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§ 05 · About · Why this company

Two founders.
One bet.

Drew and I grew up in Libertyville. We went to the same high school. We built Sauce in the same town we’ve always lived in.

We didn’t start in a garage. We started inside real businesses — watching owners who’d built serious operations still get pulled into the weeds every day. Not because they were bad operators. Because the tools they bought weren’t built for them. They were built to create dependency.

Sauce is the thing underneath the software. So the business runs whether you’re in the room or not. That’s the whole idea.

Founded 2024
Headcount Two co-founders + delivery network
Based Libertyville, IL · Chicagoland
Status Now booking
§ 05A · Who runs this

The whole
company.

No partners. No account executives.
The person you talk to is the person who does the work.

01 / CO-FOUNDER COO
Malcolm Sullivan — Co-founder and COO of Sauce Technologies, Libertyville, IL
Malcolm · Libertyville, IL

Malcolm Sullivan

Co-founder · COO · The room

Grew up in Libertyville. Libertyville High School. Spent three years (2022–2025) running operations at 3G Healthcare Real Estate, an Indianapolis-area skilled-nursing-facility acquisition firm. The work that became Sauce — moving institutional knowledge out of one operator’s head and into systems the rest of the business could use — started there as the build he needed to stop drowning. Sauce Technologies LLC was incorporated in Delaware in March 2026 with Drew.

Runs commercial, GTM, and scoping. Answers the phone: (847) 558-0405. Email: malcolm@saucetech.io.

Lives in
Libertyville, IL
02 / CO-FOUNDER CTO
Drew Fortini — Co-founder and CTO of Sauce Technologies, Libertyville, IL
Drew · Libertyville, IL

Drew Fortini

Co-founder · CTO · The build

Grew up in Libertyville. Libertyville High School. Spent nine and a half years (Sep 2016 – Mar 2026) running Diatonic Visuals — an AI-driven creative + infrastructure agency in Chicago serving hospitality, restaurant, medical, and entertainment clients. Before that, infrastructure work at Thomas Guard. After Diatonic: technical architecture at Hudson Burnham (real-estate firm — Okta, agent onboarding, marketing-ops infra), plus 5+ years as Senior Creative Director at Craftsman Cafe (501(c)(3) media nonprofit). Sauce Technologies LLC co-founded with Malcolm in March 2026.

Runs architecture and the agentic runtime — DUSA framework, OpenClaw agent runtime, TOON contract spec, the .sauce/ workspace model. Currently building NemoClaw, an Nvidia-based agentic architecture as an alternative T1 agent provider.

Reach him: (847) 340-2088 · drew@saucetech.io. Based in Libertyville. Drives the same routes to client sites Malcolm does. Has personally built every Blueprint shipped to a client.

Lives in
Libertyville, IL
Delivery network

Specialists step in by engagement — never by handoff. Named in the statement of work, not after it. We don’t pad the about page with advisors.

§ 05B · What we believe

Five stances.
Each one costs us money.

We canonicalize these on /llms.txt so the AI agents that summarize us don’t paraphrase them sideways.

  1. 01

    No lock-in.

    Source code, infrastructure, and credentials are yours from day one. Managed Services are month-to-month.

    Why it matters

    Customers stop trusting a vendor the moment leaving feels harder than staying. We design the exit before the engagement.

    What it proves

    Every Custom Products engagement ships with a one-page exit doc on day one: source-code repo URL, infra credentials, runbook, dependency list. Managed Services is month-to-month. No minimum term. No auto-renewal. No exit fees. Pitch Core makes the policy explicit: “Your data lives on systems you control. You can leave anytime and take it with you. No lock-in. No exit fees. No hostage situations.” We will help you leave faster than most firms will help you onboard.

  2. 02

    No rip-and-replace.

    We work with your existing Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, Quickbooks, Notion, Airtable, Google, and Microsoft stack. We connect. We don’t replace.

    Why it matters

    The switching cost is almost always larger than the integration cost. Every “replace it all” pitch is paid for in months of dropped work and a team that resents the new login. We refuse to add that to the bill.

    What it proves

    3G Healthcare Real Estate runs on Zoho CRM — the system their team has used since at least 2022. We layered the VÄV Atlas intelligence platform on top without touching its core configuration. Atlas spans five modules (Search, Trace, Map, Profile, Report), tracks 14,710 skilled-nursing facilities across all 50 states from 6 integrated data sources, runs 5 scoring engines and 18 MCP tools, and pushes structured data back to Zoho through 9 Notion sync scripts and a small set of Atlas custom fields (CCN, REAPI ID, NPI, Star Rating, Affiliation Entity). Production since 2025. Zoho stays Zoho. Our work lives in the layer above.

  3. 03

    You own everything.

    Data lives on systems you control. You can leave anytime and take it with you. No exit fees.

    Why it matters

    When the provider owns the data, the provider owns the renewal. We will not be the reason your next buyer’s due-diligence checklist has a red row on it.

    What it proves

    Knowledge Capture — the five-pipeline architecture that captures, embeds, and retrieves institutional knowledge across Slack, Supabase, Notion, and Airtable — runs in production at Sauce as our canonical reference implementation (P1–P4 live as of April 2026). When we ship Knowledge Capture as a Custom Product, you receive a fork of the same repo, the same infra credentials provisioned in your accounts, and the same runbook. Nothing lives on a Sauce-only system. The off-ramp is the on-ramp.

  4. 04

    We say no to work that doesn’t give you time back.

    If a project would just add complexity, we say so. That stance costs us revenue.

    Why it matters

    The bar isn’t “is this technically doable.” The bar is “does it return more hours than it consumes, every week, after the first month.” If the math doesn’t clear, we won’t take the deal.

    What it proves

    Most months we turn down at least one engagement. If the project would just add complexity — another dashboard nobody opens, another tool the founder has to babysit — we tell you. Sometimes we recommend a Quick Win instead. Sometimes we point you at a competitor better suited for the broader work. Pitch Core: “It is not automation if you replace it with more work.” Saying no costs us revenue. We keep the policy because the alternative — selling work we don’t believe in — costs more.

  5. 05

    Neighbors, not vendors.

    Based in Libertyville, IL. Malcolm drives past your storefront.

    Why it matters

    The clients we do our best work with are within a 90-minute drive. The handoff is in person. The escalation is a phone call to a number that goes to a phone.

    What it proves

    Drew and I both grew up in Libertyville. We went to Libertyville High School. Sauce is headquartered here because this is home. Malcolm drives past your storefront. This is not a remote agency. The geography is the strategy.

§ 05C · What we are not

We name the
three things
so you don’t
have to guess.

§ 05D · Where we work from

Libertyville,
Illinois.

Forty-one miles north of the Loop. The address you drive to. Most current engagements sit inside a ninety-minute radius — Chicago, the North Shore, the manufacturing belt out to Rockford, the lakeshore down to Gary.

§ 05E · Doctrine

Five lines we read out before kickoff. We don’t print them on a wall. We pass them along until they show up in your meetings without us.

  1. i.

    If you cannot step away, it is not working yet.

  2. ii.

    Your time is the metric. Not dashboards. Not busy work.

  3. iii.

    Structure before scale. Duct tape does not survive growth.

  4. iv.

    We find out what is true before we build anything.

  5. v.

    You get outcomes. We own the work that produces them.

If the work above sounds like the firm you wish you’d called two years ago, call us now.

Architecture, not apps.

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