Trust, Tech, and Truth: How Vidyuth Srinivasan Built Entrupy | Emily Blumenthal & Vidyuth Srinivasan

What happens when curiosity, risk-taking, and a refusal to follow the expected path collide? We sit down with Vidyuth Srinivasan, CEO of Entrupy, to explore his journey from India to New York, from journalism to entrepreneurship, and from outsider to innovator. Vidyuth shares how embracing his identity, thinking independently, and challenging conventional systems helped shape Entrupy—a company built to solve one of fashion’s biggest problems: trust. From navigating cultural identity to developing authentication technology that fights counterfeiting, this conversation reveals how randomness, data, and conviction can transform industries.

Key Takeaways:
 • Authenticity starts with trust — Technology can scale transparency where doubt exists.
 • Risk fuels innovation — Nontraditional paths often create the biggest breakthroughs.
 • Identity is an asset — Staying true to yourself can become a competitive advantage.

🎧 Listen now for an insightful conversation on entrepreneurship, authentication, and building trust in a counterfeit world.

Our Guest:
 Vidyuth Srinivasan is the CEO and co-founder of Entrupy, a technology company using AI-powered authentication to combat counterfeiting in luxury goods. With a background spanning journalism, entrepreneurship, and technology, Vidyuth has built a platform focused on transparency, trust, and protecting both businesses and consumers in high-stakes marketplaces.

Host Emily Blumenthal is a handbag industry expert, author of Handbag Designer 101, and founder of The Handbag Awards. Known as the “Handbag Fairy Godmother,” Emily also teaches entrepreneurship at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is dedicated to celebrating creativity, craftsmanship, and the art of building iconic handbag brands.

Find Handbag Designer 101 Merch, HBD101 Masterclass, one-on-one sessions, and opportunities to book Emily Blumenthal as a speaker at emilyblumenthal.com. 

https://www.instagram.com/entrupy/

https://www.entrupy.com/ 

Transcript

The One Question Buyers Ask

SPEAKER_02 0:00

It's a very simple question. If someone's looking at something, they just want to know if it's real or not. When do they want to know that? Typically before, just before they're going to buy it, or just after they've bought it to assuage their fears. Right. Or right in the middle of the transaction, right?

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Right.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Like, okay, cool. But for that to happen, we need to flip our technology on its head. We're looking at every item uniquely, right? Every single handbag is unique. Instead, what if we said ever what if we took an entire class of handbags and saw and found out if that is different from how the counterfeits are made?

Welcome To The Handbag World

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Hi, and welcome to Handbag Designer 101, the podcast with your host, Emily Blumenthal, handbag industry expert, and the handbag fairy godmother. Each week we uncover the stories behind the handbags we love, from the iconic brands and top designers to creativity, craftsmanship, and culture that define the handbag world. Whether you're a designer, collector, or simply passionate about handbags, this is your front row seat to it all.

Names Identity And Being Remembered

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Hi, welcome to Handbag Designer 101, the podcast of the youth.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Sheanie Bassan.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Sheenie Bassan. Okay, CEO of Entropy. I got that right. I am so sorry because as we were chatting before, I take such pride in saying people's names correctly. I think it's so offensive if someone can't take the extra minute to learn it and say it the right way. So in advance, I am sorry. Respect to you and your parents, your dad. You know, I'm sure they have no patience for this at this point. Srini Vasan, Dad.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Srinivasan, yeah, that's right. My dad's name is Srinivasan. So yes, I think he might.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Well, it depends, right? What depending on where you come from, it might be a family name. It doesn't matter what your dad's name is. And some people have like two first names as their uh or three first names, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Well, that's that's just greedy. Like, come on, pick a lane. Right? Well, look, at the end of the day, you are your own brand's best publicist. So you have to know how you can present yourself in a way that people will find you remember you, and what's the reason that they're remembering you? So pick a lane.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

Yeah, I mean, having a difficult name will make uh you memorable to begin with.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Well, I think right now, specifically, we're in a cultural time where I think a lot of people have had to apologize, especially coming to the US or having immigrant parents that like call me something else. And I think people should stand firm on who they are, what their name is. And if it's difficult, I think I think the person on the receiving end is worth putting the extra effort to say your name correctly. I don't think there's any excuses, in my opinion. Try hard. That's your name. Move on, you know? Why not?

