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When you invite visitors to tour your business, you usually want to show off your crown jewels: your latest product, a humming production line, a fancy new office remodel, etc. At my company, Megawatt, we do something a little different. We start by taking guests to our least impressive facility: our first Bitcoin mining site. Unpolished and rough around the edges, it serves as a living archive of our early lessons and our growth over the past few years.
I used to cringe every time I walked past the first containerized mining pod we ever used. Built by an outside manufacturer, it looked like the industrial equivalent of a college freshman’s dorm room: functional but not exactly five-star accommodations. Cables ran across the ceiling, there were more keys than any janitor could keep track of, and awkwardly sized parts made spares hard to come by. From a design perspective it was the textbook definition of “barely good enough.”
If you look at the row of 10 mining pods sitting at that first site today, you can see our evolution in real time. With each iteration, we shifted from off-the-shelf to purpose-built designs. We refined the layout for better airflow. We designed for modularity. And we standardized measurements to match components that we could source locally. The tenth pod is sleek, efficient and intuitive. It is not perfect, but it reflects hard-won lessons about what works in our industry.
Everyone has a plan
Most founders like to quote Steve Jobs or Elon Musk when describing the startup journey, but my favorite startup quote comes from an unexpected source: Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” He may have been talking about boxing, but every startup takes its own punches sooner or later. The question is whether you can pick yourself up, learn from the mistakes and adjust on the fly.
One of our early lessons was about parts replacement. The machines used to mine Bitcoin run 24/7 under heavy loads and high temperatures. Think of a Ferrari running at redline all day. Even the best cars need new tires, fresh oil and a tuneup. Now imagine your car needed specialized parts that could only be sourced from one specific factory a dozen time zones away. Every time a tire tread wore thin, you would be at the mercy of tariffs, slow shipping and unpredictable supply chains. As we found out, the same is true for Bitcoin mining equipment. One tiny, exotic part can halt an entire facility.
After spending too much time waiting on international shipments and paying for expedited freight, we redesigned our infrastructure around components we could source domestically. Exhaust fans come from Wisconsin. Filters use standard sizes you can find at Lowe’s or Home Depot. It’s not glamorous to talk about supply chains and measurements, but in an industry where uptime equals money, it’s transformational.
From a founder’s perspective, your first version does not need to be pretty. It just needs to exist. We didn’t know what parts would require the most attention until we started operating. Only by being in the field, and sometimes on our backs with a wrench, did we learn where the bottlenecks were. No amount of planning from a desk could have taught us that.
Don’t get comfortable
We completed construction on two new locations in the past few months, and thanks to what we learned early on, those builds went dramatically smoother. We avoided costly delays, standardized installation processes and moved in with our miners far more quickly. Flipping the switch on those sites and seeing the machines energize felt like a milestone that was only possible due to the foundation laid by our earliest, imperfect efforts.
As any homeowner will tell you: Only after you finish the kitchen remodel, when the landscaping looks perfect and the roof no longer leaks, do you come across a listing that makes you want to move. At Megawatt, we have reached this point. Just as we perfected our air-cooled site design, a new technology caught our eye: hydro-cooled bitcoin mining.
Hydro-cooling uses a closed-loop water system to absorb heat from mining computers. There are no fans and fewer moving parts, which means less mechanical maintenance and higher uptime. So naturally, we plan to go back to square one and build hydro infrastructure at our next mining location.
It’s a feature, not a bug
We made peace with the fact that we’ll probably laugh—or wince—at this decision a few years from now. Embracing imperfection is a feature, not a bug. When I walk visitors through our first site, I no longer cringe. I see a reminder of how far we have come. I see it as the place where Megawatt absorbed its first punch and got up off the mat to fight another day.
So if you’re an entrepreneur building something new, I have a bit of counterintuitive advice: If you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’ve already missed the boat. Someone else, with more humility, will beat you to the punch. So build the minimum version of your idea. Launch your clunky first product. You’ll make mistakes. People will laugh. You will cringe at old photos. But while you’re in the arena getting knocked down, you’ll be learning at a pace no careful planner can match. Before you know it, you will be the one leading tours, laughing at your missteps while plotting how to make your next version better. And if you ever get close to perfection, you will quickly be reminded that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.•
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Rekhter is co-founder and CEO of Megawatt.
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