#167 Levee: Cleaning Up Hotels' Dirty Secret

Al: My name is Al Lagunas. I'm from Chicago, Illinois. I consider myself a hustler first and a tech founder second. I started this company because I think the most overlooked workforce are people who don't sit at a computer all day those being frontline workers. 

I’m Josh Muccio and this is The Pitch. Where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. Today on the show, AL Lagunas pitches his app for frontline hotel workers to five frontline VCs. Just kidding, there’s no such thing as a frontline VC. But there has been a frontline AL.

Al: My very first job was working at a bar. I would work roofing jobs over the summer, I worked at a restaurant as a host, as a server If anyone's going to build this, if anyone understands the frontline worker and how to actually build tools for them It's going to be me, it's going to be our team. 

The Pitch for Levee is coming up, after this. And whether you’re watching or listening on YouTube, Patreon or your favorite podcast player - thanks so much for subscribing and don’t forget to turn on notifications.

[break]

Welcome back to The Pitch for Levee. Let’s meet the investors.

Paige Finn Doherty with Behind Genius Ventures

What gets me to that hell yes conviction, it’s a founder that deeply understands both sides of the business

Elizabeth Yin with Hustle Fund

 you're an A plus founder.

Charles Hudson with Precursor Ventures

I feel like I’m the lone dissenter

Jesse Middleton with Flybridge

I don’t normally like edtech, but I really like you.

And Jenny Fielding with Everywhere Ventures

Toughen up there, lady! That’s healthcare!

[clap]

…

Jesse: Hey, how's it going? I'm Jesse. 

Paige: Paige. Nice to meet you. 

Elizabeth: Elizabeth. Nice to meet you. 

Paige: Hi, how are you? 

Charles: Hey, Charles. Nice to meet you, Al.

Al: Hi everyone. My name is Al Lagunas. I'm co founder and CEO of Levee, where we're building AI agents for frontline hospitality work. So, I want us all to imagine that we are a housekeeper for a hotel. And we are at hour 10 of our shift. We're not working eight hours because the hotel is so understaffed that we have to work extra. We have three kids at home that we want to get back to. And I'm here at this hotel trying to wrap up my day at work. As I enter that final room that I'm cleaning. I notice that there's a broken toilet seat. I have one of two options. I can fill out a maintenance ticket. Go down, find the maintenance manager, hand him the maintenance ticket, explain to him what the issue is, go find my manager, tell him what's going on, let him know that the room's not going to be available because of this broken toilet. Or option number two, I kind of just set the toilet seat there and get back to what really matters, which is my family. Now, that's a decision that housekeepers actually make, and the reason I know that is because of my mother. That story that I just told is her story. She worked as a housekeeper, and she raised my brother, my sister, and myself by herself. Now, in the US, this issue of a labor shortage isn't just applying to hospitality. We have a trillion dollar labor shortage across frontline industries in the country right now. In hospitality alone, there's 248,000 job openings. To tackle this, hotels are spending money on software at a record pace. The problem, though, is that the software that they're using to solve the issue isn't built by someone who understands the user, the user like my mother. So, that's why we're building Levee.

At Levee, we're building AI agents that can inspect a room, fill out maintenance tickets, and even train employees. We do this by capturing vision and voice data through our smartphone app that's intuitive, and, yes, my mother can use. Since we launched in July, we launched a paid pilot with the largest hotel brand in the world, who is now an active customer. We have three of the top 10 hotel brands in our queue for Q1. We have over $30 million in our sales pipeline right now from brands that are coming from all over the world to implement our solution. So I'm here today raising 1.4 million dollars to continue building for this overlooked workforce and build a future of work that includes everyone. 

Jenny: Awesome. Thanks. 

Elizabeth: Great. 

Jenny: Can you tell us how the app actually works? 

Al: Yeah, definitely. So I have a video here and let me see. 

Jenny: Convenient. 

[laughter]

Elizabeth: Funny you asked.

Al: From the beginning, our whole design process is around having one button. One button initiates the app. And what you do is you scan the room number. That room number pulls in the quality control checklist for that room, that room layout. And as they go through the room, all they have to do is hold it up and take a video of the room. And in real time, everything's being verified. If something's not placed correctly, they get feedback right away so that way they can correct it. So anything that we can't see, there is voice transcription feature, which the housekeeper can just call out the issue. So for the example of the toilet that I gave, you can call it out. We can create that ticket. Get all the correct teams alerted. And really give, give back time to the housekeepers and teams. 

