Today we’d like to introduce you to Felix Huettenbach.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I grew up in Dusseldorf, Germany, raised by tough parents that have attributed to my success today as a young Co-Founder. I was always incredibly into health and wellness as a child and throughout my growing years, very dedicated to martial arts, karate, kung fu, kickboxing, you name it. I lived at a shaolin monastery for a year at age 10 to become a monk. All that’s to say, my path to becoming involved in the health and wellness industry has its early roots. I always knew I wanted to run my own company and started my first business, an event management company at 18 years old, and several more thereafter. After grad school, I went on to MIT to study entrepreneurship and management. After stints in San Francisco and back to Germany, I landed in Los Angeles, working for an early stage cancer detection company – my first foray into biotech – which gave way to my latest venture as cofounder of Sameday Health.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I’ve taken many different roads that have led me to where I am today, most of them the hard but rewarding road. Like I mentioned, I started my first company, an events management business in Munich at 18 years old, and at 20 years old, started my second company, a travel agency also based out of Germany, which I ended up closing after an opportunity came my way to move to the United States. I decided I needed to venture out to San Francisco to put my engineering background to work to build things that truly generate value and have the ability to change the world. I worked at the German American Chamber of Commerce as an intern which opened up my eyes to the incredibly boundless business startup mindset, full of ingenuity and creativity. After the internship, I headed back to Germany to finish up my degree and decided that I needed to bolster my financial acumen, taking a position at a private equity firm for a couple of months, soaking up every bit of knowledge I could.
From there, after receiving my degree, I went back to the states to attend grad school at MIT and started my third company at age 23, a robotic fitness equipment company. It was my heart and soul. We had no money and would eat leftover food from the cafeteria and sleep at the school’s accelerator for several nights a week. We would attend 2-3 hackathons a week for the purpose of winning prize money to invest in new prototypes. Building a hardware company with no money and no track record is one of the hardest things possible, from founder break-up to unreliable venture investors to navigating factory floors in Shenzhen. We got very far and built some incredible IP. I have since sold my stock in the business and am very happy that the technology will be coming to market this year.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Sameday Health?
To elaborate more on my career path, since my epiphany at age 20 that I wanted to work on things that truly generated value, everything I touched had a thread with human health and how technology could improve it. With the robotic fitness equipment company, my mission was to facilitate a healthier, fitter society in which we do not make people feel guilty and force them to exercise. Afterwards, I joined an incredible early stage cancer detection company called Quantgene where I assisted the founder as Chief of Staff in most company matters. For the first time, I got fully immersed in biotech, one key revelation was that most of the topics could be dissected and were less complex than they initially seemed, especially gene sequencing is very data and math heavy, which I always felt very comfortable with. The early stage cancer detection product Serenity will go to market in 2021 and I could not be more excited. Which leads me to my current company, Sameday Health. Being immersed in the laboratory field in 2020, I foresaw the laboratory infrastructure collapsing under the surging testing demand. I saw an opportunity to work with the laboratory directly to provide gold standard PCR tests with quick turnaround times, something that was not being offered on the market.
We do this by controlling every part of the testing process from testing to delivery to labs to processing lab results and relaying results directly to our customers through our intuitive portal. Since the company’s inception in fall 2020, we’ve administered hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 tests nationwide and have approximately 50 testing sites in 15 states. We also just started vaccinating at our testing location in Alexandria, VA, with plans to roll out vaccinations at several of our locations around the country with a goal to vaccinate 1 million people in 2021. As we transition beyond administering the vaccines and offering our testing services, as Sameday Health, we’re mission is to disrupt the American healthcare system to provide radically transparent, affordable, quality healthcare tailored to each individuals’ unique health needs. Looking towards the future, we’ll be unveiling telehealth and other services in the near future to improve access to medical services in the communities we serve.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I’ve been lucky in business and in my personal life many times. Lucky especially in terms of mentors and friends that have guided me and supported me along the way, meeting the right people who’ve inspired me and led me onto my current path. I attribute much of this luck to being very open to new opportunities with very little predisposition. I’ve taken lucky chances that many wouldn’t have dared to, which has catapulted me into founding roles at a very early age and throughout my life to now.
Image Credits
Sameday Health
