Yahoo Finance 'I founded the world's first home heater that mines bitcoin'
My First Boss: The people who helped shape business leaders
During the COVID lockdown in 2020, Alex Busarov, a London School of Economics graduate and McKinsey alumni, found himself confined to a Shanghai apartment alongside an ageing bitcoin miner known as Antminer S9.
The Heatbit Mini mines bitcoin and is billed as the world's first and only heater and air purifier that gives you 50% cashback on heating, adding circa $20 (£16) to your pocket every month.
I was fresh, straight out of university and Tim Breen immediately struck me as someone very entrepreneurial and the things I learned from him have helped me in my career.
We met in Dubai in 2008, having started my first consultancy job as a business analyst at McKinsey. Tim had an unusual path into consultancy. He had left the UK from school to go to Egypt to work as a diving instructor and later opened up his own diving shop.
At one point he decided to change something in his life and, without an undergraduate degree, went into one of the top MBA courses at London Business School and then straight into McKinsey, at the time one of the hottest consultancy jobs.
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If I didn’t understand something, he would tell me to figure it out. Once I was able to break that mental barrier, you start thinking and figuring it out. It’s a powerful skill to have. I had similar traits from my father; he would never tell me what to do. If anything he would make my life harder as a kid to make me learn more.
If Tim believed in something he would just go and do it – even if it was quite unconventional. On the day he was announced as a partner at McKinsey, he announced that he was leaving the firm and later joined a big development fund in Abu Dhabi.
When I heard he was leaving I was kind of sad, but full of admiration that he believed in what he wanted to do. From starting out fresh and taking in new ideas and information, if you consume it at that time it stays with you and Tim was impactful in that way.
My learnings from Tim’s entrepreneurial spirit played a hand when I was in Shanghai during lockdown in 2020. I had purchased a bitcoin miner, turned it on in my bedroom and first it got loud and then it got hot. I immediately thought that if it wasn’t loud then it would be a really good heater – and the concept of Heatbit was born.
Research suggested that people were only creating it in a DIY mould; they would take a graphics card or anything that uses a lot of energy – training artificial intelligence models, mining bitcoin, or rendering video games – and turn it into heating.
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Heatbit essentially provides a green and energy-efficient solution to cryptocurrency mining, with emitted heat recycled to replace other heating devices in homes.
At the start, we went to crowdfunder Indiegogo and it was going well before they banned our campaign after believing it was a ‘get rich quick’ scheme. What we realised was that this was just a bump in the road, as we had the confirmation that all those we had to refund had paid for it.
Back when I was at McKinsey I had worked in energy, from strategy to implementation and how the systems worked. If you take all the energy that goes into computing, it uses more electric energy than the whole of the UK. When you combine it with heating, the savings are significant.
Heatbit, which runs on the same technology that powers iPhones, is an app-based device and rewards between 30 to 70% of your electricity bill, while we believe that it generates significantly more cashback than any other heater on the market.
For home use, we have added an air purification function to the heater. There are other functions such as water heating while there is a process where you can use a small waste heat source to start an air conditioning function, which we are currently working on.
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What we are really building is a zero energy infrastructure. If you use it as a heater, it means that the computing doesn’t really take any extra energy.
Essentially, computing is using more and more energy globally and if you are able to combine it with heat cooling on the other applications, it makes the system a lot more efficient. It becomes cheaper because it is using less electricity, people get rewarded for their heaters and it helps with bills.
If I saw Tim again, I’m sure he would ask whether the Heatbit is actually a diving tank – but I think he would get the concept pretty quickly and see the potential.
Alex Busarov was speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon
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