Thomas Lee Young doesn’t fit the mold of a conventional Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
At just 24, Young is the CEO of Interface, a San Francisco-based company leveraging AI to reduce industrial accidents. He’s a white man with a Caribbean lilt and a Chinese surname—a combination he often jokes about when meeting new business associates. Young grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, a country with a robust oil and gas sector. Surrounded by oil rigs and energy facilities, he comes from a long line of engineers, tracing back to his great-grandfather who emigrated from China to the islands.
That unique background is now a key part of his pitch to oil and gas leaders, serving as more than just an icebreaker—it highlights a journey that’s been far from ordinary and, as Young sees it, gives Interface a competitive advantage.
His story has been years in the making. From the age of 11, Young was obsessed with Caltech, displaying a focus beyond his years. He watched Silicon Valley documentaries online, fascinated by the idea that in America, people could invent anything. Determined to get in, he even wrote his application essay about hacking his family’s Roomba to map his house in 3D.
His efforts paid off—Caltech admitted him in 2020—but the pandemic changed everything. Visa appointments were canceled, making it nearly impossible for him to enter the U.S. Meanwhile, the college fund he’d built up over six or seven years, totaling $350,000, was wiped out by the sudden market crash that March.
With little time to make a decision, Young opted for a more affordable three-year mechanical engineering program at the University of Bristol in the UK, holding onto his Silicon Valley ambitions. “I was heartbroken,” he recalls, “but I knew I could still accomplish something.”
While at Bristol, Young joined Jaguar Land Rover, working in human factors engineering—essentially focusing on the user experience and safety of industrial systems. “I’d never even heard of it before joining,” he admits. His job was to make vehicles and production lines as safe and foolproof as possible.
It was in this industrial environment that Young identified the issue that would inspire Interface. He noticed that many companies still relied on pen and paper for safety documentation, or used clunky, isolated digital tools that workers disliked. Even worse, the procedures and checklists that workers depended on were often outdated, full of mistakes, and difficult to keep current.
Young proposed a solution to Jaguar, but the company wasn’t interested. That’s when he started planning his departure. Upon discovering Entrepreneur First (EF), a European incubator that backs individuals before they have a co-founder or even a business idea, he applied cold, despite its 1% acceptance rate—and got in, essentially pitching himself.
He told Jaguar he was attending a wedding in Trinidad and would be gone for a week. Instead, he went to EF’s selection event, impressed the team, and quit his job the day he returned. “They figured out pretty quickly I hadn’t actually gone to a wedding,” he laughs.
At EF, Young met Aaryan Mehta, who would become his co-founder and CTO. Mehta, who is of Indian heritage but grew up in Belgium, also had his American dream derailed. He was accepted to Georgia Tech and Penn but couldn’t get a visa during the pandemic. He ended up at Imperial College London, studying math and computer science, where he worked on AI for fault detection and later built machine learning systems at Amazon.
“We had a lot in common,” Young says. “He’s extremely international, speaks five languages, is highly technical, and we hit it off immediately.” In fact, Young notes, theirs was the only team in their EF cohort that didn’t split up.
Now, the two share an apartment in San Francisco’s SoMa district. Asked if living and working together is ever a problem, Young insists it isn’t, given their busy schedules. “In the past week, I’ve probably seen [Aaryan] at home for a total of 30 minutes.”
So what exactly are they building? Interface’s mission is simple: use AI to improve safety in heavy industry. Their platform automatically reviews operating procedures with large language models, comparing them to regulations, technical diagrams, and company policies to spot mistakes that could, in the worst case, be fatal for workers.
The results are striking. For one of Canada’s top energy firms—Interface is now active at three of its sites—the software identified 10,800 errors and suggested improvements in the company’s standard operating procedures in just two and a half months. According to Young, doing this work manually would have cost over $35 million and taken two to three years.
One mistake that stood out to Young was a document that had listed the wrong pressure range for a valve for a decade. “They’re fortunate nothing went wrong,” says Medha Agarwal, a partner at Defy.vc, which led Interface’s $3.5 million seed round, joined by Precursor, Rockyard Ventures, and angel investors like Charlie Songhurst.
The contracts are substantial. After initially trying outcome-based pricing—which the energy company disliked—Interface switched to a hybrid per-seat model with additional charges for overages. A single deal with the Canadian energy company is worth over $2.5 million per year, and Interface is onboarding more clients in Houston, Guyana, and Brazil.
The full market potential is hard to pin down, but it’s significant. According to IBISWorld, there are around 27,000 oil and gas service companies in the U.S. alone, and that’s just the first sector Interface aims to address.
The outsider’s edge
Interestingly, Young’s youth and unconventional background—traits that might be seen as drawbacks in traditional sectors—have become his greatest assets. When he enters a room full of executives twice his age, he says, there’s often doubt. “Who is this young guy, and what does he know?”
But then, he says, he wins them over by demonstrating a deep understanding of their operations, the daily routines of their workers, and the tangible savings Interface can deliver. “Once you turn them around, they become your biggest supporters,” he says. (He recalls that after a recent site visit, five workers asked when they could invest in Interface—a point of pride, since field workers usually “hate software vendors.”)
Even though Young works from Interface’s San Francisco Financial District office, his hard hat is always nearby, ready for the next site inspection. (Agarwal notes that Young could use more downtime, recalling a recent call where he mentioned he hadn’t seen daylight all day.)
The company now has eight employees—five in the office and three working remotely—mostly engineers, plus a new operations hire. Interface’s main challenge is hiring quickly enough to meet demand, which means the small team relies on networks in both Europe and the U.S.
Reflecting on his life in San Francisco, Young is struck by how true the Silicon Valley clichés are. “You hear stories about meeting someone in a park who’s raised $50 million for some wild AI project—and it’s actually like that,” he says. “When I think about life back in Trinidad, people there can’t believe these stories.”
He occasionally finds time to enjoy the outdoors with friends—he recently visited Tahoe—and Interface organizes events like hackathons. But most of his time is spent working, much of it focused on AI, just like many others in San Francisco these days.
That’s part of why trips to oil rigs are a welcome change of pace.
That hard hat in the office isn’t just for show, Young says—it’s also a draw for engineers. For those tired of working on “some low-impact B2B sales or recruiting tool,” as Young puts it, the chance to leave the Bay Area bubble and collaborate with field operators is a major perk. Less than 1% of San Francisco startups focus on heavy industry, he points out, and that rarity is part of the attraction for both him and his team.
It’s probably not the exact Silicon Valley dream he imagined as a kid in Trinidad: long hours, high pressure, constant AI talk, and the occasional trip to an oil field.
Still, he doesn’t seem to mind. “In the past month or two, I’ve barely done anything outside of work because things have been so intense with building, hiring, and selling.” But, he adds, “I feel pretty good.”