Jesse: Awesome. Maybe just taking a step back in the pilots, the business, the model, maybe you can give us a little bit of the lay of the land. How does this business actually work? 

Al: Yeah. So right now we have our paying customer from there. We're launching paid pilots. So what we're doing is - pilot, go back to the brand, and then push to scale through them. In terms of the unit economics at hotels and how the hotel world works, everything's done at the room level. So $3 per room per month. And that's our base fee. What we're thinking in terms of, you know, building that ACV is looking at different digital workers that we can offer them. So there's the room inspector, which is an actual job that's understaffed in the hotels. That's kind of our base offering. But when we collect the data, every other job function that we can build out from there, we already have the data for. So that's where we want to start building those additional revenue streams.

Elizabeth: What are some examples? 

Al: So like a brand auditor is one that we've worked on. So these hotel brands, they have their brand standards. And if the hotel doesn't follow the brand standards, Corporate kind of loves it because they can fine them. So a brand auditor, when we were boots on the ground working with the team, they asked for that specifically. They asked if we could incorporate the brand standards for that brand into the tool. And we were like, yeah 

Jesse: And how many rooms are a part of the first contract? 

Al: 605. 

Jesse: So if I'm understanding correctly, for this first hotel, it's worth $20,000 or so for the year for you. In this particular example, are they not hiring someone? Are they, are they removing one headcount for that? 

Al: Yeah. So right now they are not hiring and they're not removing anyone. Hotels are very strapped for resources. These hotels are fighting for every person they can get on their team. 

Jesse: Yep. 

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm. 

Al: If I go in there and tell them that this can reduce head count, they're not going to want it. But for them, they can increase service, increase the level of product that they're delivering and the consistency. So that's the way that we're positioning it for them, 

Jesse: Got it. 

Jenny: This hotel in particular that you've converted, how are they doing this right now? So it's a person who walks around and checks? Or, as the situation with your mother, they just call and maybe someone comes, maybe they don't. 

Al: Um, there's no, there's no calling. Uh, a lot of these, you know, hotels are very offline still. The room inspector would come along and quite literally wander the hallways, stopping cart to cart, figuring out if there was rooms ready to be inspected. 

Jenny: And are they keeping track of this with like a, you know, some type of clipboard or something or any type of documentation? Like did the - I guess what I'm trying to understand is like, do the hotels like really care? 

Al: Yeah. So they try and inspect every single room. a little kind of - no pun intended, dirty fact about the industry is that only about 55 percent of rooms get inspected in the hotel industry. The rest you're just kind of like crossing your fingers and hoping that it's up to standards. So they definitely do care. With the hotel, they were allotted eight minutes to inspect a room. What the hotel didn't know until we were, we got there is that five of those minutes were spent correcting inventory errors, not actually inspecting for cleanliness. So even just from that point, we delivered a huge ROI from them. We got that down from 8 minutes average time to 2 minutes and 51 seconds.

Jesse: Man, we're all staying in hotels right now. I'm not feeling as good about tonight. 

[laughter] 

Elizabeth: Well, it is interesting. I mean, I've read a lot of hotel reviews, and it seems like a common category is, oh, there was like, dirty, whatever. And I've always kind of wondered how is it - but it makes sense, right? If you're going through quickly, there's going to be something that gets missed. So this is really cool. 

Al: Yeah, I appreciate it. 

Jesse: What do you imagine the opportunity is at scale? Is this a hundred percent of hotels that have this role? And I imagine there's classes of hotels that don't have this role or wouldn't pay for this role. 

Al: So a majority of hotels aspire to have a room inspection program. If you're lucky, you can afford to have a room inspection program. In terms of, you know, where do we see it going? What do we want to build here? Definitely want to stick vertically. The core value prop of the hotel starts with a clean room to stay in for the night. The pool, the continental breakfast, everything else is extra from there. So that's where the value chain starts. Everything else is built off that. By us capturing this data, we are the first to know when something is out of stock in the room. So now there's a procurement angle we can play. On the training side, when we first were getting the users to adopt Levee at the hotel, um, we offered them a, a, a $20 gift card if they completed X amount of room inspections. And, you know, they, they loved it. The hotel kept doing it after we left because for them they were now able to bonus the employees that way. 

