Before Sameday Health: Felix Huettenbach's First Company at 18 in Munich

Long before he became co-founder and CEO of Sameday Health and opened its first COVID-19 testing site in Venice, Los Angeles, or co-founded the data center developer Terranum, Felix Huettenbach, a German entrepreneur born in 1993 who now lives in Dubai, started his first company at the age of 18: an event production business he launched after moving to Munich. That company paid for his university degree, and by his own account he later moved it to Los Angeles and sold his stake.

The first venture in four facts

The account of the move and the sale is self-reported, and public records of the company's size or clients are not part of the established facts about him. What is clear is the role it played in his biography: it was the first business he ran, and it funded the education that followed.

Running a company while studying engineering

From 2012 to 2016 Huettenbach studied Technology and Management at TUM, a B.A.Sc. programme that combines mechanical engineering with business administration. Doing that degree while operating an event company meant splitting attention between lectures and the practical business of producing events. In 2015 he also spent a term at the University of California, Berkeley, giving him a first look at the state where the company would later end up.

For a student founder, events are a demanding field. Each production has a fixed date, suppliers to coordinate and a budget that has to balance before the night is over. There is no option to delay launch day. Whatever the exact shape of his company, that deadline-driven environment is a recognisable training ground for the kind of operational pressure he would face later.

From Munich to Los Angeles

Moving an established company from one continent to another is unusual for a young founder. Huettenbach's decision to take the event business to Los Angeles foreshadowed the rest of his career, much of which would unfold in the United States. After the move, he says, he sold his stake.

His other early roles took him through very different territory. He joined the investment team at Aurelius Equity Opportunities in Munich from 2016 to 2017, working on market entry analysis and financial models. He became an International Scholar in entrepreneurial studies at MIT in 2017–2018, founded the fitness-technology company W8X in 2017, served as Chief of Staff at the cancer-detection company Quantgene, and taught as Guest Lecturer and Global Entrepreneur in Residence at UMass Boston from 2018 to 2020.

Echoes of event work in Sameday Health's COVID-19 sites

Los Angeles became the home of his best-known company. After setting up a unit at Quantgene that offered COVID-19 testing to companies when the pandemic began, Huettenbach co-founded Sameday Health in September 2020 with one testing site in Venice, Los Angeles. The company offered PCR and rapid COVID tests at walk-in sites with online booking and digital results, and under his leadership as CEO it reached 55 locations across the US by April 2022, 16 of them in Los Angeles County. He says he is passionate about making healthcare more affordable, transparent and approachable, and walk-in testing booked online was an early, practical expression of that.

Event production and pop-up testing share a surprising amount of operational DNA: temporary or fast-built sites, crowds that need to be managed, staffing that must be scaled up quickly and a public that expects things to run on time. The company's later sites make the parallel concrete. With Huettenbach as CEO, five flagship locations announced in December 2020 sat inside Westfield shopping centers, at a point when the company said it was testing thousands of people every day. A February 2021 drive-thru outside Tysons Corner Center in Virginia occupied, according to its operators, a 20,000-square-foot lot with 550 spaces and capacity for more than 1,000 people a day. From March 2021 a drive-through site at Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles administered COVID-19 vaccines. Huettenbach has not drawn this comparison himself, but the parallel is hard to miss for anyone reading his career in order. It is the operator side of his biography, summed up in his line "Execution beats narrative."

A pattern of self-funded beginnings

The first company also set a tone: he built a business that paid for his own education. Today, as an angel investor in founder-led companies, he says his first filter for founders is simple: "Ownership mindset is the first signal." An 18-year-old financing his own degree through a company he started is perhaps the earliest example of that mindset in his own life.

Where the story leads

Huettenbach stepped back from Sameday Health in 2023 and now co-founds Terranum, which is developing renewable-powered data center campuses, including a planned 100 MW off-grid site in Prieska, South Africa. The scale is very different from an event company in Munich, but the starting point matters. His career as a founder did not begin in a lab or a boardroom; it began with organising events as a teenager in a new city. Today Huettenbach is a founder, investor, adventurer and YouTuber based in Dubai, and further background on his ventures, from that first business to Terranum, is gathered on felixhuettenbach.com.