Drei Ratschläge an Dein 14jähriges Ich!

Learn how to either succeed fast or fail quicker. Two would be don't be scared of those failures, learn from those failures and don’t get yourself in a slump over any of them and he third would be to focus on what it is you really want to do in the future because at 14 I had no idea what I wanted to do.

Was steht auf Deiner Visitenkarte?

Casey McNeil and am the CEO and founder of REEcycle.

Was ist das coolste an Deinem Job?

The coolest thing about my job is solving a massive problem that almost nobody has heard about. Very few people understand the problems that we're with this rare elements. So being able to educate people about this problem will also attack a huge issue that we currently have is the most fun I have in this company.

Welche Einschränkungen bringt Dein Job mit sich?

Yeah, you know as CEO you have to keep the team involved. That's a big aspect of it. We are such a large team. You have to keep everybody focused on the vision, on one key vision so that we all know where it's going. You have to help keep everybody on track as you continue to scale and when you run into hurdles you have to be the champion that's making sure that everybody understands it's going to be okay and we're going to find ways around it.

Worum geht es in Deinem Job?

So our company is REEcycle which stands for Rare Earth Element Recycling. What we do is create a renewal source of some of those critical materials on earth also known as Rare Earth Elements. So my day-to-day operations as a CEO of this company is to form the necessary partnerships that will allow us to not only source the material that we need to bring in to be able to receive and reclaim these elements but also from the partnerships at the customer end make sure that we can actually sell these materials once they are extracted from the waste of electronics. So that is pretty much my day to day. We have some chemists in the company. We have a strong technical team that works on that end and so it leaves the business end wide open for us to get out and form these partnerships and that's what I focus on most. The reason that we're creating renewable sources of rare earth elements I'd because of the problems that we're running into in supplying the demand that the world has for these materials. Right now China produces over 90% of the world supply of these materials and it's having trouble keeping up with the demand that the rest of the world is putting on them. To add to that to extract these elements we must produce radioactive waste and tons of acid to extract these materials and it's creating a lot of problems as we move forward in the way that it is destroying the earth that these rare elements are being mined from.

Wie sieht Dein Werdegang aus?

So I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. I ended up going in the University of Houston where I got my bachelor in entrepreneurship. My background has been in electronic recycling for the past four years. I used to focus on repairing and recycling the cell phones, the millions of cell phones that are discarded each year. I dropped out of school in 2012 to move to Silicon Valley where I joined a company called iCraft. After a short stay at iCraft I realized I wanted to focus on my own company because of my own vision. I left that company, went back to Houston and continued my education at the University of Houston. That led me to where I am today working with REEcycle.

Ginge es auch ohne Deinem Werdegang?

Could I do this without the past experiences that I have? No, you need to be able to sellable vision. That's the biggest one. You need to have a strong understanding of where the market is going so that you are able to interact with the right people. We've been able to form partnership with large international companies like Seagate, Siemens and a variety of other companies that are concerned about the way that they're not only recycling their technologies but how they're renewing some of the resources that they depend on. By having a good understanding of the market, being able to understand the needs and be able to connect with them on a certain level, you're able to form those partnerships that are key to creating this company.