We Built Our Own Salesforce in Months. Here's Why We're Cancelling the $600K Contract | Curative CEO

Fred Turner is the Founder and CEO @ Curative, one of the wildest stories in tech. Fred scaled a COVID testing business from $0 to $5BN in revenue and took the team from 7 to 7,000 employees in just 9 months. They did over 206,000 COVID tests in a single day and signed contracts in the 100s of $Ms with several of the largest states. Today, Curative is a unicorn health insurance business taking on the incumbents for one of the largest markets in healthcare. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:07 – Meet Fred Turner: thrill of winning vs. fear of losing 02:01 – Why he couldn't have built this business in the UK 03:40 – From cattle genetics to sepsis to Covid (the origin story) 07:54 – Pivoting into human diagnostics and at-home STD testing 14:43 – Founding Curative on a sepsis thesis, before Covid changed everything 18:44 – Covid hits: pivoting overnight into mass testing 27:03 – Building an "orthogonal supply chain" to scale testing 10x 30:44 – $5B in revenue, brutal margins, and losing money on vaccines 35:32 – The pivot to health insurance after Covid winds down 41:39 – How AI agents replaced entire back-office departments 45:48 – Is SaaS dead? Cutting Salesforce and 80% of SaaS spend 1:13:06 – Subcritical: building a fundamentally safer nuclear reactor ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465 Follow Harry Stebbings on X: https://twitter.com/HarryStebbings Follow Fred Turner on X: https://twitter.com/FredTurnerBio Follow 20VC on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/20vchq Follow 20VC on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok Visit our Website: https://www.20vc.com Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/contact ----------------------------------------------- #20vc #harrystebbings #curative #founder #ceo