SPEAKER_02 2:54

Sure. I mean, the the other side works as well. Some people just want that conversation to be easily lubricated in the sense of, you know, not wanting to spend too much time on the name. So they come up with something that sounds similar to what they are. So they look at the middle ground, right? And and I get that too. I

From India To New York Leap

SPEAKER_02 3:13

moved here much later in my life, right? I had no plans, I had no idea in my life that I would be doing what I'm doing, where I'm doing it, which is New York City. But I always had some idea in my head that, hey, I want to make a difference. I want to build something that has an impact, which is material. And by material, I don't mean money. I really mean things that tried to make lives better in some way.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:38

And because of that, so I grew up, most of my life was spent in India. And then I moved to the US. I've never had a job here. This is basically the only thing I've ever done in the US. I used to visit here, you know, with different companies that I used to work for before, but I'd never been to New York ever. And I just picked up my bags and said, Well, maybe. I don't know. Well, it was just an instinctive choice.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

What number child are you?

SPEAKER_02 4:06

I'm the second, and I'm definitely the black sheep.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Ah, wait, you're one of how many?

SPEAKER_02 4:13

Uh just two. I'm the younger. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

So is your older sibling an overachiever, color, color in the lines, doctor, lawyer, like does everything.

SPEAKER_02 4:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Doctor, yep, yep, yep, yep.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

So that's I align and identify with you as a second-born black sheep. I always say I'm the middle child without a younger sibling. So, you know, that's like I think when you have someone that you grow up with who is such an unapologetic, overachieving person that you have two options. You either are a slacker or you do your best to overachieve, but your way is never going to be the same way they do it. And you'll always go, you know, the back way, around the corner, upside down. And then by the way, I'll meet you at the front.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

That's exactly right. And no matter what you do, it always somehow ends up hurting your folks, which I feel very sorry for.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

Because they they had a tough time with me. Because, you know, exactly like you said, I had a lot of questions about things like religion. Hey, why am I why am I asking questions and saying, hey, you know, random person? I completely respect religious people, absolutely, and I understand where they come from. Where I've grown up to understand where they come from. But yeah, I had a lot of these questions, and we come from a very religious family, uh, or a pious family at least, which meant we were very ritualistic. And it started there and then it expanded to ask questions about everything, to but not in an annoying way, in a in a very challenging authority kind of way. And so Yeah, which is why I said it's possible that I've been building this because I'm probably likely a very bad employee. So, you know, this is this is the one way in which I felt like, hey, we this needs to happen and we need to be building this, and that's it.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Well, I want to back into this because we're, you know, like I said, this this is organically sp speaking.

Why The Company Is Named Entropy

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Coming from someone that you said that your name, you know, some people you they want it lubricated, another great word. How did you come up with the name of entropy? And what does it represent to you?

SPEAKER_02 6:20

Yeah, the name has some etymology to it. Wow. Yeah, it does have some yeah. So so the original thing that we started building, Urshle, she was our co-founder, my co-founder and myself, what we started doing was talking about the inherent randomness that's in the universe, right? Everything is is has a level of randomness which only keeps increasing with time. If you counted randomness, and by the way, for the record, I'm not an engineer, but I could have been one, but I ended up uh I ended up becoming a journalist by education, actually. And my co-founder was a PhD, he's a PhD.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

So we used to have you, what one of you is the respectable child, the other one is like, wow, he's just a writer. Exactly. You need one of you to be the grown-up if you're gonna take this leap of faith between the two of you, because one of you needs to ask questions and the other one needs to say, okay, we still have a path to follow. So it sounds like a good mix.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Kind of, yeah. I I think that's a good way to characterize it. I would also say one of us was intelligent and actually could do things, and the other one was just smart because he knew how to talk to the intelligent people. Right. And I think what we used to have a lot of these conversations, and we realized that, hey, if what if we so the way we met was through a common friend of mine. And my background is, like I said, I was a journalist. I worked in a bunch of different companies, did various different things in my life, and I never really wanted a job in my entire life. Not to say that I was privileged. My parents were completely middle class. They, you know, they they they worked for the government, so I never really saw a lot of money, but that didn't stop me from hustling a bit, getting money if I needed to, doing odd jobs. But I also had a had a creative bent where I wanted to make movies, I wanted to make music.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Uh but you grew up in a home of of security and no risk. So that either puts you one way or another because when you have both parents working for the government, then you know that you know you can always do what you want, but to a point, there's limitations. So you never need to worry, but if you want more, it's just you have to accept that's not going to be the case. So if you want you're really gonna have to take a jump, right.

