build a much bigger company than that. And so there's just not a big enough market in lab testing. So lab testing was out. And then we briefly looked at trying to buy a hospital or multiple hospitals. We looked at one in Florida and we looked at one in Texas. And the idea was, well, if the hospital is kind of like the health system becoming the center of where care is delivered, they have bought.”
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
“Yeah, I think we started probably like late 21 is when we got really serious about health insurance. It just took a while to actually get the license.”
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
“Yes. When we started hiring people at the beginning, we told them this is three months. You have a job for three months. Don't bank on anything beyond three months. This is a three-month gig, and we're going to shut it all down in three months. So the CFO and now the president of Curative joined at the beginning. And for her, it was going to be a six-month gig. She came out of retirement to help with the pandemic for six months. Six years later, she's still here. But it was supposed to be temporary. And every time, you know, a surge, we got through a surge, I was like, all right, that's it. It'll be over now. And then they just kept happening. So we started looking at kind of what comes next middle of 2020, like really early”
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
“Giving back. A lot of our partners wanted it. So a lot of the partners on the government side were working with for testing also wanted us to administer vaccinations”
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
“Yes, we did two and a half million vaccinations. That was another service we did. We also lost a ton of money on that. That was a terrible business. Because the government wasn't paying enough. We lost money on every single dose. It cost more to administer them than we were getting paid.”
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
“It was not clear at the beginning, and I think also it's sort of changed when nobody's had any exposure to COVID being vaccinated probably provides a lot more benefit. Once everybody sort of had COVID a few times, then the vaccines benefit as much less because you've already had it. Also, the variants got weaker and weaker. When we were first rolling them out, I mean, I think in December of 2020, there was benefit for a lot of people getting the vaccine.”
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
“So, after all was said and done, the money that we basically put forward into the insurance business, the health insurance company was about $500 million that we invested into the health insurance business”
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
“All your fixed costs are the same. You're still paying $7,000 to people. Now, you don't have to buy as many consumables, but all of that infrastructure has to be maintained for the surge. And so this is, again, where it's like the opposite of the traditional lab industry, where they have a very flat volume. Every year, people do roughly the same amount of blood work as they did last year. Or maybe they do predictably slightly more. But it's within a couple of percentage points. Here, you're kind of building it for that peak capacity and then during the lulls, like maintaining that capacity is incredibly expensive. And so it was kind of necessary. And this was part of the way it was set up. They increased the price. The reimbursement price that they were paying for these tests because they needed to incentivize the capacity to be built. Because if you don't build that peak capacity, then when you have a surge, it all goes horribly wrong. And no one can get a test. But that means you basically have to pay to overbuild it. Because during the dips, you have to have that capacity. You can't just shut it down.”
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
“Really good during surges. And then really bad not during searches. So, what we found was when there is a peak, right? So we get a new variant, or usually winter was the biggest peak, but then we started having these summer peaks, which is kind of weird. Everybody would run to get tested. And these were all public testing sites. So these were in parking lots. These were the drive-thru tests. That was what we were doing. So if you went to a drive-through testing site, like the biggest one was the Dodger Stadium site in LA. It was seven lanes of traffic, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week. So they were testing at the peak about 10,000 people a day coming through their cars, getting tested, and coming back to the lab. So when you're at peak capacity and you're filling all of the labs volume, it's very profitable. Then those basically surges subside, right? And you end up back at testing, you know, using 20 or 30% of your capacity.”
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
“I mean, some of the hiring, you have to get licensed people for certain roles, but other more administrative roles, you don't need licensed people. And so we would literally, a lot of people wanted to work on the pandemic, which is very helpful. We'd have people like line up in the parking lot socially distanced, like down the street, and then give them five-minute interview slots and just have somebody sit there with a clipboard and it's like five minutes. And next just to get the volume of people in the door.”
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
“And that was December of 2020. So that was within eight months from 0 to 206,000. And the company went from about $7,000 to $7,000 employees in those first nine months.”
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
“That's pointless. So you got to find other ways of doing the testing using supplies that maybe wouldn't traditionally be used for this kind of testing. So we were sourcing swabs from other types of vendors that were being used for electronic testing and then sterilizing them. We were sourcing, there's this kind of extraction material that you usually use in magnetic beads is kind of the default standard, but there's this other way of doing it with filter plates, which is more scalable because it's basically just glass and plastic. And you can scale that up faster than you can scale up magnetic beads where they all come from basically two factories in China. And so we're like, okay, well, we should never use magnetic beads because that's”
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
“Right. What it basically means is everybody was chasing the same consumables, the same supplies. Everybody was trying to use the same stuff. And if you can make one X of that, maybe they can increase to make 1.2x. If everybody's trying to buy that, us also trying to buy that doesn't help. That doesn't net increase the number of tests being done, right? It just makes us all squabble over 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
“McKinsey Consultant specializing in innovation and thorough supply chain. Yeah, great. Well, I found that was like a good fancy word that was helpful from a sales standpoint.”
