Sam Matlick '13: Young Alum Entrepreneur

Four years ago, Sam Matlick '13 began selling his Westminster classmates’ “old” and used electronics on eBay, and then giving them money back from the sale. Seeing an inefficient market where phone and electronics users - especially kids - would keep buying the latest iPhone or computer year after year and wastefully toss out their old models, the Westminster student, in a span of four months, resold over three hundred devices of classmates, friends, and families of friends that would otherwise have gone to waste, likely ending up among the 41 million tons of e-waste produced each year, a majority of which blights its surrounding environment in landfills.

 

Today, Matlick is a junior at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, where he has launched the outgrowth of his electronics resale endeavor, SellYourTech LLC, to escape velocity and is also focusing his attention on another project dealing with the difficulty of access to comfort care, an extremely costly yet beneficial type of 24 hour home healthcare, that Matlick seeks to help open up to terminally ill patients facing breast cancer.

 

Back at SellYourTech’s inception, Matlick’s prolific eBay presence caught the eye of a wholesaler, who established a vendor contract with Matlick, giving him certainty: “this could be a business,” and a successful one at that.

Matlick then sat down with his family attorney and went to work planning the business, filing for LLC, or Limited Liability Company, status. Upon arrival at Hamilton in the fall of 2013, Matlick looked to institute SellYourTech at the college and soon found himself striking opportunity.

 

In late October of that year, Matlick happened to notice a flyer advertising the college’s annual Pitch Competition...a competition beginning in three days. Rushing to contact the representative of the competition, he was let in. Five days later, after a weekend-long pressure cooker of a competition where he received invaluable advice on the development of his pitch from alumni mentors and judges, Matlick won the competition, beating out many teams of upperclassmen as a solo, freshman competitor.

 

The business model proposed is accurately described by Matlick as a “win-win-win” – those who ‘sell their tech’ make money they would never have given thought to otherwise, Matlick’s business profits, and all the while toxic e-waste is diverted from its destructive disposal pathway.

 

From the competition he was given a year’s access to a corporate lawyer and consulting service, and with financial backing from his father, worked with a web development company to build SellYourTech’s website and greatly expand the business. Soon, he had SellYourTech “campus reps” remotely spreading and handling operations on five college campuses, including Penn State, Cornell and Trinity College.

 

After years more of success at pitch competitions, including the New York State Business competition, Matlick was contacted by SunnKing Inc., one of the largest electronics recycling companies that largely dominates the market in larger electronics, especially with industrial electronics. Matlick’s corner of the market, on the other hand, dealing with smaller personal electronics, was an area of interest to SunnKing. Soon, SunnKing purchased a large portion of SellYourTech, and now Matlick is working diligently in preparation for a massive launch of the coalition in the coming months. He hopes to have representatives of SellYourTech on every college campus in the nation, and eventually broadening his scope beyond colleges.

 

Most recently, however, Matlick has been working on a project in honor and continued legacy of his mother, Dr. Sandee Karen Matlick, who passed away after an eleven-year battle with breast cancer in 2014. The Sandee K. Foundation (SandeeK.org) is a non-profit founded by Matlick in the spring of 2015, addressing the hardships faced by terminally ill patients and their families in accessing proper end-of-life care with comfort care.

 

“Treatment becomes very difficult at the end of life, and hospitals are cold, dark, and unforgiving – the amount of time a family can spend with their loved one [in a hospital] is limited,” said Matlick. Comfort care differs from hospice care in that it includes in-home, live-in care for a few weeks or months, while a resident nurse provides everything a hospital would. Comfort care, however, is extremely costly and, unlike hospice care, is not covered by insurance, setting it far out of the reach of far too many.

 

Matlick found that there was no existing organization helping terminally-ill patients afford comfort care, and thus established the foundation to partly or fully cover the costs of the care service, especially for those facing breast cancer. Recently partnering with the well-established Griswold Home Care, he is currently working through incorporation and attainment of 501c3 non-profit status for the foundation, a long and arduous process.

 

When asked for his advice to budding entrepreneurs, Matlick advised to “never turn down an opportunity, never turn down a business card,” and to always, always follow up. Finally, he never fails to mention that this would not have been possible were it not for Westminster and its dense, tightly-knit network of support, where he began in his dorm four years ago.