The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 54 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Curative Canceled $600K Salesforce Contract For An Internally Vibe-Coded CRM
“We just recently canceled our Salesforce contract because we have an internal CRM that was vibe coded, that is working better, that is managing our process better, is more integrated into what we're doing. We run our agents inside of it, and no one was using S…”
Curative Is Cutting 80% Of Its Enterprise SaaS Spend This Year
“We're cutting about 80% of our SaaS spend this year.”
Corporate Anthropic Spend Will Reach 2x To 5x Engineer Salaries
“Between maybe two and five X would be the two and five X salary.”
Curative Headcount Will Shrink In Short Term Due To AI
“We're about 650 people now. In five years we'll probably be bigger. In the short term I think we're going to be quite a bit smaller.”
Strategic Investor Pulling Series B Term Sheet Caused Shield's Collapse
“Ended up getting a term sheet from a strategic, large public diagnostic company. Signed the term sheet, did three weeks of work on docs. We were in the second round of docs, and then their CEO killed it because it was too competitive with their core products. …”
Fred Turner Sold CLIA License For $150K, Re-Bought Same For $27M
“And then in December of 2019, as part of the wind down, I sold that license to a company in San Diego for 150,000 dollars to pay some of the creditors. And then five months later, acquired a company in Southern California to get the same license for twenty sev…”
Curative Invested $500M Of COVID Testing Profits Into Health Insurance
“So after all was said and done, the money that we basically put forward into the insurance business, the health insurance company, was about five hundred million that we invested into the health insurance business.”
Curative Administered 2.5M COVID Vaccines At A Loss
“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.”
Hospital-Affiliated Primary Care Doctors Get Double Independent Doctor Reimbursement
“If we look at how much we pay a primary care doctor who's independent compared to a primary care doctor affiliated with a system, they get paid an average double.”
U.S. Is Unequivocally The Best Place To Receive Medical Treatment
“Yes, definitely. Yeah. The U.S. Has the access to, by far, the most cutting edge techniques and facilities and drugs. Than the rest of the world. And they are willing to spend a lot more in order to preserve life.”
Curative Built An In-House Claims Platform And Will Abandon Legacy Software
“We've built our own claim system Completely from scratch, in-house. It's now, we've migrated most of the workflows off. We'll be fully off in July.”
Big Insurers Will Take 10 Years To Adopt AI Due To Inertia
“I think some of the biggest insurers will struggle. They will not be able to keep up from a margin standpoint with where we can get to with agents. I think some of them do have Technical expertise. It's more operational and kind of people ops. If you've built …”
Curative's Anthropic API Spend Grew 6x Monthly Into Millions
“Our anthropic cost over the last six or seven months has six X'd every month from, you know, a base of, you know, a couple of tens of thousands of dollars now up to millions of dollars a month.”
Fred Turner: Curative Engineers No Longer Write Or Read Raw Code
“They're not writing any code anymore. They're not even reading the code anymore.”
Curative's AI Agent Signs Hundreds Of Contracts Daily Without Human Review
“We had a contract, a standard template contract that was drafted by a law firm, and then we have kind of like guard rails for what Gwen can agree to, but she just red lines it and then signs it. It doesn't go to a law firm for a review. Like, we're signing hun…”
AI Agent Gwen Cuts Curative's Contract Costs From $2,000 To $70
“So it costs, with people, it costs us about 1500 to 2000 dollars on average to do a contract. The average with Gwen has been about 70 dollars.”
Enterprise Data Cleanliness Is Not A Major Barrier To AI Adoption
“I think if you approach it in the right way, then the cleanliness doesn't really matter that much because the models are so good at cleaning up the data if you give them the right context.”
AI Labs Will Not Compete In Regulated Complex Industries
“I think things that have some, like, regulation around them, and are, like, complex industries, yes, they're gonna see the advantages of the models, but they're not gonna see competition from Anthropik or OpenAI.”
Curative Returned 10x Capital To Early Investors Via Post-COVID Dividend
“No, we haven't sold any secondaries. We did there was a dividend at the end of COVID. We paid out some all the investors got 10 X their money back before we started the health insurance company, and then they still have their shares today.”
Nuclear Energy's Main Challenge Is Regulatory, Not Engineering
“That it is very safe. And that it's not a science or engineering problem. Like that was when we started looking at companies to invest in, that was for me, that the thing that I was sort of disappointed by is everybody was approaching it as if nuclear is this …”
AI Enables 20 Mechanical Engineers To Do Work Of 100
“And so we're seeing that you can do the design with far fewer people using AI to optimize a lot of the design parameters, where historically you might have needed a hundred mechanical engineers to design every single nut and bolt and part You can do it with 20…”
Current AI Models Can Perform Every Back-Office Task At Curative
“I think today, the current gen models can do every back office task we have at Curative.”
Software Headcount Will Stay Flat As Companies Scale AI Agents
“I think that that's what the workflows will be, is people are going to be deploying more agents than engineers, and they're going to keep the same number of engineers. We're just going to build a lot more.”
a16z Seeded Fred Turner's Startup With $1.65M Without A TAM Calculation
“Their bio fund did our seed round right out of YC, and I don't think they did the TAM calculation. They were like, oh, this sounds interesting, and then they did the round. It was a small round, it was like, 1.65 million.”
