Alex Blumberg on Turning Buildings into Grid Assets with DaisyChain Energy

Apr 1, 2026

Alex Blumberg, co-founder and CEO of DaisyChain Energy and former founder of Gimlet Media, brings media chops to building-focused climate tech. He explains how submetering and rate arbitrage create immediate financial value for building owners. Short talks cover turning aggregated building loads into grid assets, solving hospital power quality risks, and using dollars-not-green to drive decarbonization.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Buildings Are A Big Climate Problem Driven By Incentives

Buildings are a high-impact climate opportunity hindered more by misaligned incentives than missing technology.
Alex Blumberg points to fragmented ownership, tenant-utility billing splits, and regulatory complexity as the core barriers.

ANECDOTE

Board Member Experience That Sparked Daisy Chain

Alex joined his condo board after their building received an F under New York's Local Law 97 and discovered the practical barriers to decarbonization.
The board faced costly consultant reports showing short payback upgrades versus 20-year paybacks for replacing fossil boilers.

INSIGHT

Submetering Gives Buildings Real Energy Visibility

Lack of tenant-level visibility prevents buildings from knowing or managing their true energy footprint.
Daisy Chain solves this first via submetering (direct-to-master conversion) to measure resident usage in real time.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Alex Blumberg is Co-founder and CEO of DaisyChain Energy, a company building a hardware-enabled software platform that turns commercial buildings into flexible grid assets. Best known as the founder of Gimlet Media and co-creator of Planet Money, Blumberg’s second venture focuses on solving one of the most overlooked problems in climate: the misaligned incentives inside buildings.

In this episode, Blumberg explains why building decarbonization has stalled—not because of smart grid technology, but because of economics. The conversation explores how DaisyChain uses submetering and rate arbitrage to create immediate financial value for building owners, while unlocking the ability to deploy batteries, heat pumps, and other distributed energy resources over time. They also discuss their expansion into hospitals, where power quality issues create major operational risk, and how the same platform can solve both problems. At a system level, Blumberg outlines a future where aggregated building loads become flexible assets that help stabilize the energy grid and reduce peak demand.

We’re proud to have invested in DaisyChain and support their journey towards the modernization of the grid.

In this episode, we cover:

(0:00) An overview of DaisyChain Energy
(2:06) Why Alex Blumberg started a climate company after Gimlet
(6:17) Why buildings are a messy but critical climate problem
(6:52) How DaisyChain works
(10:08) The split incentive problem in multifamily buildings
(13:53) Why decarbonization upgrades don’t pencil financially today
(15:47) Submetering and turning buildings into mini-utilities
(19:08) Using financial incentives—not climate—to win customers
(22:53) Turning buildings into flexible energy grid assets
(27:15) The power quality problem in hospitals
(31:00) Increasing net operating income vs protecting revenue
(34:55) The long-term vision: a flexible, distributed energy grid

Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.

Connect with MCJ:

*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant