Sponsorship Opportunity
The Stepchange Show
A podcast about power grids and data centers isn't supposed to go viral. Yet, in just 4 episodes, The Stepchange Show has grown to over 230,000 downloads.
“If you like Acquired, you will love Stepchange.”
Ben Gilbert, Co-host, Acquired
About The Stepchange Show
Stepchange tells the stories of human progress through the lens of transformative technologies, systems, and infrastructure. Each episode unpacks a crucial innovation that fundamentally changed how we live, work, and relate to one another.
Each episode is built like a book: we do hundreds of hours of deep research — reading everything we can find about the topic. We interview dozens of experts, and spend weeks synthesizing the core narrative to build a deep appreciation for the episode's topic.
This isn't a weekly news feed. It's a small number of carefully crafted episodes meant to be listened to, shared, and revisited as evergreen material. We produced 3 episodes in our first year (2025), and have plans for 2–3 episodes in our second year (2026).
The Breakout
The first two episodes — a two-part history of coal — built a foundation of listeners. A small, but highly engaged, audience that served as a proof of concept.
Then in September 2025 we released our third episode, Data Centers: The Hidden Backbone of Our Modern World.
The show's trajectory completely changed shape. New listeners arrived and worked backwards through the catalog and the curve kept climbing.
Year 1 of Stepchange
Who's Listening
The show's growth has been driven by word of mouth in podcast apps, not algorithmic discovery — people who listen intentionally.
The Stepchange Show audience is made up of leaders in technology and energy:
“The blokes at Stepchange Show have produced an epic history of the US grid, ‘the largest machine ever built,’ and it is TRULY GREAT. I think it is THE best single piece on the arc and accidents of history that results in our unique American power system. This will be required listening in all my future Introduction to Electricity courses at Princeton.”
Jesse Jenkins·Professor, Princeton University
“The story of the largest machine ever built (US version) is a tight four hours. It could easily have been 40 hours, and still been enthralling. Anay and Ben are building a really cool intellectual-historical franchise here.”
Nat Bullard·Co-Founder, Halcyon
“Highly recommend you take the time to listen… It takes the Acquired model and applies it to an industry, not just a single company.”
Brian Janous·Co-Founder, Cloverleaf Infrastructure (former Microsoft VP of Energy)
“They boiled a whole industry down to its essential features and key turning points. Policy makers should all listen to why fragmentation exists and why it hinders most of our reliability, economic, and sustainability goals. Anyone in Congress should listen to the prescriptions as they consider permitting reform.”
Rob Gramlich·Founder & President, Grid Strategies
Across the industry
“If you work in and around electricity, this is required (and thankfully very enjoyable) listening. Ben Eidelson and Anay Shah have created a podcast in Stepchange that feels like Acquired — treat the listener like they’re smart, compress 10 books of research into 3-4 hours — and it’s so fun.”
Sam Steyer·Halcyon
“Everyone is interested in data centers these days, so I recommend going back and listening to this long, in-depth podcast about the history of data centers. You will feel much more grounded and informed about current debates.”
David Roberts·Author, Volts
“This is a great deep dive on data centers.”
Andy Masley·Director, Effective Altruism DC
The show is reaching thousands of key decision-makers, builders, and investors in energy and technology.
The Numbers
230K+
Total Downloads
Featured
Apple Podcasts New & Noteworthy
Sponsorship Details
This is the first time we're opening the show to sponsors. We'll work with no more than four partners this season: one presenting sponsor and three additional sponsors.
We're looking for partners who are shaping the future of infrastructure — and value an audience that cares deeply about how the world around them works.
Format
Segments are 1–2 minutes long. Ben and Anay custom-create each segment in collaboration with the sponsor. The segment is embedded in the content of the episode and recorded unique to each episode of the season — enabling increasing depth over multiple episodes.
Sponsors are also featured in our email lists, episode notes, and on the Stepchange website.
Presenting vs. Midroll
The presenting sponsor opens every episode with the first segment and a mention in the intro. Their logo appears in the album art and on the Stepchange Show website. For 2026, the presenting sponsor will also be added to the Data Centers episode from 2025, which continues to grow in reach.
Pricing
We're targeting 300,000 downloads for the 2026 season. Season sponsorship is priced against that baseline.
| Tier | Season Price | Availability Remaining |
|---|---|---|
| Presenting | $200,000 | 0 available |
| Midroll | $100,000 | 2 of 3 slots |
We typically structure sponsorships as a fixed season fee. If your team would prefer pay-per-download pricing tiers, we'd be happy to discuss that. We are also open to considering per-episode sponsorship, currently priced at $100K for presenting and $50K for a midroll.
2026 Season
We will release 2–3 episodes in 2026, targeting a doubling of our audience to over 300,000 downloads.
The season opened with the story of the grid — how we built the machine that powers modern life, and why that machine is now being asked to do things it was never designed to do.
Each episode will continue the Stepchange approach: deep, narrative infrastructure stories designed to be timeless.
If you're interested in sponsoring our 2026 season, we would love to chat.
About Ben & Anay
Ben and Anay built their careers scaling companies through inflection points and now they bring that same intensity to storytelling. Alongside producing Stepchange, they actively invest in startups building software to accelerate energy abundance and upgrade critical infrastructure through their fund Stepchange Ventures.
Ben Eidelson founded and sold two companies (to Google and Stripe) and built products used by billions. His engineering background (Stanford BS & MS in Electrical Engineering) gives Stepchange its technical precision: episodes that earn the trust of the most technical listeners.
Anay Shah was an early employee at Remitly (led international expansion through IPO) and an executive at Tala leading a 250-person team through late-stage growth. His work across 15 emerging markets with USAID shapes how Stepchange tells global infrastructure stories and connects systems to the real lives they touch.
They share a conviction that many of the most important stories of our time—energy, infrastructure, the systems that hold civilization together aren't getting the depth they deserve. That conviction, and a shared urgency to improve the world for their kids, is what drives every episode.
Data as of June 2026. Analytics aggregated from Substack/RSS, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.