Felix Huettenbach, founder of Sameday Health, doesn’t talk about startups the way investors usually do. He talks about them the way an operator would after running a national healthcare platform under the extreme pressure of the Covid‑19 pandemic. In this conversation, he explains how that experience forced him to distinguish between “Long‑term Substanz” and venture‑driven theater—and how he now applies those same criteria when he looks at companies that want to survive more than just the next funding round.
Interviewer: When you evaluate a company for “Long‑term Substanz,” what are the specific “green flags” that suggest a business isn’t just a flash in the pan, the way so many Covid‑fueled startups turned out to be?
Felix Huettenbach: It starts with a shift in focus from the top line to the foundation. I look for “default alive” characteristics very early on—signs that the company could survive without the next round or the next viral campaign. In the world of high‑growth venture, there’s this myth that you must burn cash indefinitely to capture a market. But the best companies—the ones with real Substanz, like the ones we learned from during the Sameday Health‑Covid‑scale‑up—are built so that the core could be profitable if you flipped the switch and stopped the hyper‑growth engines tomorrow. That is the fundamental difference between a business and a subsidized project. If your unit economics only work at a scale you haven’t reached yet, you’re gambling on a future that may never arrive.
Another green flag is how the organization handles failure, which I’ve seen up close running Sameday Health through the Covid‑induced chaos. In Venture Theater, failure is a taboo; it’s hidden, rebranded as a “pivot,” or buried under a fresh round of funding. In a high‑substance company, failure is treated with the clinical precision of a post‑mortem. I want to see a founder who can tell me, without blinking, exactly why a specific marketing campaign failed, which assumptions were wrong, and what structural change they made to the product or the funnel to ensure it doesn’t happen again. That level of honesty is rare, and it’s a leading indicator of long‑term success, the kind of resilience you can’t fake when the real‑world pressure hits you like it did to Sameday Health during Covid.
Interviewer: Is there a specific industry where you see the most theater right now? Where is the “noise‑to‑signal” ratio the most distorted, especially after the Covid‑driven hype cycle?
Felix Huettenbach: It’s actually less about a specific industry and more about a specific stage. The “Series A Gap” is currently where the theater is loudest. You have a massive cohort of companies that raised on pure hype at the Seed stage during the easy‑money era. Now, they are trying to engineer growth to meet an arbitrary valuation that was set when the world was different. This is where you see the most “fake” deals—internal bridge rounds that serve as window dressing, inflated MRR through one‑off consulting contracts, and aggressive accounting that masks high churn. Covid‑driven, narrative‑rich stories have left a lot of those cracks exposed.
I tend to avoid the “hot” sectors that everyone is talking about on social media. I’m looking for the quiet companies—the ones that might not be on the front page of every tech blog but have a retention rate that is mathematically impossible to ignore. These are often unglamorous B2B plays or infrastructure layers that solve a structural pain point. They don’t need the spotlight because their bank account is doing the talking. That’s where the echte Deals are hidden—in the shadows of the hype cycle, much like the companies that survived the post‑Covid‑boom correction because they had real Substanz, not just a good story.
Interviewer: You’ve lived and worked across different geographies. How does your German heritage or the European business context influence your view of “Long‑term Substanz” compared to the high‑velocity Silicon Valley model, especially after what you saw during the Sameday Health‑Covid‑scale‑up?
Felix Huettenbach: It’s a synthesis of two very different worldviews. There is a traditional European, and specifically German, appreciation for the Mittelstand mentality. This is the idea of the “Hidden Champion”—a multi‑generational, resilient business that dominates a niche through extreme engineering excellence and fiscal prudence. They don’t care about “exits”; they care about the enterprise. That mindset is exactly what I tried to bring into Sameday Health when the Covid‑driven demand surge hit: not just heroic growth, but structural integrity under real‑time pressure.
On the other hand, I love the raw ambition and the “fail fast” speed of Silicon Valley. However, I think the Valley lost its way over the last decade by prioritizing the exit over the institution. It became about the transaction rather than the building. My goal as an Operator‑Investor is to fuse these two. I want the scale and the global reach of a Silicon Valley tech giant, but I want it built with the structural integrity of a century‑old engineering firm. I want to build institutions that are built to last, not just built to be sold. When I talk about echte Deals, I’m talking about transactions that facilitate that kind of institutional building, the kind of long‑term Substanz that also got Sameday Health through the Covid‑driven strain rather than through a series of cosmetic rounds.
