Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
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.
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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
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Subscribe on Spotify:
open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465
Follow Harry Stebbings on X:
twitter.com/HarryStebbings
Follow Fred Turner on X:
twitter.com/FredTurnerBio
Follow 20VC on Instagram:
instagram.com/20vchq
Follow 20VC on TikTok:
tiktok.com/@20vc_tok
Visit our Website:
20vc.com
Subscribe to our Newsletter:
thetwentyminutevc.com/contact
-----------------------------------------------
#20vc #harrystebbings #curative #founder #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:
open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465
Follow Harry Stebbings on X:
twitter.com/HarryStebbings
Follow Fred Turner on X:
twitter.com/FredTurnerBio
Follow 20VC on Instagram:
instagram.com/20vchq
Follow 20VC on TikTok:
tiktok.com/@20vc_tok
Visit our Website:
20vc.com
Subscribe to our Newsletter:
thetwentyminutevc.com/contact
-----------------------------------------------
#20vc #harrystebbings #curative #founder #ceo
