It’s reasonable to say that most every executive inherits problems they don’t immediately see while attempting to guide their organizations toward greater operational maturity.
Startup co-founders Dr. Mike Lee and Dr. Kristen Santos believe those blind spots can be mapped, measured and fixed.
The duo’s Durham-based startup, The Alchemy Lab, breaks leadership roles into dozens of individual “elements”—organized like a periodic table—and uses AI to generate a yearlong roadmap for improving an organization’s operational maturity.
“There’s not a list right now for leaders,” Lee said. “You’re expected to know everything. We’re not going to tell anybody that you don’t know everything. We’re going to help you look like you do.”
The idea grew out of Lee’s career in customer success leadership. Since entering the tech industry in 1997, he has repeatedly been hired to build customer success organizations or take over existing ones. Each new role involved interviewing employees, reviewing processes and identifying operational gaps.
But Lee found there wasn’t a consistent framework for evaluating a team’s strengths and weaknesses. Leaders, he said, were largely expected to rely on experience and instinct.
Lee wondered whether those gaps could be identified more systematically. He began deconstructing customer retention into its smallest operational components, ultimately identifying 65 distinct “elements” that organizations needed to master—the first version of a “periodic table” that would become The Alchemy Lab.
“Elements are elements because they can’t be broken down any further. Every role has those same fundamental pieces.”
Building The Alchemy Lab
After constructing the first periodic table, Lee realized the framework wasn’t limited to customer retention.
The company has since expanded the concept into more than 80 such tables covering customer success, sales, marketing, finance, operations and cybersecurity. Each contains roughly 60 to 120 elements that, together, define organizational maturity.
Users begin by selecting the periodic table that matches their role. Rather than completing an exhaustive assessment, they evaluate just 10 elements to establish an initial baseline before continuing through the remaining elements if desired. Each element is scored across three maturity levels—Foundational, Operational and Optimized.
That assessment becomes the foundation for Aurum, The Alchemy Lab’s AI engine.
“Aurum is really the brains behind the platform,” Lee said.
Using the assessment, Aurum identifies operational gaps and generates a personalized 12-month roadmap complete with quarterly priorities, projects, playbooks and implementation tasks— all while tracking progress through what Lee calls the AQ Score.
“What Aurum does is it takes where you are on each of the elements that you rated, what it would take to move to the next level, and creates tasks by quarter,” Lee said.
For example, a customer success leader struggling with customer onboarding could receive AI-generated playbooks, policies and documentation tailored to that organization’s assessment, giving leaders a starting point they can immediately customize and implement.
Early Traction
Although still in its early stages, The Alchemy Lab has begun to attract early adopters. Lee and Santos introduced the platform to potential customers earlier this year by offering temporary access to attendees at Lee’s customer retention presentation at the Gainsight Pulse conference, in exchange for feedback.
Today, the platform has more than 70 active users (including some who use it almost every day).
Lee said the company plans to officially launch this year, initially focusing on a small group of paying customers rather than rapid expansion.
“I just want people using the product,” Lee said. “I want people to vote their confidence for the product with their checks. If we can do that, I know we’re on the right track.”
QUICK BITS
Startup: The Alchemy Lab
Co-Founders: Dr. Mike Lee, Dr. Kristen Lee Santos
Founded: 2026
Team size: 3
Location: Durham
Website: thealchemylab.io
Funding: Bootstrapped
Looking ahead, Lee wants Aurum to integrate directly with workplace software such as Jira, Confluence and Gainsight, enabling it to review an organization’s existing playbooks, policies and documentation before identifying operational gaps and recommending improvements.
“The dream is that Aurum can look at what you’ve already built and tell you where you’re strong, where you’re weak and what to do next,” Lee said.
Lee also envisions the platform’s AQ Score evolving into a broader benchmark for organizational maturity, giving leaders a way to measure operational progress over time much like financial metrics measure business performance.
“If we can create a common language around operational maturity,” Lee said, “leaders won’t have to rely on instinct alone anymore.”
