Chris Koerner Bought a Bitcoin Mining Hosting Facility for $750K After Hitting an Infrastructure Wall as a Hobbyist

The Setup Chris Koerner did not start out wanting to own a business. He wanted to mine bitcoin as a hobbyist. The problem became obvious fast: purpose-built ASIC miners draw power and generate heat in quantities that a residential panel cannot absorb. You either build a data center in your garage or you rent space in someone else's. That is the entire business category, and most of it is invisible to anyone not already inside crypto. Rather than keep chasing the hobby, Koerner pulled the thread on the supply side. If he needed hosting and could not easily find it, other miners had the same problem. He went to BizBuySell and found one for sale. The seller had already done the hard part: permits, three-phase power, cooling, racking. Koerner bought the infrastructure and inherited a customer base of miners who were paying monthly to plug in. The Deal Purchase price was $750,000. Source was BizBuySell, which is notable on its own. Niche industrial assets show up on mass marketplaces when the seller does not know who the strategic buyers are, which is exactly the window where a non-obvious buyer can win. Specific financing structure was not disclosed on the episode. The business model is colocation, not mining. Customers own the ASICs. Mining Syndicate owns the building, the power contract, the network, and the cooling. Revenue is per-kilowatt or per-rack hosting fees. That is a materially different risk profile than mining for your own account: you are not exposed to bitcoin price, you are exposed to your customers' ability to keep paying when bitcoin price drops. Operating Moves The business scaled to 11 employees. Koerner's operating posture was to treat the facility as an infrastructure service business, not a crypto play. Uptime, power cost, and customer retention are the three metrics that actually matter. Competitors who were running the same business with weaker balance sheets or higher power contracts started closing during crypto winter, and Mining Syndicate picked up their stranded customers. The interview was recorded before FTX collapsed. When that happened, sales dropped roughly 20 percent as retail miners capitulated and unplugged rigs. Koerner did not lean into growth during that stretch. He leaned into staying solvent while weaker operators exited. Operating Lessons - Scratch-your-own-itch acquisitions work when the itch is a supply-constrained service you tried to buy and could not. If you hit that wall as a customer, you already understand the value proposition better than most buyers. - BizBuySell is underpriced for weird assets. Strategics are not looking there. A specialty infrastructure business with a small buyer pool will transact at a multiple that does not reflect what it is worth to someone in the category. - Colocation is a landlord business dressed up as crypto. Separate the asset (power and space) from the thesis (bitcoin price). The asset has value regardless of what bitcoin does, as long as someone wants to mine. - In a downturn, the job is not growth. It is absorbing the customers of...