Jesse: Oh, they kept doing the program that you were doing? 

Al: Yeah, yeah, they loved it because they were like, if this is going to get us to now inspect 100 percent of our rooms, even if we can't get the level of detail that the human eye can yet, they would rather have that than roll the dice on 45 percent of rooms not being inspected. So now there's that HR payroll angle where having these KPIs around employee performance is something we can offer them. 

Paige: This is really cool. Uh one like core element of our thesis and the future of work is backing clipboard companies, which is like verticalized AI companies building in industries that haven't seen a lot of innovation in a while. I would be curious to understand, like, what do you think, like the total market opportunity is in this space? 

Al: The way that look at it, I think when we look at travel and hospitality, those two industries are very intertwined. I'm glad we're here because you guys will like crazy ideas, but my big crazy idea is that the fact that we're the first to know that the room is clean means that we're the first to be able to get that room back online, which means we're the first to be able to potentially let people check in early, sell the hotel room. Expedia, I think is like a $20 billion business last time I checked. But now we're talking about getting room inventory back online faster than anyone. There's a - I think multiple billions if we stick vertically. Now if we start dipping our toes into the travel side, we start getting into some really fun numbers in terms of, you know, market opportunity and growth.

Jenny: So how long did it take you to convert this huge hotel? And how do you get more? 

Al: Yeah, good question. 

It is! AL answers it, right after this.

Jenny: So how long did it take you to convert this huge hotel? And how do you get more? 

Al: Yeah, good question. So I am a salesperson through and through. I love sales. In the hotel world, there's three stakeholders behind every property. So the management group, they're the ones who are really, really care about operations. So, I emailed their CTO and said, if anyone's going to understand this, I think you'll get it. And he's like, alright, show me what you got. And within a couple minutes, he was like, I get it. And I was like, we got him.

[laughter]

Al: But the challenge that we'll have in going to market is the people at the top get it, the users get it, the people in the middle, they're the ones that we have to educate. where -

Jenny: But just on that thread, how did you go from CTO to deployment? So what was the next step? 

Al: So the CTO introduced me to the GM of that property, met with the GM and The big unlock where they were like, okay, we got it was, we do the scan, we check the inventory. So they have these really nice water bottles that they have. When they run out of them, they put these plastic water bottles. We found out that they were out of the blue water bottles before they knew. So I sent him an email saying, Hey Mike, I think you're out of water bottles. And he was like, what? And an hour later he's like, yeah, we are. How'd you know? In that moment, I didn't even respond. I called my cofounder and I was like, I got him. I got him. 

[laughter]

Al: But yeah, the proof is going to be in the pudding. What we're doing right now is very revolutionary for the space. So we're at a point right now where we're collecting the data. Being able to bring the insights now is our next step. 

Jenny: And then you said you have two more that you're in the process of converting. Tell us about those as well. 

Al: So those, one is going to launch February 17th. So that will be in New Orleans. And the other one will launch in March. So that is actually in Mexico. That one is a luxury hotel. So when it comes to our focus, that's one of the things that we want to figure out while we're raising money right now, is we are getting market pull from the luxury hotels who want every single pair of extra eyes possible. And then your big hotels, who just want to drive efficiency. Which is, you know, a good problem I have, but at the end of the day, I want to find, you know, that person that is going to say yes, the first time they see it. 

Elizabeth: How did you land those two? Was it through a similar sales process? 

Al: It was through a trade show. We flew into San Antonio, we rented a U-Haul, went to Ikea, got a bunch of furniture, set up a mock room in the booth and had people go through and do a scan. And like when they saw it, they were like, holy crap. 

Elizabeth: Oh cool.

Al: So we loaded everything back in the U-Haul. And I'm - I've convinced one of my crazy buddies to come down and help. So it's my cofounder's driving, my buddy's riding shotgun and I'm in the middle of the U-Haul like this. And yeah, when people had it in their hands, they, they saw what we were doing and they could wrap their head around it. Um, so that's part of like our go to market, what we're raising for, is being able to get to these trade shows and put what we're building in the hands of these hotel owners.

Jesse: Who was the person? Was it also like a technologist who was at the trade show that saw this or? 

Al: No, it was the owner of the hotel group in Monterey, Mexico. 

Jesse: Got it. 

Jenny: And have you bootstrapped thus far or did you raise some money? 

Al: Yeah, friends and family and some industry angels. 

Jenny: How much did you raise?

Al: 398K to date. 

Elizabeth: Maybe I missed this, but did you talk about your background?

Al: Uh, no, I didn't. I love talking about myself. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, what were you, what were you doing before? 

Al: So before this, I worked at Amazon. I was one of the people who sold everyone's data. That's how I love to phrase it. But yeah, so I was at Amazon. Before that, I was at a startup for four years. So I was employee number 53 or 54. By the time I left, I was employee number 1200. At the time I had no idea that I was joining this fast growing startup. I was just happy to have a job out of college. But it was essentially, okay, here's your first day. Here's a computer, here's a phone, help us keep this thing afloat, go find some business. So I'm calling fortune 100 CEOs, getting a lot of expletives and getting hung up on. I'm like, okay, that's not how you do it. so it was a lot of -

Elizabeth: You were doing sales?

Al: Yeah. Yeah. So it was a lot of that to kind of figure out how to navigate these large companies. know who to talk to and get us these big opportunities. Yeah.

Elizabeth: Cool. And so tell us a bit about this raise. Like what do you hope to do with this, this round?

Al: Yeah, so go to market, operations, product. From a product standpoint our core UX principle is, can my mom use it? So that we see the team is very technically sound so we can handle most of that. On the go to market side, I mentioned trade shows, in person events, want to get behind those more. And then lastly, operations. What I learned at the small startup that turned into a big startup was that at a startup, you can always out compete people on service. Our big advantage is that when a hotel calls us, we're going to answer. So make sure that we have the team to be able to support there. 

Jenny: From a metrics point of view, where will the 1.4 get you? 

Al: Million plus ARR, 96 hotels, different brands, different management companies, but that's what we're targeting for over the next 18 months. 

Elizabeth: What's your burn right now and what do you think it will go up to after this round?

Al: Yeah. Burn right now is 21K per month. Post round we've modeled it out to right around 47. 

Elizabeth: Mm hmm. 

Paige: Can you talk a little bit about the rollout process? So you talked about the pilot, sounds like it's like a few months depending on what the hotel wants to see. Is there a training or education in place? You talked about the gift card.

Al: Um, yeah so -

Paige: - walk us through that. 

Al: When we trained the first group, I thought something happened because it happened so fast. So we had an hour blocked off for training. We trained the first group of housekeepers in six minutes. I let my cofounder train them. I was like, I'll wait downstairs. And he came back down after, you know, seven minutes. I'm like, oh, did they kick you out? Did something go wrong? He's like, no, they got it. They, they get it right away. So 90 day pilot, first 30 days, benchmarking, gathering this data. The next 60 to 90 days, that's where we actually start quantifying the, the impact that we're having for them. And then coming back to either the brand or management group to discuss, you know, what a larger scale rollout looks like and game plan. 

Jenny: Do you ever get pushback from the users? So I guess the inspectors or the housekeepers on - do they feel like they're being tracked in some way or like it's time stamped in something that makes them uncomfortable?

Al: The very, very, very first piece of feedback that we got from a housekeeper was, does this mean I'm not going to get yelled at anymore? And that was one of those moments where you’re like, damn, I think we got it. But no, so far the feedback has been phenomenal and the usage has increased week over week. Which again, for us is exciting. 

Josh: Charles, you're awfully quiet. 

Charles: I have something that I'm trying to figure out if it's too competitive, and I think it might be. So I think I probably can't do this one. 

Paige: Do you have a valuation range in mind for the raise? 

Al: 10 to 12 from, like, market comps for post revenue AI companies. 

Paige: Are you just starting the raise or where are you at in the process of it? 

Al: I told Josh I was here to kick it off. 

Paige: All right. 

Jesse: I certainly want to spend a bit more time with you. I - I worry what the process looks like in selling the operators of hotels. Like I've known many people who've owned and operated hotels, I've known people at the corporate side. They're, they're all finicky. And so I'd love to see you sort of close a couple more hotels and sort of see the repeatable, like, or, or not repeatable, and you're just like these are the different versions and there's risk here. I'm like not ready to say I'm in. Um, I have some questions in this category, but I'm really intrigued. And I think you've done a lot with very little. And to have, you know, your first customer be on for 20+ thousand dollars a year, like, I think that's very impressive for a - for a kind of business that's usually not very - maybe this one in particular is very tech savvy, but like most are not. 

Al: No, I appreciate that. 

Jesse: We could potentially, you know lead a pre seed in this, in the sort of range that you're doing. But I'm not ready to commit yet. So.

Al: Yeah. I completely understand. Yeah, I'd love to share more info with you. 

Jesse: Cool.

Jenny: Can you talk a little bit more about the AI? I mean you refer to this as an AI company, which is pretty interesting. So can you talk a little bit about that? 

Al: So when we look at, you know, AI, there's no more data to train these models on. There's no more data to do anything from like a desk worker perspective. So for us, that's our focus is, you know, can we leverage AI tools to gather data in ways that we haven't thought of before. These are offline industries. Can we use that to gather this data? And then use that data to build these tools that can complete work for these frontline teams. 

Jenny: Okay. And then more specifically, how are you guys using that data? Why does that give you an advantage?

Al: So for example, on the vision side, we are building our own models that we're augmenting them, creating parameters, so that way they're more accurate. Like for example, we took an out of the box model the first time we worked with a hotel and we looked at an ironing board, it thought it was a surfboard. On the voice side, we transcribe it and then from there, interpreting the jobs to be done and then assigning them correctly. So that we're not having to break everything down step by step or submit these different tickets. Can we do it all in one swoop and get that to the correct places? 

Elizabeth: When did you say you started the company? 

Al: So we started at the end of 2023. The first product we had built was a smart cleaning bottle, which was awesome. Would have been a terrible business. Used spatial mapping technology and like IMU sensors to map a surface as you cleaned it. I got connected with a director at DoubleTree, showed it to him and he was like, yeah, I want this. What are next steps? In the back of my head I was like, this product sucks. Like what's your actual problem? So I would say really like Q2 of last year was when we kind of figured out what we were doing. 

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm. 

Elizabeth: So, um, I really like your background. Like, I like sales go getter types. And it's impressive that you landed this first marquee customer. I would say, for us, like, I'd be very interested in doing this deal, but definitely not in the valuation range you're talking about. And I think more broadly speaking, between pre-seed and seed, like, I'd say seed, which is kind of where the valuation ranges that you're looking at, the bar is higher than landing one customer. So certainly, if you're open to it, discussing what that might look like, but otherwise I'm out. 

Paige: I share some thoughts with Elizabeth on this. One of the things that really stood out to me was the pricing model. Like, it's clear that you've done a lot of research on the industry and decided on a pricing model that really resonated with like the value that you're providing. Love the hustle. and like your usage of customer anecdotes really brought the business, like, down to earth, which I liked a lot. I would love to continue the conversation. But it feels like a little bit pricey for our strategy. 

Al: I appreciate it. Yeah. Appreciate the feedback. 

Jenny: Yeah. I have no doubt that you're going to be successful. You have such great DNA for this. I love the hustle. I mean, your whole vibe is amazing. I think that this is a real viable business, and so we're potentially interested in 50K from our fund. Next steps for me would kind of be diving into the tech a little bit. And then also the price. So we wouldn't invest at a 12. But as the round comes together, we would be interested. 

Al: Awesome. Yeah, let's chat. We can definitely dive deeper on everything.

Jenny: Sounds good. 

Josh: Elizabeth, Paige, at what price would you be interested? 

Al: Good question. Good question. 

Paige: Yeah. Great question.

We’ll be right back.

Josh: Elizabeth, Paige, at what price would you be interested? 

Al: Good question. Good question. 

Paige: Yeah. Great question. 

Elizabeth: I don't want to insult you, but I think it's like five. Because I think this is not an AI company, and like the technology is not unique. And actually I think, see that as a good thing. Because I think AI technologies in the long run are going to be great for consumers and end users. But I don't know who makes money. And that's a whole other conversation. But you are blocking and tackling a very specific need and problem. And you have the sales skills to do so. And that's what I see in this that I like. But you're also early, and that's fine. Everyone starts somewhere. You have one customer. So that, that's kind of where my thinking is around the number.

Josh: Al? 

Al: What's that? 

Josh: Would you take a deal like that? 

Al: Uh, yeah, not on day one. There's a lot of interest that we have. A lot of meetings, you know, to go. 

Jenny: And the good news is you got to revenue on 400k. Right. And so that's awesome. And so I think we all appreciate that hustle and that's what really stood out for me. 

