Notd (News of the Day, Inc.) is not a tech company, Notd is a media company. We call it a Public Media Network, for it is a network that anyone can post media to, for access by anyone else, and also in our case, anyone willing to pay for it (as opposed to other public media networks that use advertising to pay the bills).

While we use technology, so do banks and insurance companies and supermarkets and hospitals. But like those kinds of businesses, we don't sell technology. The largest public media networks, Facebook and Twitter, sell ads. Apple sells technology, and Microsoft sells technology, and every car manufacturer sells technology, but we sell digital media (text and images). It's not our media, so we're not a publisher, but we are a media distributor.

As a media distributor, we feel that the kind of media we allow on our network will define what kind of company we are. While we support free speech, we don't want to be a vehicle for spreading hate or misinformation or insults or threats, or for theft of intellectual property. And we'll insist on explicit differentiation between news and opinions. So we'll have rules, both for people who publish notes and for those who comment on them. The rules will evolve as we grow, and are able to apply and enforce them efficiently, effectively, and equitably (e is still cool).

And we don't feel our role is one of solving technological problems, either. We're addressing economic issues – mainly the business model of digital media, especially news, as the transition from print (and plastic) to digital approaches (while never reaching) unity. We're not creating new technology, we're just using it (like banks and insurance companies and supermarkets) to change the way news, information, and opinions are distributed, and how people communicate about it. So yeah, we're a media company, not a tech company.

Also, we're not part of “Silicon Valley”. While that used to be an appellation, it is now almost always applied derisively to "tech" companies, whether fair or not. In any case, we have little in common with most of the companies that receive that tag. We're nominally based in Santa Barbara, California , we're not funded by VCs, and we don't have any big name engineers or product managers that left one of the Silicon Valley tech giants to join us. And so far, nobody working for Notd has received a free lunch or massage or any one of the many benefits that employees of Silicon Valley tech start-ups allegedly receive.