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
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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
1h 27m
2 speakers
3 chapters
transcribed 2 months ago
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How did a spare-time COVID test grow into a $5B testing business?
So our chief scientific officer at Curative had, in his spare time, developed a COVID test. Lockdowns had just started. Everybody was starting to freak out. There was basically nowhere to get a test.
What's the single largest contract you signed?
In 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 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? How big do you think Anthropic will be? I think it could be 10 trillion.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited for a freaking wild story today. Fred Turner, co-founder and CEO of Curative. Now, this is an English founder in the Valley who scaled a COVID testing business to $5 billion in revenue. Then he had to scale it all back. It did not last post-COVID for obvious reasons. Today, he turned it into a health insurance provider that's worth $1.3 billion. And in the show, he says some pretty wild stuff. Like he's going to cancel his $600,000 Salesforce subscription. Sorry, Mark and Salesforce, don't kill me. For a vibe-coded solution they built in a matter of months. It's a wild story. And there are some mind-blowing elements to this journey. But before we dive into the show today, we used AlphaSense on an investment that helped us close an $8 million deal.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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