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

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“Because I've just sold the lab license, and so we didn't have a lab anymore that was capable of running these kind of tests. We had a test. So our chief scientific officer at Curative had in his spare time developed a COVID test. And one of the things they'd done at a previous company is they developed one of these flu tests and just offered it to employees to make them feel better. And so he said, hey, can I develop a COVID test? I don't think it'll be very useful, but it might make our employees feel good. And it's like a good training exercise for the team. And so they had worked on through January and the early part of February a COVID test that they'd been developing basically in their like spare time in evenings and in weekends. And so then when everything started to really take off, we actually already had the test. What we didn't have was a lab to deploy then.”
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 I was like in my apartment in San Francisco looking at some data that I think was on Twitter. And I was like, oh crap, if this continues at this rate, like this is going to be way more substantial than people realize. And so this was probably mid-February. And so then I started to reach out about sort of setting up testing capacity to, well, first of all, we had the problem of finding a lab 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, yes. And so it all happened quite quickly from like a lot of me saying, no, no, no, this is not going to be a thing. Like, don't worry about 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
“And we were like, that's really out of character that he wouldn't at least call us or text us, or that he's having his assistant. And when we dug in, they were getting ready for this thing called COVID-19, that they were expecting to see the first patient in their hospital. And so that was the first inkling for me of like, oh crap, this is going to be a big thing. This is going to be bigger than people think it is. And so they were shutting down the entire hospital. And so it started off for us as like, okay, well, we can't run our clinical studies. We can't actually launch this product because all the hospitals are in lockdown. Maybe we can go help out with this testing thing for a couple of weeks until all of this blows over, and then we'll go back to sepsis.”
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
“First money in. First money in. Love it. And so we had a pilot set up with the first hospital in Wisconsin. This was a clinician that we'd worked with before. He was really enthusiastic. And then we got a call from his assistant saying, this is all on hold and I can't speak to you for at least three 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
“Start that business. We raised a million dollars of seed money. Justin was the first investor. You mentioned at the beginning, Justin Matine. He came in right as I was shutting down Shield. He was an investor in Shield. And he wanted to put more money into Shield. And I said, no, I don't think you should do that. I think that company is, you know, not going to make it, unfortunately. But I'm thinking of starting this new thing. And he was like, yes, I'm in. And he didn't even know what it was.”
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
“Out of the emergency room, we will then take on that patient, they would pay us a fixed fee. So, no matter what happens, we're on the hook. If we can drive a better outcome by applying mostly just getting doctors to follow the instructions, but at scale, then you could drive better outcomes by getting those academic medical center type clinical results, but helping a community hospital actually do 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
“In the emergency room, they don't suspect sepsis fast enough. And as I said earlier, it's every hour is 12% increase in mortality. And the intervention that they have to do is actually pretty severe. They basically put a big IV line usually in your femoral artery. They're pumping you full of fluids. They're pumping you full of nastand biotics that have bad side effects. So it's a pretty aggressive treatment. But if they don't suspect sepsis early enough and jump to that treatment, by the time they get there, it's already too late. And so if you're in a community hospital and it's 2 a.m. on a Saturday, is there someone on staff that actually suspects sepsis early enough or does it wait until Monday morning? And so it doesn't matter if you have a better test, if no one ever runs it. And so the original pitch behind curative is let's take the learnings from an academic medical center and go out to community hospitals and basically build mini hospital and hospital that just manages their sepsis patients. So whenever they get somebody, we will diagnose them as having sepsis.”
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. Originally, the pitch behind curative was we were going to also solve sepsis, but in a completely different way. When we were going through all of this work with the sepsis diagnostics, one of the things that kept jumping out in the data was when you look at other companies that have tried to do sepsis diagnostics, because we were not the first, a bunch of big pharma companies like Roche spent a couple hundred million, Siemens spent 100 million. A bunch of companies spent a lot of money trying to make better sepsis diagnostics. Kind of this like graveyard of dead sepsis companies. And when you dig into the data, you find this really interesting thing that in academic medical centers, when you try out these new sepsis tests, they work great. And you see much better outcomes and you see people live longer and it's saving lives. And then you try to replicate that in bigger studies and they fail. And when you dig in and look why, it's when you expand that aperture of who's in the trial out of the academic medical center and into community hospitals. What's happening in a community hospital is they're so understaffed, they're so overwhelmed with the volume.”
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's a lot easier to build a company the second time around. Like, there's so many mistakes the first time where you just don't know how to do thing X like the first time you fire somebody, like how to build a good interview process, how to build a pipeline. There's so many things that it's really easy to screw up the first time around. And then when you've seen them go wrong, it's so much easier to build it the second time around. And so like, yes, it's the worst thing in the world to go through is having something you poured all that time and energy into and like, you know, the seven-day work weeks and the late nights basically go to zero, but as long as through that you learn and you take those lessons and you go solve an even bigger problem, I think, you know, you got something out of 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
“No, no, because I don't think we would have pivoted as hard into COVID when COVID hit. I mean, it would have probably been easy. So, timing is 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
“Bigger tank. Gravitas. Yeah, many, many billions of dollars. Tam for testing for this and ended up getting a term sheet from a strategic large public diagnostic company, signed the term sheet, did three weeks of work on docs. We were in the second round of docs, and then their CEO killed it because it was too competitive with their core products. Meanwhile, we told all the investors that, oh yeah, we've got the lead, we're good to go. Here's the paperwork. And so that was the death of the company. We had about three weeks worth of cash.”
