How Curative's 25-year-old CEO changed his mind about his firm's destiny

“I felt we would be out of business by now," Fred Turner, CEO of Curative, a startup that began in 2020 with an evolving healthcare focus, confided in a Zoom interview with LinkedIn editor, George Anders, in September 2020. "I felt there was going to be maybe six or eight weeks of COVID testing and then everything would be under control. The pandemic would be over." 

In March 2020 when COVID-19 began to impact cities and states across the United States, Curative settled on its current business practice: providing self-administered COVID-19 tests across the country. Now six months later, Curative employs 1,000 people and processes more than 50,000 tests every day.

“The U.S. needed far more testing than what we were aiming for," Turner shares. Looking ahead, he says, "it's going to take into at least the middle of next year before the U.S. doesn't need testing. There needs to be widespread vaccination and the vaccines have to work." 

As he begins to think about the future of his business once the COVID pandemic is more under control, Turner shares, “we’ve begun thinking about what we can do with the infrastructure that we’ve built.” Curative’s diagnostic kits are easier for test subjects to collect on their own due to relying on coughed-up samples of fluids, as opposed to carrying out deep nasal swabs; transferrable technology for other kinds of testing.

Looking more broadly at Curative's care-delivery system, as well as its scientific, software and diagnostic work, Turner says his goal is "to be able to expand to other useful services, so we can build out a life post-COVID." 

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