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by Thomas MacMillan | Oct 30, 2009 9:37 am

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Posted to: Business/Labor/ Economic Development, Downtown

One day after his co-founder testified before a U.S. Congressional committee, the head of a New Haven start-up spoke before a less intimidating crowd—20 techies in a dimly lit downtown basement.

The subject of both talks was the same—the creation and development of YouRenew.com. Bob Casey (at right in photo), who’s 22, and Rich Littlehale, 23, started the electronics recycling business from a Yale dorm room earlier this year. The company pays consumers for their old cellphones and then recycles them.

Thanks in part to the support of the New Haven’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), YouRenew has experienced exponential growth in its first seven months. The company is up to 14 employees and still hiring. The company has even attracted the attention of the U.S. Congress, explained Casey.

His remarks came at a technology-oriented happy hour at Geronimo’s restaurant on Crown Street on Wednesday. The event was the fourth in a series hosted by EDC, a private not-for-profit to support business in New Haven. The get-togethers attract city tech entrepreneurs to drink and exchange business cards.

The tech networking events are designed to foster the development of New Haven’s tech industry, said ED staffer Carlos Eyzaquirre. “It’s a sector that’s really going to grow.”

Some 20 New Haven’s techies emerged from behind their computer screens and braved the rain to gather in the basement of Geronimo’s on Wednesday evening. Plied with free drinks, macaroni and cheese, and quesadillas with fresh guacamole, they heard a PowerPoint talk about the growth and development of YouRenew.

The company takes old consumer electronics—cellphones, PDAs, iPods—and recycles or resells them for a profit, Casey explained.

The average turnover for a new cellphone is 15 months. Most of the phones that are thrown away are “perfectly working devices,” Casey said. “We saw ourselves as competing with the trash can to start off.”

Why would someone send an old Blackberry to YouRenew rather than pitch it into the trash? YouRenew will pay as much as $100 for it, Casey said. Even a “five-year-old Motorola RAZR” could fetch $17 on YouRenew, he said.

YouRenew takes the old technology and either recycles it or resells it for parts, or whole, for reuse. Sixty percent of the devices that YouRenew takes in are sold for reuse, Casey said.

The company takes a loss when it buys back older technology, Casey later explained. “We’re relying on high-end devices to carry the day,” he said. The company is willing to eat the loss as part of its mission as a green company.

The company won attention early on when the iPhone 3G was released, said Joe Pappalardo (at left in top photo), YouRenew’s director of business development. Pappalardo, a 2008 Yale grad who rowed crew with Casey, explained that a team from YouRenew went down to the Apple store in New York. With its CEO dressed as a huge iPhone, the group offered to buy old iPhones from people emerging from the store with their new iPhones. Even the store manager took them up on it.

YouRenew also partnered early on with the city, picking up three boxes of old cellphones from the Department of Public Works.

The company has benefitted recently from increased national attention on the environmental impact of electronic waste. The TV news program 60 Minutes recently ran a report on the subject. Then, on Tuesday, the U.S. Congressional Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization and Procurement held a hearing on the subject. YouRenew co-founder Rich Littlehale was a panelist at the hearing.

After the PowerPoint presentation, Casey spoke about the early history of YouRenew. He and Littlehale started the company after two failed ventures during his freshman and sophomore years at Yale. First they tried to start a health beverage company called Ambrosia. “We sunk a lot of money and a year of our lives into that,” Casey said. But it didn’t work out.

They also tried a transit company bringing Yale students to airports during Thanksgiving and Christmastime. The high point of that business, which also folded, was transporting “basically the whole school” to a Harvard-Yale football game in Cambridge.

“I guess I’ve always had an entrepreneurial bug,” said Casey, who’s in the middle of a year off from pursuing his economics degree at Yale.

YouRenew started at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Incubator on York Street, which supports emerging businesses. The company has outgrown the space. “We’re on top of each other,” Casey said.

So the company is moving downtown to 839 Chapel, where it will occupy the entire second floor.

Casey said the company has no intention of leaving New Haven. “There’s a really large available workforce,” he said. YouRenew has also benefited from the support of the EDC, which helped the company find customers and negotiate the lease on its new space, Casey said.

Casey declined to say if YouRenew is turning a profit yet. “Things are going as well as we could possibly hope,” he said.

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