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 the testing was working great. Prototypes were pursuing the FDA approval process. We went to do a series B round, ended up being a strategic”
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 so we were working on basically a better testing technology where from the earliest date, you could detect these bacteria and what antibiotic they are going to be susceptible to and treat people faster. Because with sepsis, basically every hour that you don't treat somebody is about a 12% increase in mortality. So you want to get the treatment as soon as possible.”
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 then we found a fascinating market in sepsis. And so sepsis is a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people a year. It's basically where you get bacteria in your bloodstream. And what kills you is not actually the bacteria. It's your own immune system. So you're not supposed to have bacteria in your blood, right? Your blood is supposed to be sterile. And when bacteria get in there, your immune system kind of freaks out and it triggers this whole downstream cascade where your blood vessels start to leak and all of your organs start failing and it's basically really bad. And that's what kills you is your own immune reaction to the bacteria rather than the bacteria. And so this is one of the leading causes of death in the US, often if you're dying from something else, like if you have serious cancer, it'll be sepsis that ultimately ends up being what kills you because you get more susceptible to it with other diseases. And so it's leading cause of death, like increasing mortality. It's incredibly expensive. Outcomes are”
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
“But when I was like last in this, yeah, the statistics were just kind of a like steady increase. And then an increase in resistance. This is getting to the point where certain SDDs are like harder and harder to treat and some of them might eventually become untreatable or like you have to be hospitalized to get a certain really how philantiotic to treat it, which is crazy. And this antibiotic stewardship was the whole thing. And so we did that with STDs and then...”
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
“Okay. Yeah, on the back end, it's more natural, right? All of these things have DNA in them. And so if you're looking to do better DNA testing, you're just looking for markets where people care more about that. And anything human people obviously care a lot more about are more willing to pay for and are much larger markets. And so we sort of did like a market first approach of where could there be interesting things and we narrowed in on antibiotic resistance in STDs as being like a particularly interesting area where they're getting harder and harder to treat because you get more and more antibiotic resistance. And if you're doing the DNA testing, you can predict what the best drug is going to be early. Treat with that drug and then you're not using the most aggressive antibiotics.”
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 for the coffee. It was, you know, for Andreason, it was like a small around. Sure. And so we kept developing the technology. We had customers. And then we went to go raise an A. And then people did do the TAM calculation. And there's about 100 million cows in the US. If you're doing well, you could charge 15 to $20 per test. So even if you assume you could test every cow every year, you'd be at 1.5 billion total market, which is not enough to do a series A off of. And so what we end up doing is taking some of the core DNA testing technology that we had developed, pivoting and using that for human diagnostics. And so that was my kind of first foray into healthcare. We actually first launched high throughput STD testing lab, which was, and we launched an at-home STD test that was, that was tons of fun.”
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, their bio fund did our seed round right out of YC, and I don't think they did the TAM calculation. They're like, oh, this sounds interesting. And then they did the round. It was a small round. It was like 1.65 million”
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
“Move to the valley, and then it was the same pitch, the same company we were doing mostly dairy testing at that point. So testing dairy cows to try and predict their milk yield, which for farmers is actually very valuable because they don't make milk until they're 18 months old. And so from day one, all your animals have to have a cough every year to keep making milk. So your herd doubles every 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
“This was like the end of 2015 Yeah. So I went back to the hotel room and it turned out like the application deadline was six days away. So I was like, all right, it's meant to be. So did the application, you know, got the interview, came back for the interview, and then moved to Silicon Valley for the summer 16 batch.”
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 VC episode, by the way. There we go. It's a new phrase for you. Yes, so I went from initially cattle testing through sepsis to COVID. So it started off my first company in the UK, which was called TL BioLabs at the time, basically sequencing dairy and beef cows to predict various traits about the animal from an early age. So it started off with beef. You can predict that certain cows are going to have more musculature from an early age, and some cows can have too much musculature, and then they have trouble giving birth. And so there's like an optimum that you're shooting for. And I found this completely by chance. I won the UK National Science Engineering Competition was on TV a little bit. And this farmer reached out to me because he wanted to...”
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
“Very different mindset that they were optimizing for how to get the best outcome rather than I always felt like in the UK it was sort of optimizing for like mitigating the worst downstream outcome.”
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
“Think the UK doesn't have some of the kind of infrastructure for startups and investing of like that many people that have kind of done a startup before and then are willing to invest in the next generation, particularly investing in younger people. I tried to raise a venture around in the UK and I couldn't even get meetings. This was when I was like I was 18. I was in like first year of college and I was doing this startup on the side. I couldn't even get meetings with, I think I got like one fund to take an associate meeting with me. It seemed like people were more investing like purely on credentials. And this was a while ago, right? This was, you know, more than 10 years ago, but it seemed like people were investing just on, oh, well, you came out of this university. So if you, you know, you're an undergrad, like how could we possibly look at this? This doesn't make any sense. Whereas you go to Silicon Valley and it was like, well, what's the possibility here? What could you envision in 10 years if everything succeeds? Like how big a company could this be? And it just was.”
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
“Thrill of winning. Certainly during COVID, with what some of what we built at Curative, I got kind of a taste for the speed at which you can move when everything is behind you and all the momentum is behind you. And I've been chasing that ever since.”
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 hundreds of millions of dollars. I think our peak day was 206,000 people tested in a single day. And the company went from about $7,000 to 7,000 employees in those first nine months. The total revenue ended up being about $5 billion over a three-year period. 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. We're cutting about 80% of our SaaS spend this year. One of our internal meetings we have a slide of like 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, our chief scientific officer at Curative had in his spare time developed a COVID test. Locked down to just started, everybody was starting to freak out. There was basically nowhere to get a test.”
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