SPEAKER_02 8:37

If you and if you wanted more, sometimes the question was, why should you want more? Why shouldn't you be content with what you have? Shouldn't they? Also, in in your formative years, a lot of those questions are around if you do something that's uncharted, you need to know exactly what you're doing because the perception is that the cost of failure is too high. But when I was growing up, because I started being an independent thinker much early in my life, I didn't care about the failure because there is, and my wife and I talk about this quite a bit, where it's like, hey, you moved your somewhere in the back of your head, you you thought, or maybe you didn't care for it, that you might have had a safety net, right? And I would say there was a safety net, but that safety net was absolutely unattractive. In the sense, it for the kind of people that we are for building this, it didn't matter because we didn't want to want it to ever come to that point. It wasn't like you know, playing a poker hand where you know it's a big bet, but you have maybe the second best hand, and you're like, hey, should I take a shot at it? It wasn't a situation where you can afford to lose that money and you're making a strategic choice. Right. So the premise of you can afford to lose money was never even there. You could it it's completely a free-for-all. So you could potentially bet everything you ever have on it, or you could build yourself up to a position where you have nothing, therefore you have nothing to really bet, and you have nothing to lose.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Right.

SPEAKER_02 10:11

Right?

SPEAKER_01 10:12

It's it's so the definition of entropy ties into that, in your opinion.

SPEAKER_02 10:18

I am so sorry. All right, so so I'll I'll give you the the quick three liner, right? So, co-founder and I were talking, we realized we wanted to build something related to the randomness of the universe and tie that to how we can authenticate or add trust by looking at random things and the random the definition in physics in general for randomness. You can define, you can quantify randomness through entropy. That's TROPY. But we wanted to use entropy to determine the truth behind things. So the TRO became TRU. So the idea, the company's name, everything is associated with finding the truth behind objects, using randomness, and building trust in transactions happening anywhere. Because the mission for the company always was and will be in adding trust where where we feel or where there's evidence that there's a trust deficit when people

Do Objects Have Unique Identity

SPEAKER_02 11:20

are transacting and things.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

So, but you and your partner met through a friend-in-law in India, and then what was the journey? Like, so he had a PhD or finished his PhD. He must have been some doing something PhD safe related.

SPEAKER_02 11:36

He was actually still doing his PhD then. Uh yeah, that he was in the middle of it. And when we met, the idea was, hey.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Where did you meet?

SPEAKER_02 11:46

Uh this is funny. We met at a bar.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

I was gonna say, if it's not a bar, it's a little disappointing at this point.

SPEAKER_02 11:53

But but my first question to him was, hey, you know, nice meeting, blah, blah. I still remember so well. Great to meet you. Uh heard a lot, blah, blah, blah. Let's just sit and chat. What would you like to have? What do you do? Beer, whiskey, chin. Oh, I don't drink. Oh.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Was that a little sus that a little sus to you?

SPEAKER_02 12:11

It was complete sus. Uh, because I've always maintained that, you know, when people don't have any like that. Yeah. Yeah, you know? Yeah. So they're like, okay, fine. Yeah, that's fine. We'll we'll get you some soda or something, and uh, let's order some food and start talking. And turns out he doesn't eat any meat.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

I was just gonna say he must be vegan or something, we're going there.

SPEAKER_02 12:37

Yeah, and at that point I used to smoke, so I picked up a cigarette, like, how about that? Nope, nothing. I was like, Oh, this is going to be a long dinner.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

But to be Indian and to be vegetarian is not, it's not unique.

SPEAKER_02 12:50

It's not unique, but it was different because if that was all the case, all of these things were true, then you might not be seen in a bar.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

That's true.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

Right? Like, why do you why'd you come to a bar? We could have gone somewhere else. We could have gone to a you know a regular restaurant.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

So A, this was not transitive, A did not equal C. So there was something in between here.

SPEAKER_02 13:14

Exactly. Exactly. And and the and I wasn't sure if I wanted to find out what that something in between was, right? Right. So we we started talking about it, it was a generic conversation about a bunch of things, what he's working on. And I think at that point he was trying to see if anything could be done. So it was very exploratory at that point.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

And anything could be done in terms of what?

SPEAKER_02 13:36

In terms of can this concept, this theoretical concept, actually be productized? And I don't even know why he wanted to talk to me.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

No, but what was what was the concept?

SPEAKER_02 13:49

The concept was do physical objects in this universe actually have their own unique identity? It's a simple question, right? And if that is the case, is it worth looking at productizing it? And again, this is just a theoretical paper, right? This is a PhD paper. So from there we move to, oh, maybe it does. Oh, if it does, should we build it? If we do build it, what problem is it potentially solving? If it is solving a problem, can it actually become a product or a service? And if it is a product or a service, how big can it get? Where can we sell it? Who can we sell it to? So there were a huge, huge number of questions that we wanted to answer, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:33

And this is all very much before AI, before any of that.

