Curative founder Fred Turner’s fast pivot into COVID-19 testing
With 18 million tests and half a million vaccines administered in its first year, Curative is on a mission to put itself out of business. CEO Fred Turner is already eyeing the next pivot.
Fred Turner was only 16 when he built his first PCR machine, a tool used to amplify small segments of DNA or RNA. He was interested in sequencing his own genome, but he soon discovered there were others who had a need for these kinds of cheaper, faster testing capabilities. As demand grew, he dropped out of college to focus full-time on his first startup, heading to the US, where he went through Y Combinator to secure funding for that company, Shield Diagnostics.
What he couldn’t have predicted at age 16 when he first built that PCR machine is that less than a decade later, a global pandemic would bring the world to a halt. Fred saw that PCR-based testing could play a critical role in getting people easy access to COVID-19 tests and helping prevent the spread. Over the past year, his company Curative, which now employs 5,000 people across the US, has administered 18 million COVID tests (including one to me), which at $100 per test implies $1.8 billion in revenue! In addition, they’re providing vaccinations and other essential health services. It sounds like an overnight success story, but as you’ll hear, there have been ups and downs along the way, including one seriously low point following an unsuccessful Series B round that effectively shut down Shield. Now that he’s running a business whose mission is “to put ourselves out of business,” Fred will be looking at the next pivot he can take in healthcare, drawing on the infrastructure and institutional knowledge he’s put in place to provide a better, more integrated patient experience at every touchpoint. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast and Spotify. If you love it, please help more people find it by leaving a review!
“When I was a teenager, I built this PCR machine basically from scraps and bits you can buy on eBay.”
Fred Turner was a teenager when he built his first PCR machine, a tool used to amplify small segments of DNA or RNA (“a backbone tool for most of molecular biology,” as he describes it), to get a better understanding of his own genome. His interest had been piqued after reading Craig Venter’s autobiography, but no lab in the UK was going to let a 16-year-old in to experiment with their equipment, and he certainly couldn’t afford to pay a company to do it for him. So he went the DIY route. By age 17, he’d won a national engineering competition for his machine. And then the farmers came calling.
It turns out, farmers in the UK were looking for a cheaper and easier way to test their cows for a certain gene, and they thought Fred’s machine might be the answer. Soon enough, his was the go-to lab for the pedigree farming community in England. By the time he was 20, his operation had outgrown his parents’ basement and moved into a full-fledged lab space.
“It was kind of like, shifting gears from trying to figure out fundraising to figuring out, like, how to run a company.”
Having pivoted his attention to agriculture, Fred ultimately made the decision to drop out of college and focus full time on the business. But he needed funding to be able to scale, and he wasn’t having much luck in the UK. A trip to San Francisco didn’t result in any investors, but it did introduce him to Y Combinator. He applied and got in, a step that would enable him to move to the US. If you’ve ever wondered about the Y Combinator process, Fred walks us through what it was like — and what it was like to go from having about $120,000 in the bank to suddenly having $4 million in seed money to work with.
“We pivoted out of agriculture and tried to apply that technology we were working on to human diagnostics.”
Fred says that around the time they started thinking about raising Series A funding, it became clear the agriculture market wasn’t going to be big enough to build a business around. As they began to explore other applications for the testing technology they’d developed at Shield Diagnostics, human diagnostics seemed to be the most interesting untapped opportunity. With a new business focus, he ended up raising $8 million, built out the necessary CLIA labs and brought on people who had the depth of experience in human diagnostics they needed. As Fred explains, “It’s a whole new set of regulations, and the science is very similar, but the actual implementation is very different in humans.”
“In healthcare, everything has to cost, you know, 100 times as much and take a long time.”
While Shield hit a couple million in annual revenue with an STD testing business, running an STD testing business was a challenge, particularly in ways that made it difficult to get paid. As Fred puts it, “The US healthcare system is just a bit of a mess in some places.” Many of the challenges were also rooted in integration issues, so even if a clinic wanted to use the product, the implementation process was so burdensome, they’d be reluctant to move forward.
That’s when the company began to look at pivoting again and started exploring a “side project” around sepsis. The expansion was short-lived, though, because of an unsuccessful Series B round that ultimately spelled the end of the company. Fred describes that painful experience, including the process of selling off assets to pay back creditors, since “the company died owing money.”
“The opportunity probably isn’t in diagnostic testing. The opportunity, I think, is in providing better care.”
Fred launched Curative almost immediately after Shield shut down, leveraging many of the insights he’d learned from both the due diligence and the challenges of that venture. But as Curative was trying to set up clinical trials for sepsis to test their new idea, hospitals started dropping out. They had another priority to deal with: COVID-19.
Fred says the initial move into COVID testing was partly driven by the fact that Curative couldn’t do anything with their original sepsis project since everything was closed. But he also saw that there were going to be other challenges with COVID testing on the horizon. “All of the problems I had seen in Shield with launching the STD testing kind of highlighted a lot of systemic problems with diagnostic testing in the US,” he says. “And it was very clear that because of those problems, scaling existing testing capacity was going to be exceptionally difficult.”
“We didn’t invent any new science. I think that was a really important part of scaling fast and kind of a big learning from Shield.”
Curative was one of the first COVID-19 companies in the US to offer scalable oral-fluid swab testing. During our conversation, Fred shares how the logistics, software and supply chain they’ve built helped them scale up from zero to 18 million tests in a year. I also learned a little bit about the journey my own test took from a mobile van in a Miami parking lot to a lab in Washington, DC.
Scaling the business has also meant scaling the staff. Fred has hired leaders with operational expertise to lead an organization that’s quickly grown to 5,000 employees across the country. And now they’re transitioning from a testing focus to vaccinating people and scaling up that side of the business. At the same time, Fred says, “We said from the very beginning that our mission is to put ourselves out of business.” So he’s keeping his sights set on the next pivot and how their operations will shift to work on the healthcare challenges of a post-COVID world.
With the infrastructure Curative has built, they’re certainly poised to address more than just COVID. While nothing can compare to how quickly they scaled up in the whirlwind of the past year, hopefully, the next big project won’t require it. As Fred told me, they’re looking ahead to future initiatives that operate “on real world timelines, not COVID time.”
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