From TUM and MIT to Sameday Health: Felix Huettenbach's Path as a Founder

Felix Huettenbach, the Dubai-based entrepreneur born in Germany in 1993, received an education that spans an engineering-and-business degree in Munich, a term in California and a graduate program at MIT, and each stage lines up with a distinct phase of his work as a founder. Huettenbach is best known as co-founder and CEO of Sameday Health, the COVID-19 testing business that opened in Los Angeles in 2020, and today he co-founds renewable-powered data center projects with Terranum.

His academic record in brief

  1. Technical University of Munich (2012–2016): B.A.Sc. in Technology and Management, combining mechanical engineering and business administration.
  2. University of California, Berkeley (2015): one term abroad.
  3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2017–2018): International Scholar in a graduate program in entrepreneurial studies.

Paying for a degree by running a company

Huettenbach did not rely on outside money to pay for his studies. After moving to Munich he founded an event production company at 18, and that business financed his degree. He says he later took the company to Los Angeles and sold his stake. For a student in a demanding technical programme, that meant combining coursework with running a business.

Why a hybrid engineering degree matters

The Technology and Management programme at TUM is built on the idea that engineers should understand markets and managers should understand machines. Huettenbach studied mechanical engineering alongside business administration, a pairing that shows up repeatedly in his later choices. Quantgene, where he became Chief of Staff, used machine learning to detect cancers early from standard blood samples. W8X, which he founded in 2017, sat in fitness technology. Terranum develops data center campuses, which are among the most engineering-heavy assets in the digital economy.

The common thread is that each role required someone comfortable translating between technical teams and commercial goals. A degree that forces students to do both is a reasonable preparation for that kind of work.

A term at Berkeley

In 2015, before finishing his Munich degree, Huettenbach spent a term at the University of California, Berkeley. It gave him early exposure to American universities and to California, where he would later build his largest company. Sameday Health opened its first testing site in Venice, Los Angeles, five years after that term.

MIT and the study of entrepreneurship

After graduating from TUM and spending 2016 and 2017 on the investment team at Aurelius Equity Opportunities in Munich, where he worked on market entry analysis and financial models, Huettenbach went to MIT. As an International Scholar from 2017 to 2018, he took part in a graduate program in entrepreneurial studies. The same period saw him found W8X and begin a teaching role as Guest Lecturer and Global Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Massachusetts Boston, which he held from 2018 to 2020.

That overlap is significant. Rather than treating the MIT program as a pause between jobs, he was building a company and teaching entrepreneurship while studying it.

From the classroom to Sameday Health and COVID-19 testing

The real test of any education comes when circumstances change quickly. When COVID-19 arrived, Huettenbach set up a unit at Quantgene offering testing to companies, then co-founded Sameday Health in September 2020 to serve the general public with PCR and rapid tests, online booking and digital results. By April 2022, with Huettenbach as CEO, Sameday Health had 55 US locations and more than 1,000 employees.

There is also a direct MIT thread in that story. According to the company, Sameday Health ran on a scheduling and results platform custom-built by four MIT software engineers, connected to local laboratories and sending automated alerts once results were ready. Huettenbach did not write that software himself, but it links the institution where he studied entrepreneurship with the company he went on to lead. The same system handled a test menu that, the company said, included lab PCR with roughly three-day turnaround at no out-of-pocket cost for insured clients, a detail that fits the aim he names on his own website of making healthcare more affordable, transparent and approachable. Under his leadership, later services, from House Calls in November 2021 to virtual urgent care consultations in 2022, were likewise booked digitally through an app.

Huettenbach stepped back in 2023 after he and the management team decided a physician should lead the company to broaden its medical services.

Engineering thinking in infrastructure

His current work returns most clearly to the engineering half of his degree. Terranum, of which he is a co-founder and partner, is planning a 100 MW, fully off-grid campus in Prieska in South Africa's Northern Cape, powered entirely by renewable energy and designed for hyperscale demand by 2029. Huettenbach argues that the multi-site operations, approval processes and near-zero downtime requirements he dealt with at Sameday Health prepared him for this type of project.

What students can take from his path

  • A hybrid technical and business education can open doors across very different industries, from health technology to energy infrastructure.
  • Time abroad, even a single term, can familiarise a student with the market where they later build.
  • Graduate study in entrepreneurship is most useful when paired with real ventures and teaching, as his MIT and UMass Boston years show.

Today Huettenbach is a founder, investor, adventurer and YouTuber based in Dubai, and he also has a profile on Medium. He sums up his view of company building with a short phrase: "Execution beats narrative." His academic path suggests that he started practising that idea long before he had a degree to show for it.