Jesse: 12 hotels and you're profitable. 

Jenny: Yeah, exactly. 

Jenny: That's great. 

Jesse: Yeah. 

Al: Pen and paper on that.

Jesse: Well, thank you. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, thank you.

[applause] 

Al: Thanks, everyone. 

Jenny: Good job. 

Paige: Thank you. 

Elizabeth: Thank you. 

Josh: Any last comments? 

Jenny: He was great. The tech was - He was calling it an AI company and that's why I was digging in there a little bit. Like, where are we using AI? And it's kind of off the shelf. But, you know, to Elizabeth's point, like he can just build a nice business here, with better tools than if they're using nothing. Basically anything better is going to be an enabler for those businesses. 

Jesse: I don't know how accurate the recognition in the video is. I mean, that, that part is clearly leveraging models if it is autonomously, mostly on-device recognizing. So, I mean, there's, there's something there. It's not easy to recognize in shaky video on a cell phone walking around a room if something is out of place, and so if they're actually doing that, they're, they're doing something, and so I think there could be something there. But I - but they're just very early, so I, you know, I didn't react to the price because I figured, let's have conversations and do some diligence, and, you know, if his $30 million in potential contracts is more likely than not, maybe you say, that's all right. Like, you know, um, and so I sort of didn't immediately stop there, but I agree they're very early.

Jenny: His numbers didn't exactly add up. 

Jesse: They didn't add up, yeah. 

Jenny: He said his burn was like 45,000 and this 1.4 is going to last 18 months. It seems like -

Jesse: It burns 21 today, right? 

Jenny: Yeah, but he says it was, we asked what it was going to go up to. 46, so 46 times 18. I'm just like a little -

Jesse: Yeah, I mean, he's expecting a lot of revenue, if you will, right.

Jenny: - right. So it kind of seems like he could raise like 750 or eight on five.

Jesse: Yeah. 

Jenny: With a bunch of us. 

Jenny: My gut is that this round's not gonna come together super quickly, and you're gonna get a few more months of data from that big hotel that you can kind of base your decisions on.

Elizabeth: Raising 1.4 these days is really hard. 

Jenny: It is. 

Elizabeth: The bar is high. 

Jenny: Especially this space. He's calling it AI, but it's not. 

Elizabeth: It's not AI. 

Jenny: This is not a sexy space. 

Josh: Yeah. 

Jesse: I'm, like, I'll be very curious. I mean, what he's describing makes so much sense. Like one customer at your decent hotel calling down and being like, my room's dirty. I'm leaving a horrible review. I'm never staying here again, is very bad. Especially with these marquee brands. 

Josh: So you're going to diligence this Jenny and Jesse? 

Jenny: I'm on it.

Jesse: Yep.

Josh: We've got the J’s diligencing this deal.

Jenny: I also think there's so many interesting other places he can go. Like, he could do a partnership with Airbnb. Like… 

Josh: It's cool for sure.

Jenny: Yeah, it's pretty neat. 

Josh: Um, let's just reset the room. Got one more pitch.

Jesse: Sounds good.

Ever the sales guy, AL’s not taking the first offer. But he walked out of the pitch room with a 50k commitment from Jenny, interest in leading the round from Jesse. And “a lot of meetings to go to.”

After the pitch, things did not jive with the J’s. Jesse told AL that he wouldn’t be moving forward due to scar tissue from other companies in the hospitality space. And Jenny passed in diligence because she didn’t see a repeatable go to market strategy.

No offer to invest in Levee is being made to the listening audience on today’s show. But you can join our private investor community on Substack. Where you’ll get access to the deals we’re doing behind the scenes. 

So, if you’re an accredited investor, you can apply to join at thepitch.fund

We’ll see you next Wednesday, in the PITCH ROOM.

–

This episode was made by me, Josh Muccio, Lisa Muccio, Anna Ladd, Enoch Kim, and Jackie Papanier. With deal sourcing by Peter Liu, John Alvarez, and Phoebe Sun.

Thank you to Kenny Rose, the founder of Franshares. From episode 130, for introducing us to Levee.

Music in this episode is by The Muse Maker, Breakmaster Cylinder, Baleen, Desjardins, Marlon Gibbons, Base Collector, Peter Jean and The Runaway Queen.

The Pitch is made in partnership with the Vox Media Podcast Network.