SPEAKER_02 14:37

Way before any of that, way before any of that. And my thing there, the thing that's still even today, that I'm so like my eyes light up every time I talk about it, is the fact that one, this is actually true. There is evidence to say that every single thing that even we make, every single thing that that exists on the planet has something extremely unique about it that can only be itself, right? It's like the difference between looking at, and and I will go back to this analogy later. It's like the difference between looking at someone's face versus their DNA, right? So depending on the frame of reference, you can identify someone through their face, or if you don't, if you can't see the person, or if you see 20 people that look exactly alike, that they're, you know, uh, I don't know, what would you call that? Clowns. Dodecker tets, something like that. But if there were 20 people that looked exactly alike, you would probably have to go to that DNA and look at, okay, this is that 0.1% difference, right? So that was the idea. It's like everything is unique, yet they can be similar. Like, oh, so it was a mind-blown moment. And I said, you know what? I'm just switching jobs now. I was moving in from a software company to a sports marketing group. Because that's I I love sport. I love the whole concept of the commercialization of it or the franchise model of it. And I was about to move to actually manage the contracts of an extremely popular cricket player at that point, like one of the most popular cricket players of all time. And I had a choice then. It's like, okay, do I do that or does this interest me? Do I want to explore this?

SPEAKER_01 16:19

I mean, this is such an existential, you know, sober conversation you had from meeting someone to saying, okay, can this construct of things having its own number placement of some description, can it be marketable? Can it be sellable? And what's the why? And who would buy it? And and how could we commercialize something that is essentially nothing right now? So that is quite the, I mean, and and that is quite the conversation to have. Being like, so should I not take this day job where it's going to pay me a lot of money, or should I just take a leap of faith and jump into this, like, you know, cosmic era of maybe I'll start my business with this guy that I just met who doesn't drink or eat meat.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

Right. That's exactly right. And at that point, it wasn't even a technology, right? It was just a concept. It was literally an a thought. And then, and you know how it is, you start somewhere and you end up somewhere completely different. But that wasn't on our mind. I think the the amazing thing about how we're building this or how we have built it, at least thus far, is that we've always hung on to the mission and hung on to the things that we have absolutely loved, which has been okay, here's an idea. Okay, great, nice idea, but it means nothing. Validate it, right? Get feedback on it. Go take every single baby step that is to stake, uh, there is to take. Don't skip any step because every step teaches you something. So we didn't even know at that point that we were following a lot of the well thought-through schools of how do you build a company, how do you build a product in the early stages? And how do you take it from nothing to something, and then from something to something bigger, and then take it through different stages.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

So we can monetizing.

SPEAKER_02 18:09

Yeah, yeah. And monetizing exactly. So, and that was any on one hand, I was always thinking about it because I've never wanted to build anything for free. But on the other hand, it was is this even possible to actually build into a technology or a product? Because it's just a concept, right? Everything having a unique fingerprint.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

So can I just pause for one second just to make sure? Because I want to mention this and then we'll go back. So, just to make sure, as a result of this, because this is your story, it is so fascinating. Um, and it's so mad, so many bold choices. But can you just touch upon how entropy ties into handbags and what this would do and the value of what this represents? Because that's how I found you. And then we'll go back to the building of it because I think that's important to bring this all full circle because the the journey of the journey of just is so important to see

The Resale Market Defines The Problem

SPEAKER_01 19:05

how you ended up there.

SPEAKER_02 19:06

Yeah, yeah, no, and that's what I was gonna say. And this also tells you how much of an outsider I am to this space. But what we ended up doing very quickly was we started something, we took it to, you know, this is where I come in, right? I hustled my way into setting up meetings with everybody who builds products of all kinds from food to art to wine to luxury products, and got to meet a bunch of luxury bands as well. So, like, hey, what do you think of this? And they're like, this is an alien concept to them, right? They like making new things and selling, they're designers, creative people. We went in there with a technology that said, Do you want your thing and its its identity to be protected forever for its lifetime? And they're like, Oh, yeah, hell yes, I would want to, but you know, come back when you have more data. So this is also web three at this point, in terms of yeah, this is like web four, yeah, speaking to web 1.0, right? Yeah, it's like what it's just yeah, it doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_01 20:11

Trying to tell your parents how to how to make an Instagram video, like you could be there all day, forget it, you know, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 20:18

Exactly. And so we we went to the the the retail brands, and then we realized that, and again, this was just a process of validation, right? Take it to 50 people, see who is interested in what problem it solves. So validation.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Had you moved yet, or were you still in India?

SPEAKER_02 20:33

I was doing both. I was traveling back and forth, coming in for meetings and heading back. Then we stumbled upon, so we had a I had a list of all of these different kinds of industries. And at one point, it I spoke to some of the brands and they liked it. And like I said, they said, come back when you have more data. Hmm, interesting. So there is something here, but we don't know exactly how to get there. So by chance, we spoke to a bunch of people who are resellers who who had their sort of sided job as buying and selling expensive things, including handbags, watches, and a few other things. But like, hey, what do you think of this? Wait, you're telling me that I could identify this product? Okay, maybe, but what I really want to know is is this real or not? That's all I want to know. So it's a simple question that they ask. And we're like, oh man, okay, that is the question that is worth answering, right? It's a very simple question. If someone's looking at something, they just want to know if it's real or not. When do they want to know that? Typically before, just before they're going to buy it, or just after they've bought it to asker which their fears, right? Or right in the middle of the transaction, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:40

Right.

SPEAKER_02 21:41

Like, okay, cool. But for that to happen, we need to flip our technology on its head. We're looking at every item uniquely, right? Every single handbag is unique. Instead, what if we said ever what if we took an entire class of handbags and saw and Found out if that is different from how the counterfeits are made.

Masterclass Offer And Discount Code

SPEAKER_01 22:04

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Louis Vuitton Pilot And Early Validation

SPEAKER_01 23:49

Like then it had a name.

SPEAKER_02 23:50

That's exactly right. Yeah. I think it was fundamentally or semantically, it went from looking at differences between things to commonality between things, right? And then building two classes of this is different from this, but in this, in one class, there's a lot more similarity than differences. And what is it actually true? Is that is this again? This was another theoretical concept, right? So we had to validate it. So we actually built a product of very basic technology, and we did it with uh LV, uh with Louis Vuitton handbags and wallets and a bunch of things. We're like, hey, they all have a certain standard. What if we collected data from different eras and saw if it actually if computers could understand these different eras and the commonalities, and then create a new class of just counterfeit products, fake products of all different uh types, but similar looking to this authentic class, and then see if it actually can detect. So we did a small project, did it for about three, four months, it worked, and we took the technology to one of the biggest resellers, currently biggest resellers, who at that point weren't that big. And we had a 35, 40 minute conversation. And at the end of it, they were like, Hey, why don't you build this for us? We're like, wait, are you trying to acquire us or acquire us? And they said yes. And it's like, interesting, we don't even have a product. So from trying to identify a market to getting an offer to be acquired was kind of a big jump.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

So, in terms of this, was it how were they tested side by side? Was it like a 360 laser? Was it someone scanning the codes? Was it someone checking the interior labels to make sure the numbers match up? Like, so you're having this conversation because you know, I've spoken to enough authenticators. I am not an authenticator. It's like I need to say I'm not a lawyer, you know, when you give advice, I'm also not an authenticator, so I can't give advice to that. But there are many things that determine what's real and what's not. So, how are you able to work backwards in terms of that?

SPEAKER_02 25:59

That's

Building Scalable Authentication With Data

SPEAKER_02 26:00

a good question. So we didn't work backwards at all. We just collected that data. We looked at it more from a data standpoint. We understood that there were a lot of signals, so to speak, which can indicate the authenticity or the lack thereof. But we looked at it purely from the perspective of, hey, I know that these things are definitely fake. I know that these things are definitely authentic. So let's start there, right? We started with that level of we don't know much, but what we do know is that this data at scale might give us some information. So so, and and going back to your original question, we were looking at only images because the idea that we had was we wanted to build something scalable and repeatable and something that everybody could use if they had to. But we realized that in those days at least, the optics that were available on phones, et cetera, weren't that good.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:53

So we said we need, if we're going to build something like this, if at all, we if if it ever comes down to it, we're going to have to use a deeper frame of reference, right? Similar to you know, looking at a photo of a face or looking at the DNA of somebody.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

Right.

SPEAKER_02 27:07

So we said our frame of reference needs to be deeper because the new information that we get, the quality of that data is going to be consistent. So again, everything was approached from a data standpoint, right? Because data, in our view, was scalable. We could scale that knowledge and data, and it would continually get better. Because in those days, the state of the art was a QR code or a hologram or some kind of a number, right? We said, okay, anybody can copy that. And once you've cracked it, that security is worthless. So you have to keep playing that spy versus pie game. Right. Compared to if you're doing AI or or if you're if you're doing it based on data, then you can always afford to stay, you know, 30 paces ahead.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Right.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

Because you're getting new data. So going back to that, we collected this data, it worked. We were almost acquired. We said thanks, but no thanks. Because again, we use that as validation. Okay, there is a market here. If we don't even have a product and they won't acquire us, there is a deep enough problem. So we got deeper. That's how we got into handbags. And then the question was okay,

Collecting A Century Of Handbag Signals

SPEAKER_02 28:10

all of this is fine, but where the hell are we going to get this data? We need to now map hundred years worth of handbag data. Who the hell even has that information?

SPEAKER_00 28:19

Right.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

So, in a way, looking back, it was doing the hard things first, right? We embarked on a glorious global adventure on collecting data. We went all over the world posing as wholesale buyers for authentic product, for fake product. We stood in the line, you know, some weird-looking guy who doesn't look like he should belong here was actually standing in many of the retail stores, handbag sections, asking questions about how things are made, what kind of leather is this, you know, the stitching qualities, and how do you, you know, asking the essays, what goes into this? And how do you know, like what can you tell from these different ways of construction and different eras of, and I've heard this in your previous podcast as well, which is all true. I mean, there are some transition years when we would see data that comes from the authentic authentic class, which looked really bad. Like, oh my God, how is this factory so bad? But then we saw a lot of it. Right. We saw that to be consistent, right? Yeah, and then we realized that okay, so this is not it, and this is why I was talking about a lot of people think about authentication as if you're looking at a checklist and looking at a bunch of one or two signals, like, oh, if they have this grommet incorrectly stamped, it must be fake. That's not how it works at all, right? Because of these idiosyncrasies. So that kind of taught us to also be better authenticators. So we had to become authenticators ourselves. I was authenticating for the longest time, and I had no idea. I didn't even the only exposure I had to Air MS for the longest time was my dad when he'd gone to France once, he got me a nice little bottle of cologne. And I was like, okay, this sounds interesting. And then, of course, in school you learn about history and the Greek gods, etc. But as a brand, I had no exposure.

SPEAKER_00 30:05

Right.

SPEAKER_02 30:06

But when we got into this, I was like, oh man. So it was a journey of discovery for myself, right? Understanding how these things were made. And honestly, I really have come to appreciate that. I don't collect anything, maybe perfumes, that's my thing. But I don't collect any of these types of products, but I do appreciate the artisanship, the work that goes into it, the thought that goes into it, the consistency that they have is not easy to do, especially at that scale.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Right. It's so, I mean, oh, I'm I'm so digging this. It's I mean, it sounds to me that you were more, and I you can correct me, but you were more shopping for a business idea, less so what the business idea was. And this just kind of stuck. Like this, this answered and checked all the boxes of of your need to ask questions. You found someone that was on the same wavelength that you could bounce ideas off of and that he maintained your interest because for people like you and me, it's hard to keep our interest. It's hard, and it's also for hard for people to want to stay along for the ride of being with you, considering who you are. Because you you gotta be a lot of a person to be able to do all of this. And unapologetically, you just have to be. You because you have to be puty, you have to be persistent, you have to be willing to keep showing up at the places where people said no, you can't come in, because you gotta keep like you got to get to the bottom. Like, wait, I need to know. Can you explain this to me?

SPEAKER_02 31:31

Yes, I need to know. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

Wait, why did they use the stitch? No, but like, but what what makes this stitch so interesting? But wait, why?

SPEAKER_02 31:38

And why do they have to move? Like, they had a great couple of factories in this particular country. Why did they have to move? It made no sense. I mean, everything was working great.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

Yeah, no, it's so fascinating. And again, being someone who is somewhat of a handbag anthropologist at this point, you know, and I uh and to your point, I have this gigantic dossier of the history of the handbag. And it's mine, I don't share it with anybody else, but I do a lot of guest writing. Like editors ask me, you know, like I've got something coming out about the fanny pack and its history, but I feel like in order to speak to authenticating and in order to speak to why brands did it, you have to go back to even why that silhouette exists and what it's trying to accomplish and what that user or end customer from either even an ethnographical standpoint, tying into their lifestyle, why was this product created? And then only then can you get into the authentication and seeing if someone was copying it, they're copying it for the product, not for the use, not for the day-to-day, not for the customer. It's checking a box of someone who wanted that product to say that they could have that product. And only then, in my opinion, can your technology separate the difference or at least identify it? And I'm no tech person either, but that is just what I can surmise. So it's all these are bold choices. I mean, you started this what in 2010? So it's been a minute.

SPEAKER_02 33:09

You probably 2013, 2013, and then we didn't raise any money. The first few years, we were running off of a grant that we got from NYU to pursue this, and they were kind enough to even give us an office. And that's when I moved to New York saying, hey, I think this is the right place to build it. We originally registered the company. Because my uh co-founder was doing his PhD at NYU. He did his own thing, but then we we ended up having a bigger, our own space. That's when I started visiting back and forth. And it was just a question of, hey, it just seems like I need to, we need to build this in in in New York, in the US, but specifically New York. And it was a very easy, instinctive choice for me to do that. But looking back, I don't know what I was thinking. I think most of the times when I asked that question to myself, I what were you thinking? The answer is pretty much the same. It's I wanted this to happen really bad. I wanted this to exist. And that's still the same. I think with entropy, the idea

