A personal reflection on COVID and Sameday Health
What COVID Really Taught Me
On fear, testing lines, and building Sameday Health in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis that gave nobody a playbook.
March 2020: COVID Hits Los Angeles
I remember exactly where I was when it stopped feeling like a story on the news and started feeling like my life. I was Chief of Staff at Quantgene at the time, working on liquid-biopsy cancer detection — close to healthcare, but still one step removed from the front line. Then Los Angeles shut down because of COVID, and within days everything I thought I understood about how a city works came apart.
What stuck with me wasn't the empty streets. It was the COVID testing lines. People waiting for hours in their cars, sometimes overnight, just to find out if they were carrying the virus that could kill someone they loved — and then waiting another week or more for the result. By the time the answer came back, it was already too late to be useful. That gap between "I need to know" and "I finally know" wasn't an inconvenience. It was where people were getting hurt.
I didn't have a grand plan. I had a very simple, very stubborn thought: COVID testing speed was solvable, and nobody serious seemed to be solving it fast enough. So I stopped being one step removed — and Sameday Health was born out of that decision.
There Was No COVID Playbook
We opened our first Sameday Health clinic in Venice with almost nothing but a name that was also a promise: results the same day, not the same week. What followed were the most intense months of my life. We were sourcing COVID testing kits during a global shortage, where a supplier who said yes on Monday could go silent by Friday. We were hiring hundreds of people for Sameday Health in weeks, not quarters, training them on protocols that were themselves changing week to week as we learned more about the virus.
Nobody tells you what it actually feels like to carry that kind of responsibility. It's not adrenaline, not most days. It's a low, constant hum of pressure that doesn't switch off when you go home, because you know a wrong call on inventory, staffing, or a lab partnership at Sameday Health doesn't just cost the company money — it costs someone their COVID test result on time, or at all. I slept less than I'm proud of. I missed things I can't get back. That's the honest version, not the highlight-reel one.
"You don't get the luxury of a perfect decision. You get incomplete information and a line of people outside who need an answer today."
Getting COVID Wrong Before Getting It Right
I want to be honest about something founders don't always admit: at Sameday Health, we got things wrong first. A clinic layout that couldn't handle the testing volume we were seeing. A staffing model that broke under a surge. A lab turnaround estimate that was optimistic by a full day when a full day mattered enormously to the person waiting on their COVID result. Building fast during an emergency means you don't get to test in a sandbox. You test in production, in real time, with real consequences for real people.
What I'm actually proud of isn't that we got it right immediately — we didn't. It's that we kept fixing Sameday Health in public, in real time, without losing the thing that mattered most during COVID: getting people accurate answers, fast, so they could make decisions about their health and the people around them.
What I Carry From COVID Now
By the time the most acute phase of the crisis passed, Sameday Health had grown to more than 2,000 people across over 50 sites, and we'd helped more than 3 million Americans get tested, vaccinated, or seen. Those numbers still don't fully capture what those COVID years were. What I remember more than any statistic is the specific relief on someone's face in a parking lot when a Sameday Health result came back the same day instead of a week later — and knowing that relief was the entire point.
COVID didn't teach me to be a founder. It taught me what it actually costs to be one when the stakes are real and immediate, not theoretical. I learned that discipline isn't a personality trait you either have or don't — it's a decision you make again at 4am, and then again the next morning. I learned to have enormous respect for the nurses, techs, and site leads at Sameday Health who showed up every single day of the COVID crisis, long after it stopped being new or interesting, because people still needed them to.
I don't think I'll ever build something under quite those conditions again, and I'm not sure I'd want to. But I'm grateful I was in the room for it, grateful for what Sameday Health became — and grateful, most of all, that COVID is a story I get to tell in the past tense.
We align technical insight with disciplined execution to provide measurable gains across operational, financial, and strategic domains.