Market Shapers with Inder Singh
Jul 14, 2026 · 29 min · 9 segments
When it comes to market shaping, having a wide range of tools in your kit is critical. “You don’t want to be a hammer looking for a nail,” says today’s guest Oliver Sabot. Sabot has spent years…
Inder SinghHost
And this feels like a really perfect segue into climate because it feels like there's a lot of work that's going on to say, how do we match buyer's needs with supply technologies.
The way that I might think about this is crossing the chasm to those minimum volumes that will create a market, that will enable a market to start functioning, where there's a high enough return on investment to the people who invented the technology and are delivering it, and yet there's a high enough return on investment to the buyers who are buying the technology for specific purposes.
You and Dai wrote an amazing piece in a Stanford journal that is talking about applying these approaches and market shaping to climate.
What's different? What's the same? Did I capture that right about early matching work that's going on in climate?
You take anything we do right now in the world and it needs to be decarbonized, right? Everything in your home needs everything related to work and transportation and food and so forth, like every part of it is just way too greenhouse gas emission intensive right now.
The good news is across many of them, we already have or are close to much cleaner versions, the challenges, the market dynamics are in the way, right? So take an example, you're in Oakland right now.
If your cooling system breaks this summer, you're gonna very quickly be like, it's 100 degrees outside, like I need a new cooling system.
And you start researching and someone says, hey, there's this heat pump that's electric and it has a much lower carbon footprint.
Right now, the great cleaner electric heat pumps are substantially more expensive up front.
And there's a ton of friction for you installing it, right? We've experienced this a lot.
Even for people who work full time in the climate sector, they're saying, you know, I know I should use a heat pump.
But man, it's taking me weeks and months and I'm trying to figure out like how I get the right supplier and I can't get a contractor who can do this right.
This is all just a ton of friction, even before the basic economics of for more middle or low income families, right? Every hundred dollars is going to matter.
And if this thing is... a couple thousand dollars more expensive, you're going to install the legacy fossil fuel device.
And of course, when you're talking about big machinery like this, like if your furnace breaks this summer, you're probably only going to replace it again in another 15 or 20 years.
This is not a decision like going to the drugstore every couple of months, right? These are big, lumpy decisions.
So what we need to do is we need to find ways to dramatically lower that friction.
There's an organization called Rewiring America that's working with Chai and others to say, how do we... represent demand to the manufacturers of heat pumps, get the price that they offer substantially lower? How do we work with contractors and other actors locally to just make a very simple experience for the buyer? We need to do that across most aspects of our lives as citizens and consumers, but then you scale it up to how people are buying steel and ammonia and all these other big aspects of the economy.
And this feels like a really perfect segue into climate because it feels like there's a lot of work that's going on to say, how do we match buyer's needs with supply technologies.
The way that I might think about this is crossing the chasm to those minimum volumes that will create a market, that will enable a market to start functioning, where there's a high enough return on investment to the people who invented the technology and are delivering it, and yet there's a high enough return on investment to the buyers who are buying the technology for specific purposes.
You and Dai wrote an amazing piece in a Stanford journal that is talking about applying these approaches and market shaping to climate.
What's different? What's the same? Did I capture that right about early matching work that's going on in climate?
You take anything we do right now in the world and it needs to be decarbonized, right? Everything in your home needs everything related to work and transportation and food and so forth, like every part of it is just way too greenhouse gas emission intensive right now.
The good news is across many of them, we already have or are close to much cleaner versions, the challenges, the market dynamics are in the way, right? So take an example, you're in Oakland right now.
If your cooling system breaks this summer, you're gonna very quickly be like, it's 100 degrees outside, like I need a new cooling system.
And you start researching and someone says, hey, there's this heat pump that's electric and it has a much lower carbon footprint.
Right now, the great cleaner electric heat pumps are substantially more expensive up front.
And there's a ton of friction for you installing it, right? We've experienced this a lot.
Even for people who work full time in the climate sector, they're saying, you know, I know I should use a heat pump.
But man, it's taking me weeks and months and I'm trying to figure out like how I get the right supplier and I can't get a contractor who can do this right.
This is all just a ton of friction, even before the basic economics of for more middle or low income families, right? Every hundred dollars is going to matter.
And if this thing is... a couple thousand dollars more expensive, you're going to install the legacy fossil fuel device.
And of course, when you're talking about big machinery like this, like if your furnace breaks this summer, you're probably only going to replace it again in another 15 or 20 years.
This is not a decision like going to the drugstore every couple of months, right? These are big, lumpy decisions.
So what we need to do is we need to find ways to dramatically lower that friction.
There's an organization called Rewiring America that's working with Chai and others to say, how do we... represent demand to the manufacturers of heat pumps, get the price that they offer substantially lower? How do we work with contractors and other actors locally to just make a very simple experience for the buyer? We need to do that across most aspects of our lives as citizens and consumers, but then you scale it up to how people are buying steel and ammonia and all these other big aspects of the economy.
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