Integrity As A Business Mission

SPEAKER_02 34:10

and the way we approached it and where we ended up and where we are going, a lot of it comes down to what do we want to do with this? Where should this go? And what should this be? Those are four questions that we ask ourselves all the time, outside of you know, the business side of it or the numbers or the accuracy in the product. And the answer, thankfully, at the very high level, all of us, you know, on the board now and co-founders ourselves have a very simple answer to it, which is hey, this needs to exist to help society at large. And now that it exists, it needs to be the biggest, best version of itself. But the bigness of it is not necessarily about I want to build something big, right? The benefit that people have out of it is people get out of it, is really what we're after because it's an emotional need. And I come from traditionally a much lower trust society, right? A lot of people are for themselves, and I've always never I've never liked that.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

I realized people with parents that work for the government, if that's the case.

SPEAKER_02 35:18

I know, and my dad was just he was so by the book, he was like he never, and you know, in a world where a lot of these things could have been going your way, secret, you know, you could have secret handshakes. That's right, he was he just had one job all his life, and he was always extremely above board and kept talking about integrity. So, in some ways, so imagine hearing that while being the black sheep, right? And while yeah, and growing up, you do all the uh unsavory things, not criminal things, but unsavory things. So, in a way, it's almost like a path to redemption for myself, but it also is understanding the value of goodness to society. And we try to do that. And I think the more we do it, the more the world benefits from not just, I mean, and we're only one small part, right? We're not really the most important thing on this planet. Absolutely not. Probably one of the least. But on the other hand, if we're able to help somebody have that peace of mind and ensure that that peace of mind continues, right? Not just for that transaction, for that moment of interaction. And that is really important as a motivator for us, which means we want that peace of mind to be scaled up, to be accessible to everybody. And uh yeah, that's our pursuit.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

I gotta say, and I've spoken to, I've discussed this with a few people actually on a few episodes that are coming. But one way or another, and this was told to me by a therapist years ago, or someone I know who's a therapist, who said, one way or another, we follow the path of our parents, whether we want to or not, we end up doing what they're doing in some shape or form because it's so ingrained in us. Even as a black sheep, you still end up following some sort of moral compass code that that was that you saw, even as so far as that you fought so hard to get away from it. It's like when you get older, there's comfort in knowing that this is the right way because that's how you saw it and you respect it, and you're gonna make sure what you do still follows that same that same code in that regard.

SPEAKER_02 37:26

That's a great point. Yes. I think it is inevitable. Even if we were like, I would fight it all the time. I was ready to disagree with you the moment you said that. But yes, you are 100% right. In some, we we don't fall that far away from their tree from in a in a sense of morality. And I think that has always been important to me, or that has grown increasingly important to me. And one of the things we talk about internally at entropy is we always talk about integrity. We don't like bullshitting our first cultural value as a company, and we're about a hundred and almost 140-something people now globally. And the first thing we talk about is talk straight.

SPEAKER_01 38:04

I think, you know, to what you said about on a macrocosmic level, entropy may not have value because, you know, essentially you're protecting people's stuff, right? But on a microcosmic level, the whole essence of people buying things and what I teach, you know, people trying to understand as an entrepreneur and building a product and recognizing people's budgets are separated into needs and wants, and a lot of time they get commingled. But if someone is spending their hard-earned money, even if it's a dollar or a rupee or whatever, that should then be protected that they're getting what they bought.

SPEAKER_02 38:43

That's exactly right. That is exact just just let them get what they paid for. That's all, right? It's very simple. Um and sure, it sounds simple, but there's a lot of work that goes behind it. Yeah, but then again, nobody needs to know about that. It's not that important, it's important to us, right? But that doesn't make it important to the whole world, right? Correct. Just give them what they what they think they're buying and make sure you're protecting people because there is goodness in that, there is a positivity to society.

Counterfeits Hurt The Buyer Too

SPEAKER_02 39:10

And look, I also get the other side of it. What you know, on one hand, you can say, oh, counterfeiting is bad. And there are a lot of bad things about counterfeiting. In fact, we're doing a project now where we are running every single or or huge, I think over a thousand different fake products through X-ray machines, understanding what they're made of, and the results are not looking good, not good at all. So, the one thing if if anyone is listening who thinks reps are a cool thing, trust me, I was 18, I also thought they were cool. I bought a lot of the whole thing, right? And I bought a lot of them too. I grew up buying them. My mom used to buy them for me in school because you be you had one spare school-issued shoes, and then you'd go buy the one off the pavement and wear that four days out of five, right? That's just how we grew up. But what you don't realize is that you think that there's no victim in this entire process, and screw the man for asking you to pay that much. What you also need to understand is if that is if you think that, then you are the victim.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

Correct. Correct. And I have to say, I think that comes with age, comes that kind of knowledge of recognizing. And just to end cap what you were saying, when I got into handbags and accidentally became an accidental designer, blah, blah, blah. It was one of the first times I recognized, you know, and this was before the days of everything being PU or faux leather or vegan leather, whatever the hell they want to rebrand it. It's just not real. It's chemically made the end.

