Thomas Lee Young doesn’t sound like your typical Silicon Valley founder.
The 24-year-old CEO of Interface, a San Francisco startup using AI to prevent industrial accidents, is a white guy with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese last name, a combination he finds amusing enough to mention when he’s first introduced to business contacts. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, the site of substantial 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 makes for more than a great conversation starter; it underscores a path that has been anything but straightforward and that Young might argue gives Interface an edge.
It was years in the making. From age 11, Young fixated on Caltech with the intensity of someone much older. He watched shows about Silicon Valley online, mesmerized by the idea that people could build “anything and everything” in America. He did everything possible 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 its ripple effects. For one thing, Young’s visa situation became nearly impossible (visa appointments were cancelled and processing came to a halt). At the same time, his college fund, carefully built over six or seven years to $350,000 to cover his education, “basically got hit entirely” by the abrupt market downturn in March of that year.
Without a lot of time to decide his future, he chose a cheaper three-year engineering program at the University of Bristol in the UK, studying mechanical engineering, but never abandoning his Silicon Valley dreams. “I was devastated,” he says, “but I realized I could still get something done.”
At Bristol, Young landed at Jaguar Land Rover, working 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 manufacturing lines as safe as possible, ensuring they were “dummy proof” for smooth operations.
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It was there, inside heavy industry, that Young saw the problem that would become Interface. He says the tools many companies use to manage safety documentation are either nonexistent – pen and paper – or so siloed and poorly designed that workers hate them. Worse, the 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 pitched Jaguar on letting him build a solution, but the company wasn’t interested. So he started plotting 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 to essentially pitch himself.
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