How this founder’s unexpected path to Silicon Valley could become an advantage in industrial technology

Thomas Lee Young doesn’t look like your typical Silicon Valley founder.

The 24-year-old CEO Interfacea San Francisco startup that uses artificial intelligence to prevent industrial accidents, is a white man with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese last name, a combination he found amusing enough to mention when he was first introduced to the business contacts. Young was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, the site of significant oil and gas exploration activity, and 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.

This background has become his calling card in his meetings with oil and gas executives today, but it makes for more than just a great conversation starter; It highlights a path that was anything but straightforward which Young would argue gives Interface an advantage.

It’s been years in the making. From the age of 11, Young focused his attention on Caltech with the strength of someone much older than himself. He had been watching shows about Silicon Valley on the Internet, and was fascinated by the idea that people could build “anything and everything” in America. He did everything he could to secure acceptance, even writing his application essay about hijacking his family’s Roomba to create 3D spatial maps of his home.

The trick worked, as Caltech accepted it in 2020, but then the coronavirus hit, and so did its ripple effects. For one thing, Young’s visa status has become nearly impossible (visa appointments have been canceled and processing has been halted). At the same time, his college fund, carefully built up over six or seven years with $350,000 to cover his education, “took a complete hit” due to a sudden market downturn in March of that year that knocked the S&P 500 34% from its peak.

Without much time to decide his future, he chose a cheaper three-year engineering program at the University of Bristol in the UK, where he studied mechanical engineering, but he never gave up on his dreams of Silicon Valley. “I was shocked, but I realized I could still accomplish something,” he says.

In Bristol, Young arrived at Jaguar Land Rover, where he worked in what is called human factors engineering – essentially designing the user experience and safety of industrial systems. “I had never heard of it before I joined,” he admits. The role included finding out how to make cars and manufacturing lines as safe as possible, and ensuring they were “false proof” of smooth operations.

There, within heavy industry, Young saw the problem that would become the forefront. He says the tools many companies use to manage safety documentation either don’t exist — pen and paper — or are so siled and poorly designed that workers hate them. Worse still, operating 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 offered Jaguar to let him build a solution, but the company wasn’t interested. So he started planning his exit. When he learned about Entrepreneur First (EF), a European talent incubator that hires promising individuals before they have a co-founder or even an idea, he applied despite it having a 1% acceptance rate. He was accepted to basically introduce himself.

He told Jaguar that he was going to a wedding in Trinidad and would be gone for a week. Instead, he went to EF’s selection process, impressed organizers, and the day he returned to the office, resigned. “They realize: ‘Oh, maybe you’re not at a wedding,'” he laughs.

At EF, Young met Aryan Mehta, the future co-founder and CTO. Mehta, who is of Indian descent but was born in Belgium, had his American dream thwarted. He was accepted to both Georgia Tech and Penn but likewise was unable to get a visa appointment during the coronavirus. He ended up studying mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, where he developed artificial intelligence to detect errors before building machine learning pipelines at Amazon.

“We had similar backgrounds,” Young says. “He’s a very international player. He speaks five languages, he’s a very technical and amazing guy, and we got along very well.” In fact, they were the only team in the EF group that did not break up, Young says.

What’s more, today they live together in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, although when asked about spending a lot of time together, Young insists that’s not a problem given their respective workloads. “Over the past week, I have seen (Aryan) at home for a total of up to 30 minutes.”

As for what exactly they’re building, Interface’s pitch is straightforward: Use AI to make heavy industry safer. The company independently reviews operating procedures using large language models, comparing them to regulations, technical drawings and company policies to detect errors that could – in a worst-case scenario – lead to the death of workers.

Some numbers are arresting. For one of Canada’s largest energy companies, where Interface is now deployed across three sites (Young declines to name the brand), Interface’s software caught 10,800 errors and improvements across the company’s standard operating procedures in just two and a half months. The same work done by hand would have cost more than $35 million and taken two to three years, Young says.

One error he found particularly troubling, Young says, was a document circulating for 10 years that included the wrong pressure range for the valve. “They’re lucky 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.

Contracts are great. After initially experimenting with results-based pricing (the energy company “hated it,” Young says), Interface adopted a hybrid per-seat model with trailing costs. One contract with the Canadian energy company is worth more than $2.5 million annually, and Interface has more fuel and oil services customers coming online in Houston, Guyana and Brazil.

The total addressable market is not entirely clear, but it is not small. In the United States alone, there is such a thing 27000 Oil and gas services companies, according to market research firm IBISWorld, and that’s just the first sector Interface wants to address.

Edge of strangers

Interestingly, Young’s age and background – things that might seem like disadvantages when it comes to more established industries – became his secret weapons. He says that when he walks into a room with executives two or three times his senior, there is initial skepticism. “Who the hell is this young man and how does he know what he’s talking about?”

But then, he says, he delivers his “wow moment” by explaining his understanding of their operations, their workers’ daily routines, and how much time and money Interface can save them. “Once you can turn them around, they will absolutely love you and defend you 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 particularly proud, since field workers typically “hate software providers.”)

In fact, although Young works out of Interface’s office in San Francisco’s financial district, his hard hat is perched on a table not far from his desk, ready for the next site visit. (Agarwal suggests Young could use a little more time 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 — most of whom are hired engineers, plus an operations employee who started just this week. Interface’s biggest challenge is hiring quickly enough to keep up with demand, a problem that requires its small team to tap networks in both Europe and the United States.

As for what Young portrays of the life he wanted and now lives in San Francisco, he is amazed at how accurate the stereotypes of Silicon Valley are. “You see people talking online saying, ‘Oh, you go to a park and the guy sitting next to you raises $50 million to build a crazy AI agent.’ But it’s actually like that. “I remember what life was like in Trinidad. I mention these ideas to people back home, but they don’t believe me.”

He sometimes makes time to get out in nature with friends — he says they went to Tahoe recently — and Interface hosts events like their hackathon last weekend. But mostly, it’s work, and most of that work involves AI, just like everyone else in San Francisco right now.

Which makes trips to oil rigs strangely attractive.

In fact, that hard hat in the office isn’t just a practical necessity; It is also a temptation, Young suggests. 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. He points out that less than 1% of San Francisco startups are in heavy industries, and that scarcity is part of the appeal for him and the people he hires.

It’s probably not the version of the Silicon Valley dream he spent his childhood chasing from Trinidad: long hours, intense stress, and endless discussions about ubiquitous AI, punctuated by the occasional trip to an oil rig.

However, for now, he didn’t seem to mind it. “Over the last month or two, I haven’t been doing much at all (outside the office), because there’s been so much activity here, building, hiring and selling.” “But I feel very strong,” he adds.