A few minutes into her talk at Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale 2025, recorded March 25–27, 2025, Ann Willmott put up a photo of tumbleweeds she had helped pick out of a filter at a mining site. Willmott is a product manager at Foundry, where she works on Optifleet, the company’s miner management software. Her point was that running a mine is daily problem-solving, and that the software should be built around that.
She came to the job from television. Willmott first took an interest in Bitcoin in 2013. Her career, though, was in daytime television: until mid-2021 she produced The Bold and the Beautiful, the long-running soap opera. She described it as a fun job and an interesting business, with a cast that gets mobbed in countries such as Italy, Australia and South Africa.
I just started to feel more and more like the opportunity cost of working in any other field was too great.
Ann Willmott · 1:36
She made the switch in 2021 and found her way to Foundry. She said she left a great job because she believes a censorship-free, permissionless and decentralized currency is a true innovation.
Why the day-to-day decides the outcome
Willmott told the room that miners produce new bitcoin, secure the network and work through mining economics every day, and that when those economics work, more miners can join and compete. She cited Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin for America talk, which argued that cyber power requires Bitcoin miners running ASICs, and added that this means miners help with the nation’s cyber security. “No pressure,” she said.
The daily work, she said, is less glamorous than a Hollywood soap opera. She listed the problems site teams face: tumbleweeds or bugs in the filters, extreme heat and cold, rain, dust storms, snow in the containers, hashprice volatility and shipping. She pointed the audience to Danny from Compass Logistics on the next panel for the shipping part.
Operational excellence is not abstract. It's a survival strategy every single day.
Ann Willmott · 4:40
What Optifleet is
Willmott said Optifleet is new to the market because Foundry is only now opening it up, but that it had been developed over a little more than two years in close coordination with Foundry’s own site operations team and with Fortitude Mining. The decisions, she said, came from the problems and workflows of the people running those sites.
Optifleet is battle tested. It may be a new entry to the market because we are just opening it up, but actually we've developed it over the last two years
Ann Willmott · 5:01
She said the software was running in more than 20 sites at the time, across different power regions and energy management strategies, with a range of miners and firmware, and that support for more is added as customers need it. Foundry, she noted, has served institutional clients through its pool for five years, and that is the focus for Optifleet too.
Everything in Optifleet is meant to be clear, understandable, and immediately actionable because what you're trying to do in a Bitcoin mine every day is to just keep your numbers moving back up
Ann Willmott · 5:45
A firmware product written in-house
Willmott said she had “buried the lead”: Foundry was announcing a firmware product, and Optifleet would be fully integrated with it. The firmware team had written the code from scratch, not adapted from something else, was seeing promising results from its autotuning tests, and expected to roll out to some initial customers that summer.
Beyond firmware, she said, the development team was working on an external API, an improved work order system and faster onboarding. She also addressed AI: many companies are pivoting to it, she said, but Foundry’s team is focused entirely on Bitcoin mining services.
The demo: one site, one or two clicks
She described a typical technician’s day: arriving to find underperforming numbers, working through problems in order of priority, and seeing the numbers slip overnight. Optifleet is meant to show the whole site at a glance and reach any detail in one or two clicks. The site map groups miners into zones, which are IP ranges on the network, and a technician can click any miner to reboot it, open its log, or see its hashrate history, error history and diagnostics.
Metrics such as hashrate, hashboard temperature and chip temperature can be viewed in real time or as a 30-minute average. Operators can write their own curtailment rules, and Optifleet integrates with demand response providers such as Voltus, with direct connections added as needed; in Nebraska, she said, Foundry was building a direct curtailment link with the utility NPPD. Other features she listed include auto-reboot rules, alerts, an energy report that can show actual usage from eGauge meters, a firmware report, SensorPush sensor support and an issues screen for low hashers, non-hashers and specific error codes.
Credit to the site teams
Before leaving the stage to point people to the Foundry booth for demos, Willmott closed by thanking Foundry’s site operations technicians, who she said teach the product team about their problems every day and get the job done whatever the drama.
Unlike a soap opera, I have to say they hardly ever cry and they rarely slap anyone in the face.
Ann Willmott · 13:09
She said operational excellence is about uptime and efficiency, and also about something larger.
It's also about resilience, freedom, and the future of Bitcoin. That's the mission that we're on.
Ann Willmott · 13:45
Bitcoin traded at $87,393 on March 25, 2025, when the session was recorded. On October 11, 2026, it was $83,079.