Mike Lee
Committees – MICRO Fall 2022
Published May 10, 2023
As part of our ‘Meet Our Founders’ series today, we introduce Mike Lee, Founder of Committees based in Durham, NC. Committees manages your graduate capstone process, saving hours per week, including chair/student matching, committee calendar scheduling, time management, milestones, and committee communications.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve and what influenced you to start your company?
A: When graduate students work through their capstone projects (thesis or dissertation), their lives can become very busy and stressful trying to manage their capstone committees, the relationship with the chair of their committee, and keeping up with work and life. Committees will take the stress out of managing all of this by handling capstone management in one app. My co-founder and I are both Doctoral Candidates, and we are living this challenge right now, so to make life better for those coming behind us, we wanted to create an app to take the stress out of this very important part of their educational journeys.
Q: What are you most excited about right now? What keeps you up at night?
A: I am most excited about seeing our idea being validated with the NC IDEA MICRO Grant award. What is keeping me up at night is mainly being able to deliver a product that will directly increase the quality of life for graduate students around the world, as well as Professors, Deans, and School leadership.
Q: What does the road ahead look like for your company?
A: At this time, we have developed a clickable prototype of Committees, our next phase is fundraising to create an MVP version of the platform to gain users and start the customer feedback loop to improve our functionality.
Q: How will your NC IDEA grant funds advance your company?
A: The NC IDEA grant will allow Committees to do a deeper dive into understanding our total addressable market while developing plans and a clickable prototype for our B2B version of Committees.
Q: What is your favorite productivity app?
A: Evernote, I use this in all aspects of my life.
While visiting Durham, Mike recommends:
Support Committees and Mike by:
- If you know anyone working on an Undergraduate Thesis, Master’s Thesis, or Doctoral Dissertation, point them to Committees, as we will make their lives much easier.
