Tumbleweeds in the Filter

A few minutes into her talk, Ann Willmott put up a photo of tumbleweeds. She had helped pick them out of an air filter at a Bitcoin mining site.

Willmott is a product manager at Foundry, where she works on Optifleet, the company’s miner management software. She spoke at Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale in March 2025. Bitcoin was at $87,393 that day. On October 11, 2026, it was $83,079.

Her background is not the usual one for mining. For years she worked in daytime television, producing The Bold and the Beautiful, until she left in mid-2021. She had been interested in Bitcoin since 2013, and in her words, "I just started to feel more and more like the opportunity cost of working in any other field was too great." She made the switch in 2021 and joined Foundry.

Her point to the room was that mining is daily problem-solving. She listed what site teams deal with: bugs and tumbleweeds in the filters, heat, cold, rain, dust storms, snow in the containers, hashprice swings and shipping. As she put it, "Operational excellence is not abstract. It's a survival strategy every single day."

Optifleet, she said, was new to the market but had been built over a little more than two years with Foundry’s own site operations team and with Fortitude Mining. It was running in more than 20 sites, across different power regions, miners and firmware.

She showed how a technician sees the whole site on a map of zones and can click any machine to reboot it, open its log or check its hashrate and error history. Operators can set their own curtailment rules, and the software connects to demand response providers such as Voltus. In Nebraska, she said, Foundry was building a direct curtailment link with the utility NPPD.

Then the news. Foundry was announcing its own firmware, written from scratch in-house, with Optifleet fully integrated. The team was seeing promising results in autotuning tests and planned to roll it out to some first customers that summer.

She also said that while many companies are pivoting to AI, Foundry’s team is focused entirely on Bitcoin mining services.

She closed by thanking the site technicians she learns from every day. Unlike soap opera actors, she said, "they hardly ever cry and they rarely slap anyone in the face."

The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.