I spent the first part of my career around things built to last.

Army Signal Corps during the Gulf War. Then IT work supporting the Air Force as an independent contractor, and later the Army's Transportation Corps as a DoD civilian. In that world you don't throw things away — you maintain them, repair them, hand them off to whoever's next. You end up thinking in decades instead of quarters.

Then I went to Silicon Valley — HP, then a startup — right before the dot-com crash. Different world entirely. The whole point was to make things to be replaced. Every version obsolete the moment the next one shipped. I watched that happen in real time, from the inside.

After that I built something with my hands. A residential and commercial painting company in San Francisco, eighty-five guys on the crew at our peak, awards for quality and customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, the work would still be there the next morning, and the next year, and the year after than, doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

It wasn't permanent. But it stayed done. That mattered to me more than I understood at the time.

Then I built the opposite kind of company, a digital marketing agency for home improvement contractors — 500-plus clients, three countries. It grew, it worked, and I hated it. Every campaign existed to be replaced by next month's campaign. Nothing ever finished. The whole business ran on things built to disappear.

Somewhere in there I saw a video of someone turning an old coin into a ring. It wasn't really the video. It was recognizing something I'd already been looking for — an object that had already lived one whole life. Most coins like it end up melted for their metal, or forgotten in a drawer. This one was about to start a second life instead.

I bought some tools. Ruined a lot of coins learning. Found a silversmith to teach me properly, because I wanted to actually be good at it, not just capable of it. Opened a small retail workshop and built the business the way I'd built the paint company, not the agency.

That's Silver State Foundry. I spent a decade building things meant to disappear — campaigns, content, versions, cycles. Now I build the opposite. Objects meant to stay.

And I can't imagine doing anything else.

— Terry Ladd
Founder, Silver State Foundry

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