Silicon Valley
Thomas Lee Yang doesn’t sound like your typical Silicon Valley founder.
Its 24-year-old CEO interfaceA San Francisco startup using AI to prevent industrial accidents, a white guy with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese surname, a combination he found amusing enough to mention when he was first introduced to a business contact. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, home to considerable oil and gas exploration activity, Young grew up around oil rigs and energy infrastructure as his entire family worked as engineers, extending back generations to his great-grandfather, who immigrated to the island nation from China.
That background has become his calling card today in pitch meetings with oil and gas executives, but it makes for more than a great “Silicon Valley” conversation starter; It underscores a path that has been anything but straightforward, and Yang could argue gives the interface an edge.
It was years in the making. From the age of 11, Young settled 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 he could to secure admission, even writing his application essay about hijacking his family’s Roomba to create a 3D spatial map of his home.
Silicon Valley could become
The ploy worked — Caltech accepted him in 2020 — but then Covid-19 hit, and it took its toll. For one thing, Yang’s visa situation became almost impossible (the visa appointment was canceled and processing stopped). At the “Silicon Valley” same time, his college fund, carefully built up to $350,000 over six or seven years to cover his education, was “basically completely wiped out” by a sudden market downturn 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, studying mechanical engineering, but never gave up on his Silicon Valley dreams. “I was devastated,” he says, “but I realized I could still do something.”
In Bristol, Young landed at Jaguar Land Rover, working in something called human factors engineering – basically UX and security design of industrial systems. “I had never even heard of it before I joined,” he admits. The role involved figuring out how to make cars and production lines as safe as possible, so that they were “dummy proof” for smooth operations.
It was there, inside heavy industry, that Young saw the problem that would become the interface. He says the tools many companies use to manage safety documentation are either non-existent – pen and paper – or so dumb “Silicon Valley” 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 flawed, outdated and nearly impossible to maintain.
How this founder’s unlikely
Young asked Jaguar to develop a solution, but the company wasn’t interested. So he started plotting to get out. When he learns about Entrepreneur First (EF), a European talent incubator that hires promising people before they’re co-founders or even have an idea, he’s cold, despite the 1% acceptance rate. He was originally accepted to pitch himself.
He told Jaguar he was going to a wedding in Trinidad and would be away for a week. Instead, he went through EF’s selection process, impressed “Silicon Valley” the organizers and quit the day he returned to office. “They realized, ‘Oh, so you probably weren’t at the wedding,'” he laughs.
At EF, Yang met his future co-founder and CTO Ariane Mehta. Mehta, of Indian descent but born in Belgium, had his own American dream thwarted. He was accepted to both Georgia Tech and Penn but similarly couldn’t get a visa appointment during Covid. He went on to study mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, where he developed AI for error detection before building the machine learning pipeline at Amazon.
“We had similar backgrounds,” Young said. “He’s super international. He speaks five languages, very technical, amazing guy, and we got along great.” In fact, they were the only team in their EF team that didn’t collapse, Young says.
What’s more, today, they live together in San Francisco’s Soma neighborhood, though when asked about spending so much time together, Young is adamant “Silicon Valley” that it’s not a problem given their respective workloads. “Last week, I saw [Aaryan] Maybe for a total of 30 minutes at home.
Exactly what they’re building, the interface pitch is straightforward: use AI to make heavy industry safer. Companies autonomously audit operating procedures using large language models, cross-checking them against regulations, technical drawings and corporate policies to catch errors that – in the worst case scenario – could kill workers.
Arresting some people. For one of Canada’s largest energy companies, where Interface is now deployed across three sites (Young declined to name the brand), Interface’s software found 10,800 errors and improvements in the company’s standard operating procedures in just two and a half months. As Yang said, doing the same job manually would cost more than $35 million and take two to three years.
One error Young found particularly troubling, he said, was a document that had been in circulation for 10 years listing the wrong pressure range for a valve. “They’re lucky nothing happened,” said Medha Aggarwal, a partner “Silicon Valley” at Defy.vc, which led Interface’s $3.5 million seed round earlier this year, with participation from angel investors including Precursor, Rockyard Ventures and Charlie Songhurst.
Contracts are significant. After initially trying results-based pricing (energy companies “hated it,” Young says), Interface adopted a hybrid per-seat model with additional costs. A single contract with a Canadian energy company is worth more than $2.5 million annually, and more of Interface’s fuel and oil service customers are coming online in Houston, Guyana and Brazil.
The total addressable market is not entirely clear, but it is not small. Only in the United States, there is something like 27,000 Oil and gas services “Silicon Valley” companies, according to market research organization IBISWorld, are the first verticals to tackle the interface
Outsider’s Edge
Interestingly, Young’s age and background—things that might seem like disadvantages in a more established industry—become her secret weapons. When he walks into a room of executives two or three times his age, he says, there is initial skepticism. “Who is this young man and how does he know what he is talking about?”
But then, he says, he delivers his “wow moment” by understanding their operations, their employees’ daily routines, and exactly how much time and money the interface can save them. “Once you flip them, they will absolutely love you and advocate and fight for you,” she says. (He claims that after a recent, first site visit with operators, five workers asked when they could invest in the interface, which made him especially proud, because field workers generally “hate software suppliers.”)
In fact, although Young works out of Interface’s office in San Francisco’s Financial District, his hard hat sits on a table not far from his desk, ready for the “Silicon Valley” next site visit. (Agarwal suggests that Young could use a little more down time in his life, recalling a recent call in which Young told him 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 person who started this week. Interface’s biggest challenge is recruiting fast enough to keep up with demand, a problem that requires its small team to tap into networks across both Europe and the United States.
For what Young wanted and now lives in San Francisco, he was surprised by how accurate the stereotypes of Silicon Valley were. You hear people online saying, ‘Oh, you go to a park and the person sitting next to you has raised $50 million by building some crazy AI agent.‘ But it really is like that,” he says. “I remember what life was like in Trinidad. I mention these ideas to people back home, and they don’t believe me.”
He occasionally makes time to go out in nature with friends — he says they recently went to Tahoe — and Interface hosts events like the hackathon “Silicon Valley” they threw last weekend. But mostly, it’s work, and much of that work involves AI, just like in San Francisco right now.
Which makes oil rig tours oddly interesting.
In fact, that hard hat at the office isn’t just a practical necessity; That’s also a temptation, Young suggests. For engineers tired of building “some low-impact B2B sales or recruiting tool,” as Young puts it, the occasional promise to leave “Silicon Valley” the Bay Area bubble and 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 the people he hires.
It’s probably not the full version of the Silicon Valley dream he spent his childhood in Trinidad: long hours, intense stress, endless AI discussions everywhere, punctuated by the occasional trip to an oil rig.
Still, for now, he doesn’t think so. “I haven’t done much in the last month or two [outside the office]Because there’s so much intensity here with construction, hiring, sales.” But “I feel pretty strong,” he adds.