1,000 Employees in 100 Days: Felix Huettenbach's COVID Build-Out at Sameday Health
Felix Huettenbach, the co-founder and CEO who scaled Sameday Health's COVID testing network across the United States, has a five-word summary of the most intense phase of his career: "1,000 employees in 100 days". The phrase is a useful entry point into a broader question that many founders faced in 2020 and 2021, namely what happens to a company when demand sets the pace instead of the business plan.
The case in brief
- Huettenbach co-founded the company and served as its CEO; it opened in September 2020 with one site in Venice, Los Angeles.
- It offered PCR and rapid COVID-19 tests at walk-in sites, with online booking and digital results.
- By April 2022 it had 55 US locations, 16 in Los Angeles County, and more than 1,000 employees; the company said 1,200.
- Huettenbach stepped back in 2023 after the leadership decided a physician should run the company.
Why speed defined COVID-19 testing
Huettenbach says he is passionate about making healthcare more affordable, transparent and approachable, and walk-in sites with online booking were the most visible form that took at Sameday Health. Testing during the pandemic also had an unusual property: the value of the service depended heavily on time. A result that arrived late was worth far less to the person waiting for it. Sameday Health's format addressed that pressure: walk-in access removed scheduling friction, online booking let people reserve a slot, and results were delivered digitally.
When speed is the product, the organisation behind it has to move at a similar tempo. That is the context in which Huettenbach's hiring figure makes sense. Every new site needed staff who could collect samples, manage queues, handle bookings and communicate results. Hiring was not a support function; it was the growth engine.
What 100 days of hiring demands
Bringing on roughly a thousand people in about three months forces a set of trade-offs that slower companies rarely confront all at once.
Onboarding becomes infrastructure
At that rate, training cannot be improvised site by site. It has to be repeatable, documented and fast enough that new staff are productive within days. The quality of a testing network rests on whether the newest employee follows the same process as the most experienced one.
Location count multiplies complexity
Fifty-five locations are not one large operation; they are fifty-five small ones that must behave consistently. Supplies, staffing levels and reporting all need to work everywhere at once.
Under Huettenbach as CEO, the rollout began early. In December 2020, three months after the Venice opening, the company announced 30 new facilities across 11 states by year-end and said it was testing thousands of people every day. By March 2021 his company listed more than 50 locations in 15 states, from California and Texas to New York and Washington. One drive-thru, opened in February 2021 outside Tysons Corner Center in Virginia together with mall owner Macerich, was laid out, according to its operators, on a 20,000-square-foot lot with 550 spaces and capacity for more than 1,000 people a day.
Software carries part of the load
Not every scaling task was solved with people. According to the company, four MIT software engineers custom-built its scheduling and results platform, which was integrated with local laboratories and sent automated alerts once a result was ready. Every booking handled by software was one less task for site staff who might have joined only weeks earlier.
Processes have to travel
Speed only helps if the process can travel. Sameday Health's format of walk-in access, online booking, PCR and rapid tests and digital results was first assembled at one site in Venice and then rolled out to many sites, alongside other formats such as the Tysons drive-thru and the Staples Center vaccination site. A standardised format means a new location starts from a known template instead of a blank page.
For founders, the takeaway is that speed rests on repeatability: training, booking and result delivery have to scale at the same rate as headcount and locations, or the customer experience is the first place where the difference becomes visible.
Handing Sameday Health to a physician
A second development concerns the founder's own role. Early in 2023, the founder and his management colleagues agreed to put a physician in charge, so that Sameday Health could widen the medical services it offered. Huettenbach stepped back that year.
Where the Sameday Health experience travelled
Huettenbach, today a founder, investor, adventurer and YouTuber based in Dubai, did not leave operations behind entirely. He is now a co-founder and partner at Terranum, a Dubai-based company developing data center campuses powered by renewable energy, including a planned 100 MW off-grid campus in Prieska, South Africa. He argues that Sameday Health's mix of multi-site physical infrastructure, official approvals and near-zero downtime prepared him for that field.
His approach as an investor echoes the same theme. He has put it in three words: "Execution beats narrative." Applied to COVID-19 testing, the Sameday Health case is a reminder that execution at speed is mostly an operational matter of sites, people and processes.
The broader takeaway
"1,000 employees in 100 days" is a striking number, but its real value as a case study lies in what it required. Felix Huettenbach's experience at Sameday Health during COVID-19 shows that hyper-growth compresses many operational decisions into a short window, and that the choices made in that window, about training, processes and leadership, shape how a company develops long after the emergency has passed. Glimpses of his life beyond the boardroom appear on Instagram under @felixhutti.