We Built Our Own Salesforce in Months. Here's Why We're Cancelling the $600K Contract | Curative CEO
Summary
Curative's CEO reveals how scaling from 7 to 7,000 employees in 9 months during COVID taught him to ruthlessly cut costs—cancelling a $600K Salesforce contract by building internal tools instead. The key insight: Silicon Valley's possibility-focused mindset vs. the UK's risk-averse approach explains why he couldn't raise venture capital at 18 but built a $1.3B company after moving to the US.
Key Takeaways
- Curative is cutting 80% of SaaS spend by building internal tools, with Salesforce being the single largest contract cancelled. This suggests founders should benchmark software spending against revenue and consider build-vs-buy decisions at scale.
- Silicon Valley VCs optimize for 'how big could this be in 10 years' while UK investors optimize for risk mitigation and credentials. This fundamental difference in mindset explains why the same founder couldn't raise at 18 in UK but succeeded in California.
- Momentum and speed compound during tailwinds. The founder explicitly states chasing the 'thrill of winning' and the velocity of execution when 'all momentum is behind you'—suggesting founders should lean into market validation phases aggressively.
- Y Combinator served as the pivot point for geographic repositioning. The founder applied after meeting a YC alum at a US conference, suggesting emerging founders should prioritize US-based networks and accelerators for venture-backed growth.
- Pivoting from non-core services matters. Curative did 2.5M vaccinations but admits 'that was a terrible business'—showing discipline in exiting low-margin adjacent services despite operational scale.
Related topics
Transcript Excerpt
Lockdowns had just started. Everybody was starting to freak out. There was basically nowhere to get a test. So, our chief scientific officer had in his spare time developed a COVID test. I think our peak day was 26,000 people tested in a single day. I'm so excited for a freaking wild story today. Fred Turner, co-founder and CEO of Curative. 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 postcoid 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. And the company went from about 7 to 7,000 employees in those first 9 months. We did 2.5 million vaccinations. That was another service we did. W…