To scale COVID testing capacity by 10x during the pandemic, Curative had to abandon the supply chains everyone else was using and build an entirely separate 'orthogonal' supply chain of alternative vendors and materials.

27:47don't know how to scale those kind of things up all of the supply chain broke down and so we basically said okay start from scratch throw all of that away imagine that you're going to have to scale this up to hundreds of thousands of tests a day where do you start and so we built what we called an orthogonal supply chain which is just basically a fancy way of saying we don't use the

28:06things other people use >> sound like a Mackenzie consultant specializing in innovation an orthogonal supply chain yeah great >> well I found that was like a good fancy word that like you know was helpful from a sales >> stand what it basically means is everybody was chasing the same uh consumables the same supplies everybody was trying to use the same stuff and if if you know you can

28:28make 1x of that maybe they can increase to make 1.2x. If everybody's trying to buy that, us also trying to buy that doesn't help. That doesn't net increase the number of tests being done, right? It just makes us all squabble over it. >> So that's pointless. So you got to find other ways of doing the testing using supplies that maybe wouldn't traditionally be used for this kind of

28:47testing. Um, so we were sourcing swabs, you know, from other types of vendors that were being used for, you know, electronic testing and then sterilizing them. we were sourcing. There's this kind of extraction material that you usually use and magnetic beads is kind of the default standard, but there's this other way of doing it with filter plates which is more scalable because it's basically just glass and plastic

29:10and you can scale that up faster than you can scale up magnetic beads where they all come from basically two factories in China. And so we're like, okay, we should never use magnetic beads because that's not going to scale as a technology. we need to go find vendors who can scale up the plastic and glass manufacturing and partner with them to basically 10x it. And so you kind of

29:28approach every single bit of the supply chain that way. You end up with this massive scale. Now, outside of a pandemic, that doesn't work because people don't want 10x more testing than they wanted yesterday. But within a pandemic, you got to approach it differently. And so we peaked, I think our peak day was 26,000 people tested in a single day. >> 206,000 people tested in a single day.