# About Protechtus

> So many people rely on technology. So few understand it. Closing that gap has been the point of Protechtus since the first year.

Last verified: 2026-11-09. Markdown version of https://protechtus.com/about.html. First person: Jay Pitts, founder.

| | |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2012, Utah LLC, based in Draper, Utah |
| First specialty | Malware remediation, pre-ransomware era |
| Now | Sextant, local-first AI memory and orchestration, releasing |
| Writers | One |

## It started on the floor at Best Buy

I grew up in the Salt Lake Valley, under the Wasatch Mountains, with some of the best snow on earth a short drive up the canyon. I have worked since I was eleven: private landscaping first, then Subway, then Best Buy. I was lining up a move to Geek Squad for the raise. I had seen the operation from the inside, helped with its work a few times, and realized I could do all of it on my own. I already was. So instead of taking the raise, I started Protechtus LLC.

## Search, referrals, and a lot of handshakes

I leaned hard into SEO and into KSL Local, a local business directory at the time, and Protechtus became the first name people found there for computer repair and IT support. Business networking groups turned into referral networks. A handful of clients who needed a lot of help and kept coming back turned it into a real business.

## Malware, before ransomware

We specialized in virus removal and malware remediation, then extended that into remote support and remote optimization. This is where I got deep into Linux-based tooling for fixing a machine and undoing what an infection had done. Ransomware had not gone mainstream yet. It was the era of disruptive, destructive malware and of scareware, the fake antivirus that came right before it. Before I left, we put the tools I actually used onto a recovery CD and sold it at local events. In hindsight that was what a public repository does today, in a time when getting those tools took an IT person.

## My father, on paper and in fact

The reason any of it worked was my partner and backer: my father, a career IT administrator with twenty years in by then. He was the server person, the patch-it-by-hand-from-a-disk person. I was the specialized one, and in practice I did nearly everything. But he was there to back me up on what I did not yet understand, and on paper we were a team. That mattered.

> I felt bad that so many people rely on technology and so few understand it. Bridging that gap was always the underlying mission.

## Two years in Denmark, and a different return

I put Protechtus on hold for two years in Denmark and held on to the LLC. When I came back my interests had moved: direct sales in Alaska, which went well, then computer science at Southern Utah University. Somewhere in there I understood what I had always wanted Protechtus to be. Not a shop. A resource for the everyday user: clear, digestible, usable, especially for people who cannot afford to hire IT help. That is why the Daily section exists on this site.

## A bodywork practice, built the same way

I built Holistic Muscle Management on the habits the repair shop taught me: full engagement with every client, the extra mile wherever you can find one. When the pandemic closed the Heber office I went back to tech consulting. Custom-built machines when the prebuilts vanished, helping people and small companies move to working from home, setting up a media company's streaming and recording gear, and working toward cybersecurity. The pandemic makes a tidy comeback story. The truth is simpler: Protechtus never really went away. I had stopped consulting. I had never stopped intending to return.

## What Protechtus is now

A small studio with two arms and one mission. The studio is releasing Sextant, a local-first AI memory and orchestration platform built to make AI work better for the person using it, along with the libraries, the terminal tools and the research pipeline behind it. The publication is the resource I meant to write from the first year: verified, plain-English guides on security and AI for people who are not engineers, the first of them now in preparation. Mountain weather teaches you to check again. So does malware. Find the real problem, fix it, check it again, stand behind it.

## Contact

hello@protechtus.com