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
“You have to kind of scale something like that up from scratch, that the existing labs, like the lab industry in general is a very low margin industry and it's built on efficiency. You look at the big labs, the Quest and Lab Corps, and they are ultra-efficient machines. Like some of what they do with automation is incredible. But if you're asking them to 10x capacity, that's literally the opposite of what they're built for. They are built for, we will get 1% extra margin by optimizing this bit of the process over here so that it is perfectly efficient. And they're really good at that. But if you ask them to 10x that, it really doesn't work. And the mindset isn't there. The people don't know how to scale those kind of things up. All of the supply chain broke down. And so we basically said, okay, start from scratch, throw all of that away. Imagine that you're going to have to scale this up to hundreds of thousands of tests a day. Where do you start? And so we built what we called an orthogonal supply chain, which is just basically a fancy way of saying we don't use the things other people use.”
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
“Yeah, they tested every employee at every nursing home across the state once a week for a three-month period. And so they did a great job of basically keeping things open, keeping these nursing homes open, keeping visitation, but making sure that the employees of those nursing homes were not spreading COVID to the people in the nursing homes. And so they wanted to test every single employee that was working at those nursing homes and then exclude the people that weren't, that had COVID so they weren't exposing the residents there. And so we ran this big program, a bunch of labs, or they put it out to bid, and everybody said, no, that's too crazy. Like, that's impossible. We cannot possibly test that many facilities with that tight a turnaround time. Like, this is impossible. And we bid, yeah, we can do that. We'll make that work. And we delivered 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
“Probably one of the Florida contracts was maybe the largest. So we did a contract with the state of Florida for all of their nursing home testing. I forget what the dollar figure was, but it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They put it out to bid and we won”
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
“So, the best thing we could get with the city of LA because they have obviously their city, there are certain restrictions is that they would pay after delivery, but they would pay net one on the invoice. And so we would deliver the tests for a day, and then we would send somebody to City Hall the next morning to pick up a check for those tests. So the tests had been done, they were paying after we delivered them, but it was not your standard like 30 or net 60 for a government contract. They were having, we were invoicing them every day for the number of tests they did and they were having somebody in their finance department like get us the check because we needed that to pay for supplies to basically grow out that testing capacity for where they want it 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
“This was like early March, so people locked down to just started. Everybody was starting to freak out. There was basically nowhere to get a test. Unless you were ultra high risk and in a hospital, there was pretty much no chance you were getting a test. So everybody was freaking out. This is when everybody was still like cleaning their supermarket bags with wipes. And nobody knows what's going on. Everything's shutting down. It wasn't so bad on the West Coast, but New York was like was really bad already by this point.”
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
“Yeah. And then so they were doing a pilot. They said, look, we got a couple of labs. You know, you're going to have to demonstrate this because we were a complete unknown, right? We'd 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
“Longevity front, yeah, exactly. So she was a friend and was trying to basically help with the pandemic. And so she actually drove me down to LA with a car full of PCR machines so I could like work on a laptop. And she helped with a lot of the early development work. And she tweeted, hey, we've got COVID testing capacity. Does anybody want some? And the deputy mayor of LA slid into her DMs and was like, yes, please, we would like to talk about that. So that was how our first big contract came about”
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
“So, this was mostly, yeah. And so, actually, our very first customer was the sheriff department in San Demas. Well, we did some private testing for individuals that were paying for the tests, but our first government customer was the sheriff's department in Sandemas. And that came about because they got wind that we were setting up a COVID lab because people were freaking out about it in the town. And so one of their sheriffs reached out to me on LinkedIn and was like, hey, what are you guys doing? And so I connected with him and I explained what we're doing and how it was very safe and how we had this way of deactivating the COVID as soon as it went into the sample. And so there was no live virus on site and we were not presenting a risk to the community. And actually this was going to be a good thing. We're going to be hiring a lot of people and kind of got him on board that, you know, we're doing we knew what we're doing and we're doing this in a safe way. And then he was like, well, we really need testing. And then the fire department wanted testing. And then our first really big contract was the city of LA. And that came about from a tweet. So we had Laura Demick.”
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
“Forward revenue from customers. So we were getting paid. We had our first testing contract. We were doing police and the fire department.”
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
“And that's where the lab was. And so I flew out there to look at that lab. This was from San Francisco and to look at one other lab license that was, I think, affiliated with one of the universities. You know, they had a good space. They had this license, and they were doing pretty minimal testing. So they just kind of like a blank slate. And so it started off as a 50-50 JV between Curative and this company that had the lab license. And we would bring the test, we would bring the expertise, they would bring the license. And it became pretty clear quite quickly that they didn't have the expertise to scale it up. Like they were actively getting in the way of scaling it up. So we bought them out.”
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
“So we reached out, I reached out to a bunch of people on you in the Bay Area that had facilities with this kind of license. Nobody wanted anything COVID related on site. Nobody wanted anything to do with it. And so I like put it out. I just put out an email to everybody I know. And there's actually a guy who was in the same YC batch as me who'd become a VC. Like basically very far east of actual LA, still in LA County, it's a little city best known for Bill and Ted. It's a little town of like 30,000 people.”
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