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 …