Thomas Lee Young doesn’t sound like your typical Silicon Valley founder.
The 24-year-old CEO of Interface, a San Francisco startup that uses artificial intelligence to prevent workplace accidents, is a white guy with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese surname, a combination he finds funny enough to mention when first introduced to business contacts. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, the site of significant oil and gas exploration activity, Young grew up around oil rigs and energy infrastructure because his entire family worked as engineers, stretching back generations to his great-grandfather, who immigrated to the island nation from China.
That background has become his calling card in pitch meetings with oil and gas executives today, but it’s more than a good conversation starter; it underscores a path that has been anything but straightforward and, as Young might argue, gives Interface an advantage.
It was years in the making. From the age of 11, Young fixed Caltech with the intensity of a much older person. He watched programs about Silicon Valley online, fascinated by the idea that people could build “anything and everything” in America. He did everything he could to secure admission, even writing his application essay about hijacking his family’s Roomba to create 3D spatial maps of his house.
The ploy worked—Caltech accepted him in 2020—but then COVID-19 hit, and so did the ripple effects. First, Young’s visa situation became almost impossible (visa deals were canceled and processing stalled). At the same time, his college fund, carefully built over six or seven years to $350,000 to cover his education, was “basically hit completely” by the sharp market decline in March of that year.
Without much time to decide his future, he opted for a cheaper three-year engineering program at the University of Bristol in the UK, where he studied mechanical engineering, but never gave up on his Silicon Valley dreams. “I was devastated,” he says, “but I realized I could still get something done.”
In Bristol, Young landed at Jaguar Land Rover, where he worked in something called human factors engineering – essentially the UX and safety design of industrial systems. “I had never heard of it before I even joined,” he admits. The role involved figuring out how to make cars and production lines as safe as possible, ensuring they were “dummy-proof” for trouble-free operation.
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It was there, in heavy industry, that Young saw the problem that would become Interface. He says the tools many companies use to manage safety records are either non-existent – pen and paper – or so neglected and poorly designed that workers hate them. Worse, the operating procedures themselves—the instruction manuals and checklists that workers depend on to stay safe—are riddled with errors, outdated, and nearly impossible to maintain.
Young pitched Jaguar to let him build a solution, but the company wasn’t interested. So he began planning his exit. When he learned about Entrepreneur First (EF), a European talent incubator that recruits promising individuals before they have a co-founder or even an idea, he cold-applied despite its 1% acceptance rate. He was accepted essentially pitching himself.
He told Jaguar he was going to a wedding in Trinidad and would be gone for a week. Instead, he went to the EC selection process, impressed the organizers and the day he returned to the office, he resigned. “They realized, ‘Oh, so you probably weren’t at a wedding,'” he laughs.
At EF, Young met Aaryan Mehta, his future co-founder and CTO. Mehta, of Indian descent but born in Belgium, had his own thwarted American dream. He had been accepted to both Georgia Tech and Penn, but was similarly unable to get a visa deal during COVID. He ended up studying mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, where he developed AI for error detection before building machine learning pipelines at Amazon.
“We had similar backgrounds,” says Young. “He’s super international. He speaks five languages, very technical, great guy and we got on very well.” In fact, they were the only team in their EF cohort that didn’t break up, says Young.
More than that, today they live together in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, although when asked about spending so much time together, Young is confident that it’s not a problem given their respective workloads. “Over the past week I have seen [Aaryan] at home for maybe a total of 30 minutes.”
As for exactly what they’re building, Interface’s pitch is straightforward: use AI to make heavy industry safer. The company independently audits operating procedures using large language models, cross-checking them against regulations, engineering drawings and company policies to catch errors that could – in the worst case scenario – get workers killed.
Some of the tracks are arresting. For one of Canada’s largest energy companies, where Interface is now deployed at three sites (Young declines to name the brand), Interface’s software found 10,800 errors and improvements across the company’s standard operating procedures in just two and a half months. As Young tells it, the same work done manually would have cost more than $35 million and taken two to three years.
One error Young found particularly troubling, he says, was a document that had been in circulation for 10 years with the wrong pressure range listed for a valve. “They’re just lucky nothing happened,” said Medha Agarwal, a partner at Defy.vc, who led Interface’s $3.5 million seed round earlier this year with participation from Precursor, Rockyard Ventures and angel investors including Charlie Songhurst.
The contracts are significant. After first trying performance-based pricing (the energy company “hated it,” says Young), Interface adopted a hybrid model per overpriced seat. A single contract with the Canadian energy company is worth more than $2.5 million annually, and Interface has several fuel and oil service customers coming online in Houston, Guyana and Brazil.
The total addressable market is not entirely clear, but it is not small. In the US alone, there are something like 27,000 oil and gas service companies, according to market research outfit IBISWorld, and that’s just the first vertical that Interface wants to tackle.
The outsider’s edge
Interestingly, Young’s age and background – things that can seem like disadvantages when it comes to more established industries – have become his secret weapons. When he walks into a room with executives two or three times his age, he says, there is initial skepticism. “Who the hell is this young guy and how does he know what he’s talking about?”
But then, he says, he delivers his “wow moment” by explaining an understanding of their operations, their employees’ daily routines and exactly how much time and money Interface can save them. “When you can turn them, they will absolutely love you and defend and fight for you,” he says. (He claims that after a recent first site visit with operators, five workers asked when they could invest in Interface, which made him especially proud since field workers typically “hate software providers.”)
Although Young works out of Interface’s office in San Francisco’s financial district, his helmet sits on a table not far from his desk, ready for the next site visit. (Agarwal suggests Young could use a little more downtime in his life, recalling a recent call in which Young told her he hadn’t seen the sun all day.)
The company now has eight employees – five in the office, three remote – mostly engineering hires, plus an operations employee who started this week. Interface’s biggest challenge is hiring fast enough to keep up with demand, a problem that requires its small team to tap into networks across both Europe and the US.
As for what Young makes of the San Francisco life he wanted and now lives, he wonders how accurate the Silicon Valley stereotypes turned out to be. “You see people online talking about, ‘Oh, you go to a park and the person sitting next to you has raised $50 million by building some crazy AI agent.’ But that’s actually how it is,” he says. “I think back to what life was like in Trinidad. I mention these ideas to people back home and they just don’t believe me.”
He occasionally makes time to go out into nature with friends — he says they were in Tahoe recently — and Interface hosts events like a hackathon they held last weekend. But mostly it’s work, and most of that work involves AI, just like everyone else’s in San Francisco right now.
Which makes the trips to oil rigs strangely appealing.
In fact, that helmet in the office is not only a practical necessity; it’s also a lure, suggests Young. For engineers tired of building “some low-impact B2B sales or recruiting tool,” as Young puts it, the promise of occasionally leaving the Bay Area bubble to work with operators in the field has become a recruiting advantage. Less than 1% of San Francisco startups work in heavy industry, he notes, and that scarcity is part of the appeal for him and for the people he hires.
It’s probably not quite the version of the Silicon Valley dream he spent his childhood chasing from Trinidad: long hours, intense pressure, endless AI discussions everywhere, punctuated by the occasional trip to an oil rig.
Still, right now he doesn’t seem to mind. “During the last month or two I haven’t done much at all [outside the office]because there has just been so much intensity here, building, hiring, selling.” But “I feel pretty strong,” he adds.