The Pitch · Josh Muccio

Levee: Cleaning Up Hotels' Dirty Secret

September 17, 2025·32 min·2 clips

Al Lagunas built his hotel inspection app because his mother, a housekeeper, faced impossible choices between work and family.

Al Lagunas opens with his worker-first story. He is from Chicago, Illinois, calls himself a hustler before a tech founder, and says frontline workers get overlooked because they are not sitting at computers all day. Josh Muccio gets to the tension fast. Levy is an app for frontline hotel workers, and the joke about frontline VCs keeps the investor lens in view without sanding down Al's background. Al has done the jobs. He brings up bars, roofing, restaurants, hosting, and serving to argue that his team understands the people the product is built for. Then the room gets to the market question. Al points to room inventory coming back online faster, uses Expedia as a travel-scale reference, and hints at billions if Levy stays focused on hotels. The follow-up is sharper. How long did it take to convert a huge hotel, and how do you get more? Al answers like someone who has sold the thing. Hotel properties, he says, have three stakeholders. Management groups care about operations, while the middle layers need the most education. The CTO opened the first door. An email became a quick demo, and within minutes the CTO knew enough to introduce Al to the property's GM. The proof is oddly perfect. Levy scanned inventory and noticed the hotel had run out of its nicer blue water bottles before the team knew. That got Mike's attention. Al emailed the GM, got a surprised reply, confirmed the shortage, and called his co-founder because the moment felt like something had clicked. The cliffhanger stays practical: can one sharp operational win turn into repeatable go-to-market, or is it just a great story from one property?

As heard by us

A hotel-tech pitch that keeps coming back to who buys in, who uses it, and whether it can hold up in operations.

Levy is at its best when it treats the pitch as an operational problem, not a slogan. The episode circles the same hard questions in a useful way: frontline workers are overlooked, Al Lagunas wants the app to fit inside hotel operations, and a scan only matters if the right…

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Why you'd press play

Hear a founder pitch a frontline-hotel-worker app and get pressed on how it reaches real deployments.

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