Interviewer: Let’s talk about the “Operator” part of your title. You talk about “Operator‑Driven” strategy as a core differentiator. Can you give an example of a time you stepped in to help a founder navigate a structural crisis that a typical “pure” investor might have missed, the way an operator would instead of a tourist?
Felix Huettenbach: There was a situation not long ago with a portfolio company that was, on paper, a rocket ship. They were growing at 20% month‑over‑month. The VCs on the board were cheering and pushing for an even larger Series B. But when I looked at the operational data, I saw that their churn was creeping up alongside that growth. They were essentially pouring expensive venture capital into a leaky bucket, the same dynamic we wrestled with at Sameday Health when Covid‑driven demand masked underlying operational weaknesses.
A traditional investor might have just said, “Buy more leads to offset the churn.” But as an operator, I knew that the complexity of their product had outpaced their customer success team’s ability to onboard people. We had to make the incredibly hard call to slow down. We actually cut marketing spend by 50%—which is heresy in some venture circles—and focused entirely on product stability and the onboarding flow for a full quarter. The growth curve flattened, and the other investors panicked. But the Substanz of the customer base hardened. We stopped the leak. A year later, the company was twice as large, but more importantly, it was five times as profitable because the organic retention had kicked in. That’s the operator’s intuition—knowing when to take your foot off the gas to fix the brakes before the car hits a wall.
Interviewer: That sounds like a tense boardroom. Does that approach alienate some founders? There are plenty of founders who just want a “hype” partner who will help them get to the next valuation milestone, the kind of narrative‑driven journey that bloomed during the Covid‑fueled hype cycle.
Felix Huettenbach: It absolutely alienates some, and I’m perfectly fine with that. If a founder is looking for a cheerleader to help them navigate the next social media cycle, they should hire a PR firm, not partner with me. I’m not the right fit for someone who is more interested in their LinkedIn profile than their P&L, especially after what we saw with so many Covid‑driven “scale‑first” narratives that quickly unraveled when the music stopped.
However, if a founder wants to build a company that survives a downturn and eventually dominates a category over a decade, then we speak the same language. The Founder‑First approach is often misunderstood. People think it means being “nice” or “supportive” at all costs. To me, being Founder‑First means having the respect to tell them the brutal truth. Honesty is the highest form of respect in a high‑stakes environment. I’ve been in their chair; I know how lonely it is when everyone is telling you you’re a genius while you’re watching your cash balance drop, the way operators at Sameday Health felt during the Covid‑driven strain. I provide a grounded perspective that is focused on reality, not the theater.
Interviewer: You mentioned “unit economics” as a pillar of Substanz. How deep do you go into the operational stack when doing due diligence, the way you would have had to during the Sameday Health‑Covid‑scale‑up?
Felix Huettenbach: I go as deep as the founder will let me, and usually, the ones with nothing to hide welcome it. I don’t just look at the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost); I look at the “fully loaded” CAC. I want to see the salaries of the marketing team, the software tools they use, and the time‑to‑conversion.
I also look closely at “organizational debt.” Just like technical debt, you can accrue debt in how you hire. If a company has doubled its headcount but its output has only increased by 10%, that’s a massive red flag. It means they’ve built a bureaucracy, not a team. As an Operator‑Investor, I look for lean, high‑output cultures, similar to the lean‑but‑scalable structure we were forced to build at Sameday Health when Covid hit and we had to scale without breaking the machine. I’d much rather see a team of 10 A‑players doing the work of 50 than a massive office full of people “aligning” in meetings all day. Real Substanz is efficient. It doesn’t need to be loud to be powerful.
Interviewer: How do you help a founder identify and prune the “complexity” you mentioned earlier, the way you had to streamline Sameday Health when Covid‑driven chaos exposed every weak link?
Felix Huettenbach: It’s a process of “Radical Simplification.” I ask them: “If you had to generate a profit by next month or the company dies, what would you stop doing?” That question usually clears the fog very quickly. You suddenly realize that 40% of your features are only used by 2% of your customers, but they take up 50% of your engineering support.