SPEAKER_02 40:43

Exactly that it's artificial.

SPEAKER_01 40:45

It is. However, that's when I learned about pig leather and how that's what the factories in China were using before cow, before lamb. It was skyved, which they cut a layer out, but it was all pig leather. And I thought, and so people were saying it's still leather. Again, before people had the wherewithal to say that it wasn't even leather at all. And I thought, oh my God, you know, because the touch, the feel, the weight, the smell, the whole thing, the way the chemicals are taken on. I mean, I garmento offspring, I learned about lab dips and all that and things coming back. And, you know, the top-of-line sample from production didn't match. Like I get all that, but an understanding that if I'm gonna spend that money and I'm gonna wear that product out, if this is what is going to represent me as my personal brand, I definitely did not want it to be pig leather. And I could assume with full confidence nobody else would uh either.

SPEAKER_02 41:36

But I well, I think that that there's also an issue there, right? Like you knew it, but then there was probably, and and correct me if I'm wrong, there was probably a sense of doubt as to okay, I know it, I care about it, but am I sure that everybody else cares about it?

SPEAKER_01 41:54

Smoke buys mirrors, so it's all relative. You know, that's the line that you know, fake it till you make it. So a lot of people are using it to help build their own personal brand up. But it's, you know, I don't think we, you and I, can ever dictate why people buy things and what their reasoning is. Is it because they want to look better, they want to keep up with the Joneses, they want to prove that they are one of those people who can afford or get the illusion. There will always be people who are happy buying knockoffs or dupes. Yeah. And then there's the people who just don't know any better. And I think, you know, your job has to cover at least one of them because those who buy dupes are buying it knowing full well, and those who aren't, then they should be protected one way or another.

SPEAKER_02 42:39

That's exactly right. So there's one side, which is, you know, one of the analogies that I frequently use is, you know, this idea of us are always operating on the edge of criminality, right? Our job is to actually prevent a crime from occurring, right? Yep. And the analogy I use is, you know, does Batman ever come and say that, oh, yeah, crime's done in Gotham, all of you go back? Right. That's not how it works. Crime's always going to happen, whether we like it or not. And so our job is really to be the gatekeepers where we can, where it makes, where people allow us to be. Um, so it all comes down to what consumers want and what people want. And yeah, we we cannot control what other people do. What we can control is what information they need and what they what they can get on demand. So that's why, you know, we do it the way we do it.

SPEAKER_01 43:28

Vidyu, I want to say thank you so very much for being part of Handbag Designer 101 the podcast. I want to absolutely have you back in the future to talk about the state of the market because I feel like

Verified Labels Certificates And Coverage

SPEAKER_01 43:40

getting getting into what entropy does, your your backstory, the whole thing, because I think it would be interesting to have another conversation to speak about what you do and what you're dealing with and what you're trying to develop as a result of what the current trend trends are of counterfeits. Cause I think that's a great learning lesson. That's that's a whole other full. Long conversation, but how can people find you, follow you, learn more about entropy, the whole thing?

SPEAKER_02 44:06

Firstly, thanks, Emily, for this. And I know there's so much more to talk about. I'd love to be back on and share something which is hopefully more useful than the silly story that I just shared. You can follow us, you can find us on dub dub dub entropy. You can look up entropy on all the socials, especially Insta and TikTok, where our game is fairly decent. Yeah. And we you can also, more importantly, if you're buying for secondhand resell goods, and if you're going into a store yourself, look for the verified by entropy label. It's sort of like the Visa MasterCard supported thing. You'll find it on the doors, or ask the resellers if you're buying them online, how they authenticate. And if possible, ask them for an entropy certificate. Because if you do, if and when that item turns out to be inauthentic, or we couldn't call it authentic, you are fully financially covered by us. We don't take a cut of any transaction, but we're saying that if we get it wrong, you get your money back,

Final Thanks Rate And Follow

SPEAKER_02 45:05

we'll take possession of that fake if it is a fake.

SPEAKER_01 45:07

Wow. That's the nugget I want to hold on to. Thank you, Vidyou, so much for being part of this.

SPEAKER_02 45:13

Thanks, Emily. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 45:15

Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review and follow us on every single platform at Handbag Designer. Thanks so much. See you next time.