About UpLeft Media
UpLeft Media LLC was founded on a simple belief: progressive media creators deserve hosting infrastructure that puts their interests first — not the interests of Silicon Valley venture capital.
We’re a podcast hosting company built by two lifelong friends who spent their careers building decentralized, privacy-respecting technology infrastructure. We saw how platforms like Patreon extract value from creators while giving them little control over their own audience. We built UpLeft Media to be the alternative.
Our Founders
Nick Bedi — Co-Founder, Infrastructure & DevOps
Daniel Montgomery — Co-Founder, VP of Engineering
Nick and Daniel met in high school. Decades and careers later, they’re building UpLeft Media together — combining two decades of engineering experience with a shared belief that the internet should be open, decentralized, and owned by its users.
Nick Bedi
Nick Bedi brings over 15 years of DevOps and cloud infrastructure experience to UpLeft Media. As a DevOps Engineer at Orchid (2022–2025), Nick built and maintained the infrastructure powering Orchid’s decentralized marketplace for internet services — a pay-as-you-go VPN protocol, decentralized storage, and nanopayment ecosystem built on Ethereum. His work kept Orchid’s decentralized bandwidth marketplace online and performing for users who value privacy above all else.
Before Orchid, Nick was a DevOps Engineer at Tripwire (2018–2022), where he built and maintained security-focused infrastructure for the industry’s leading file integrity monitoring and compliance platform. His work there gave him deep experience in building resilient, highly available systems for security-critical applications.
Nick’s career spans some of the most significant companies in cloud infrastructure:
- Citrix Online (2007–2013) — where he worked during the formative years of cloud computing, helping build the infrastructure that powered what would become AWS WorkSpaces.
- Flexera / RightScale (2013–2017) — one of the earliest cloud management platforms, where Nick gained expertise in multi-cloud orchestration and cost optimization.
- Red Hat (2018) — as a Cloud Consultant, helping enterprise customers navigate complex infrastructure transformations.
Nick holds a Skydiver A License and has completed 47 jumps, including time in King Air aircraft — a reflection of his approach to engineering: take calculated risks, always check your equipment, and never skip your pre-flight inspection.
His hands-on experience running self-hosted infrastructure at scale — Docker Swarm clusters, Caddy reverse proxy configurations, and custom CI/CD pipelines — directly informs UpLeft Media’s hosting architecture. He doesn’t just manage our infrastructure; he built it from scratch.
Daniel Montgomery
Daniel Montgomery is a seasoned engineering leader who has spent over two decades building software organizations and scaling engineering teams. As Vice President of Engineering at Orchid (2021–present), Daniel oversees the entire engineering organization — defining technical strategy for Orchid’s decentralized marketplace covering VPN, AI compute, storage, and the OXT nanopayment token. He promotes the platform from Director of Engineering to VP within a year, taking responsibility for everything from platform architecture to hiring and team culture.
Before Orchid, Daniel built his foundation at two of technology’s largest employers:
- HCL Technologies — where he honed his skills in enterprise software development and large-scale project delivery.
- IBM — where he gained experience in enterprise systems and corporate engineering practices.
Daniel holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1999–2004). His academic background in computer science, combined with decades of hands-on engineering leadership, gives him a rare ability to bridge the gap between technical execution and business strategy.
At Orchid, Daniel has become known for his commitment to “prosocial technology” — the belief that engineering should serve public good, not just shareholder returns. He actively advocates for decentralizing technology platforms and giving end users genuine ownership of their data and digital identities. This philosophy is the intellectual foundation of UpLeft Media.
Our Story
Nick and Daniel have known each other since high school. Their friendship has spanned careers across some of the most important infrastructure companies in technology — from Citrix to Tripwire, from IBM to Orchid. Along the way, they both watched the same pattern repeat: platforms that promise to empower creators end up extracting value from them.
At Orchid, they worked together building technology designed to give internet users sovereignty over their own connections — a decentralized VPN that doesn’t require subscriptions, a nanopayment system that eliminates intermediaries, and a storage network that doesn’t let a single corporation hold your data hostage. It was only natural to bring that same philosophy to podcast hosting.
Patreon, the dominant subscription platform for podcasts, takes 10% of creator earnings on their standard plan — plus payment processing fees — while giving creators subdomain URLs that bury their brand under Patreon’s marketing machine. For a podcast earning $1,000/month in subscriptions, that’s ~$129/month to Patreon, even as the platform has faced controversies around content moderation inconsistency and opaque fee structures.
We built UpLeft Media to offer a better deal: 8% platform fee, custom domain hosting, full content ownership, and transparent pricing. No surprises. No hidden fees. No platform lock-in.
We believe that progressive podcasters — the voices covering labor organizing, climate action, mutual aid, and social justice — deserve infrastructure that shares their values. UpLeft Media is that infrastructure.
Our Values
- Fair pricing — 8% flat fee. We make money when you make money.
- Full ownership — Your content, your domain, your audience. Always.
- Transparency — No algorithmic suppression, no opaque content moderation.
- Progressive — We support creators covering issues that mainstream platforms often silence.
- Decentralized by conviction — Our founders built decentralized infrastructure at Orchid. We bring that same philosophy to podcast hosting.
- Lifelong friends — We’ve known each other since high school. This isn’t a pivot — it’s a partnership built on trust.