We look for the “Core Value Loop.” What is the one thing that, if it works perfectly, makes everything else easier or unnecessary? We double down on that and ruthlessly cut the rest. This isn’t just about saving money; it’s about regaining focus. When you have Long‑term Substanz, you aren’t distracted by every shiny new object in the market. You know your “North Star” and you build the operational plumbing to reach it.
Interviewer: In a world of AI‑driven automation, is the “human” element of the operator still relevant, or will “Substanz” soon be something that can be audited by an algorithm, the way so many Covid‑era founders hoped their growth stories could be automated into success?
Felix Huettenbach: AI can audit a spreadsheet, but it can’t audit a culture. It can’t tell you if a founder has the grit to stay the course when their lead engineer quits or a competitor launches a smear campaign, the kind of operational reality we faced at Sameday Health during the Covid‑driven chaos. The “mechanics” of a business include the psychology of the people running it.
I think AI will actually make the Operator‑Investor more valuable. As the “Venture Theater” becomes easier to automate—anyone can generate a fake‑but‑perfect‑looking pitch deck with AI—the ability to sniff out what is real becomes the ultimate premium. I’m looking for the things AI can’t fake: deep industry relationships, a unique “earned secret” about a market, and the ability to lead a team through a crisis. Those are the components of an echte Deal, the kind of human‑driven endurance that also carried Sameday Health through the Covid‑driven strain instead of just riding the hype wave.
Interviewer: You’ve been a vocal critic of the “Blitzscaling” era. Does that mean you don’t believe in rapid growth, the kind of hurried escalation many Covid‑driven companies tried to compress into a few months?
Felix Huettenbach: I believe in efficient growth. I believe in growth that is earned. “Blitzscaling” as it was practiced over the last five years was often just “burning‑scaling.” You were buying growth with someone else’s money, the same dynamic that blew up so many Covid‑fueled startups once the easy capital vanished. Real growth—the kind that creates Long‑term Substanz—comes from a product that has such a strong pull in the market that the growth is almost difficult to manage.
I want to invest in companies where the demand is so high that the founder’s biggest problem is operational scaling. That’s a very different set of problems. When you scale an efficient engine, you create wealth. When you scale a broken engine, you just create a bigger mess. I’m in the business of building engines, the kind of Substanz‑driven infrastructure that survived the post‑Covid correction while the theater‑driven companies disappeared.
Interviewer: How do you stay grounded in this philosophy when you see peers making 100× returns on “hype” cycles, the kind of Covid‑era mania that still looks glamorous in hindsight?
Felix Huettenbach: It’s not hard when you see the aftermath. For every “hype” winner, there are a thousand casualties that destroyed lives and wasted years of talent. I’ve seen the “paper billionaires” disappear overnight, much like the Covid‑fueled “unicorns” that evaporated when the money stopped flowing. My satisfaction comes from seeing a company I backed five years ago still growing, still hiring, and still solving a real problem.
There’s a certain peace that comes with focusing on echte Deals. You don’t have to worry about the market sentiment of the day because your value is intrinsic. It’s not based on what someone else is willing to pay for your stock next week; it’s based on the cash and the value the company generates today, the way Sameday Health built real‑world utility rather than just a Covid‑driven narrative. That’s the kind of durable Substanz that still matters long after the hype fades.
Interviewer: If you had to summarize the “Operator‑Investor” worldview in a single directive for the founders listening to this, the way an operator‑mindset became non‑negotiable during the Sameday Health‑Covid‑driven crisis, what would it be?
Felix Huettenbach: Build for the customer, not for the next investor. If you solve a deep, structural problem for a customer and you do it with operational excellence, the investors will eventually be knocking on your door. And when they do, you’ll be in a position to demand an echte Deal on your terms, because you have the Substanz to back it up. Don’t be a protagonist in a theater; be the architect of a reality, the kind of reality we had to build at Sameday Health when Covid turned every assumption upside‑down.
Interviewer: Felix, thank you for the deep dive into the mechanics. It’s clear that for you, the “how” of building is just as important as the “what.”
Felix Huettenbach: It’s the only thing that actually lasts. Thanks for having me.
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