Curative Won A Multi-Hundred-Million-Dollar Florida Contract For Nursing Home Testing
“Probably one of the Florida contracts was maybe the largest, so we did a contract with the state of Florida for all of their nursing home testing. I forget what the dollar figure was, but it was, you know, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They put it ou…”
Curative Scaled To Peak 206,000 COVID Tests Daily Within Eight Months
“Our peak day was 206,000 people tested in a single day. And that was December of 2020. So that was within eight months from zero, zero to 206,000.”
Curative Grew Headcount From Seven To 7,000 In Nine Months
“And the company went from about seven to 7000 employees in, in those first nine months.”
Curative Generated $5 Billion In Revenue Over Three Years
“I think the total revenue ended up being about five billion over a three-year period.”
Curative Was The Largest U.S. COVID Testing Provider Outside Quest And LabCorp
“We were, yeah, we were the largest, like, non-LabCorp and Quest testing company.”
Curative Reduced Physician Credentialing Time To 12 Hours Using Claude
“And that used to take us two to three months on average, and cost about 50 dollars. We have now built in-house an agent that runs on, on Claude, that does this end-to-end, and it goes to the website, it verifies the license, it goes and reads the transcripts, …”
AI Agents Parse Messy Files Best Via Throwaway Python Generation
“What we found works amazingly is literally to give the files to an agent, tell it to write Python to get these files into a standardized format, because they're not very good at parsing files, but they're incredibly good at code gen, and so you can tell it to …”
Curative's AI Agent Executed 3,500 Contracts In Eight Weeks
“So this has taken us from doing About a hundred contracts a week to about a hundred contracts a day. Last year, as an entire team, we did 2300 contracts. So far in about the last eight weeks, the agent alone has done 3500.”
Curative's AI Agent Gwen Sends 15,000 Custom Emails Daily
“So Gwen is sending on average 15,000 emails a day. Customized emails to providers that know about their practice, that know about their work, and one of the things we found is like that relentlessness of the follow-up is what works.”
Curative Used AI Agents To Migrate Dashboard Stack From Looker To Snowflake
“We moved away from Looker, right? Google's Looker product for visualizations. It's super expensive, and we moved to do it in Snowflake. And it's been a lot cheaper. It's worked really well. Part of that migration is moving all of our dashboards and all of the …”
Society Will Look Back In Disbelief At Mid-Level Administrative Jobs
“I think these are jobs that will look back and say, God, I can't believe we had people doing that kind of work.”
Subcritical's Reactor Design Makes Runaway Nuclear Reactions Impossible
“So we are designed to operate at .97. So that means you never have enough neutrons to keep the reaction going. The reaction will always fizzle out. So no matter what you do, it's going to fizzle out. But normally that would mean you get no power output. What y…”
AI Creates Better CAD Models Via Python Than Direct 3D Vectors
“You can generate really good CAD models by having it write Python to make the CAD model. Like, it's not good at, necessarily good at, like, three-D space visualization or outputting a drawing Right, as vectors, but it's really, really good at generating plausi…”
Subcritical Nuclear Deployments Cost $1B Per 300MW Facility
“Each one of our deployments would be about a billion dollars of construction cost for a 300 megawatt facility.”
People Should Have Children Early Rather Than Waiting Until Late 30s
“I think, you know, like, have kids early when you have the energy and can run around and not sleep, and it's one of the best things you'll ever do. You should just get on with it.”
Curative's AI agent Gwen signs contracts with the CEO's signature, 100 a day up from 100 a week
“So she now signs the agreements with my signature. She'll open up the DocuSign link and then click the button, and it's my signature on that agreement. And so this has taken us from doing about a hundred contracts a week to about a hundred contracts a day.”
UK VCs Refused Meetings When Fred Turner Was 18
“Like when I found, I tried to raise a venture around in the UK and I couldn't even get meetings. This was when I was like, I was 18. I was in like first year of college and I was doing this startup on the side. I couldn't even get meetings with, I think I got …”
A $1.5B Total Market Is Too Small To Raise A Series A
“And there's about a hundred million cows in the US. If you're doing well, you could charge 15 to 20 dollars per test. So even if you assume you could test every cow every year, you'd be at 1.5 billion, like total market, which is not enough to do a series A of…”
Curative Wouldn't Have Pivoted To COVID Testing If Shield Survived
“No, no, because I don't think we would have pivoted as hard into COVID when COVID hit.”
City Of Los Angeles Paid Curative Daily On Net-One Payment Terms
“The best thing we could get with the city of LA, because they have obviously, you know, There's a city, there's certain restrictions, is that they would pay after delivery, but they would pay net one on the invoice, and so we would deliver the tests for a day,…”
Payers Ultimately Drive All Behavior In US Healthcare
“Everything sort of ends up coming back to the payer. Like, the payer is the one that drives behavior in the US healthcare system. If you are providing the dollars, people will go where the dollars aren't. If you say I'm going to pay for this service, people wi…”