Thomas Lee Young doesn’t seem like your typical Silicon Valley founder.
The 24-year-old CEO of Interface, a San Francisco startup that uses AI to prevent workplace accidents, is a white man with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese last name, an interesting combination that he notes when first introduced to business associates. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, a country with a lot of oil and gas exploration activity, Young grew up around oil rigs and energy infrastructure, going back generations to his great-grandfather who immigrated to the island nation from China, and his entire family working as engineers.
That background is his calling card in today’s pitch meetings with oil and gas executives, but it’s more than just a conversation starter. This highlights a path that was anything but straightforward, and one might argue that Young brought an advantage to the interface.
It took many years. Ever since he was 11 years old, Young had been obsessed with Caltech like someone much older. He watched shows online about Silicon Valley and was fascinated by the idea that people could build “anything” in America. He did everything he could to secure admission, even writing an application essay about hijacking his family’s Roomba to create a 3D spatial map of their home.
The ploy worked, and Caltech accepted him in 2020, but then COVID-19 hit and its ripple effects were large. For one thing, Young’s visa situation became nearly impossible (his visa appointment was canceled and the process stopped). At the same time, his college endowment, which he had carefully built up $350,000 over six or seven years to finance his education, was “basically completely devastated” by the sudden market downturn in March of that year.
Without much time to decide on his future, he opted for an inexpensive three-year engineering program at the University of Bristol in England, studying mechanical engineering, but never gave up on his Silicon Valley dreams. “I was devastated,” he says. “But I realized I could still accomplish something.”
At Bristol, Young joined Jaguar Land Rover, working in what is known as human factors engineering, or the UX and safety design of industrial systems. “I had never heard of that before I joined,” he admits. This role involved finding ways to ensure that cars and production lines were as safe as possible and “dummy proof” for smooth operations.
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It was within heavy industry that Young saw the problem of interfacing. He says the tools many companies use to manage safety documentation are either pen and paper non-existent or so siled and poorly designed that employees don’t like them. To make matters worse, the work procedures themselves—the instruction manuals and checklists that blue-collar workers rely on to stay safe—are riddled with errors, outdated, and nearly impossible to maintain.
Young pitched Jaguar for permission to build the solution, but the company wasn’t interested. So he began planning his escape. When he learned about Entrepreneur First (EF), a European talent incubator that recruits promising talent before they have a co-founder or an idea, he coldly applied despite having a 1% hiring rate. It was accepted that he essentially promoted himself.
He told Jagger that he was going to attend a wedding in Trinidad and would be away for about a week. Instead, he participated in the EF selection process, made a good impression on the organizers, and quit the same day he returned to office. “They realized, ‘Oh, you’re probably not at the wedding,'” he laughed.
At EF, Young met his future co-founder and CTO, Aryan Mehta. Mehta, who is Indian but born in Belgium, had her American dream thwarted. He had been accepted to both Georgia Tech and the University of Pennsylvania, but was also unable to get a visa appointment due to COVID-19. He ended up studying mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, where he developed AI for fault detection before building machine learning pipelines at Amazon.
“We had similar backgrounds,” Young says. “He’s very international. He speaks five languages, he’s a very technical, great guy, and we got along very well.” In fact, they were the only team among EF’s that didn’t break up, Young says.
More than that, the two now live together in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, but when asked about spending too much time together, Young was adamant that it wasn’t an issue given their respective workloads. “Last week, I met (Aryan) at his house for probably a total of 30 minutes.”
As for what exactly it’s building, Interface’s pitch is straightforward. The idea is to use AI to make heavy industry safer. The company uses large-scale language models to autonomously audit business procedures and check them against regulations, technical drawings, and company policies to discover errors that, in the worst case scenario, can lead to the death of an employee.
Some numbers have caught our attention. At one of Canada’s largest energy companies, where Interface is currently deployed across three locations (Young declined to name the brands), Interface’s software found 10,800 errors and improvements across the company’s standard operating procedures in just two and a half months. Doing the same work by hand would cost more than $35 million and take two to three years, according to Young.
One mistake that Young found particularly troubling was that documentation had been in circulation for 10 years that listed incorrect pressure ranges for the valves. “They were just lucky that nothing happened,” says 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 contract can be quite expensive. After initially experimenting with outcome-based pricing (which energy companies “hated,” Young says), Interface adopted a hybrid per-seat model with overage fees. One contract with the Canadian energy company is worth more than $2.5 million annually, and Interface has a growing number of customers accessing fuel and oil services online in Houston, Guyana and Brazil.
The total addressable market is not entirely clear, but it is not small. There are about 27,000 oil and gas service companies in the U.S. alone, according to market research firm IBISWorld, and that’s just the first area Interface wants to address.
outsider’s edge
Interestingly, Young’s age and background, which may seem like a disadvantage when it comes to established industries, are his secret weapons. When he walks into a room full of executives two or three times his age, he says he’s initially skeptical. “Who is this young man and how does he know what he is talking about?”
But then, he says, they provide a “wow moment” by explaining exactly what their company does, what their employees do every day, and how much time and money the interface will save them. “Once you can turn them over, they will absolutely love you and advocate and fight for you,” he says. (He claimed that after a recent first site visit with operators, five of his workers asked when they could invest in Interface. He was especially proud given that field workers generally “hate software providers.”)
In fact, as Mr. Young works at Interface’s offices in San Francisco’s financial district, his helmet is on a table not far from his desk, ready for his next site visit. (Agarwal suggested Young could use some more downtime in his life, recalling a recent phone call in which Young told him he hadn’t seen the sun all day.)
The company currently has eight employees: five in the office, three remotely, mostly engineering hires, and an operations person who just joined the company this week. Interface’s biggest challenge is hiring talent fast enough to meet demand, a problem that requires the small team to tap into networks in both Europe and the United States.
Young marvels at how accurate Silicon Valley stereotypes have turned out to be about the life he wanted in San Francisco and how he thinks about the life he currently lives in. “You see people online saying, ‘I go to the park and the guy sitting next to me raised $50 million and built this crazy AI agent,’ and that’s the reality,” he says. “It reminds me of what life was like in Trinidad. When I share these thoughts with people back home, they don’t believe me.”
He occasionally makes time to go out into nature with friends, and says he recently went to Tahoe. Interface hosts events like the hackathon it held last weekend. But mostly, it’s a job, and most of that job has to do with AI, just like everyone else in San Francisco right now.
That’s why a trip to an oil rig is oddly appealing.
In fact, a helmet in the office is more than just a practical necessity. It’s also a lure, Young suggests. For engineers tired of building “low-impact B2B sales and recruiting tools,” as Young puts it, the promise of being able to occasionally leave the Bay Area bubble and work with operators in the field has been a recruiting advantage. Less than 1% of San Francisco’s startups are in heavy industry, he notes, and scarcity is part of the appeal for him and the people he employs.
It’s probably a very different version of the Silicon Valley dream he spent his childhood chasing from Trinidad. Long hours, intense pressure, endless AI discussions everywhere, punctuated by occasional trips to oil rigs.
Still, he doesn’t seem to mind so far. “For the last month or two, I haven’t done much (outside the office) because there’s been so much activity here – construction, recruiting, sales.” But “I’m feeling pretty strong,” he added.
