Another Gates Gets Wired In

Phoebe Gates, the youngest and most stylish of Bill and Melinda Gates’s children, steps into the spotlight as a founder of a new online shopping tool.

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Vanessa Friedman

By Vanessa Friedman

April 24, 2025

On the top floor of a building near Union Square, there’s a small, white-walled office filled with frazzled 20-somethings munching on Cinnamon Crunch and jelly beans. A whiteboard with a countdown calendar is marked off in red. On a shelf nearby, a plaster Roman bust has a pink balloon stuck to his mouth, like a bubble-gum bubble about to pop. Outside the door: a little sign that reads “Phia,” the name of a new e-commerce tool dreamed up by two Stanford grads in their dorm room.

A basic start-up. Except for one thing: the Gates factor.

See, Phia, a web browser/app that went live April 24, aims to be the Booking.com of fashion, offering an instant price comparison from thousands of e-commerce sites for any item, new or used, that may catch your fancy, is the brainchild of not just any old Stanford undergrads. It is the invention of Phoebe Gates, 22, the youngest child of Bill Gates and his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, and Ms. Gates’s former roommate Sophia Kianni, 23.

It’s complicated enough starting a business as a young woman. But starting a tech-adjacent business as a young woman who shares a last name with one of the most famous tech entrepreneurs on the planet — and its 13th-richest person — with all the preconceptions and expectations that implies, is a knotty proposition.

“Growing up, I realized that people are always going to have thoughts about me,” Ms. Gates said recently. She was fast-walking across the green market from her office to her apartment. It was Go Day minus 14, and she and Ms. Kianni were not sleeping much.

fashion.

She lives in a loftlike two-bedroom apartment with two ragdoll cats, an open-plan living-dining-kitchen area, 20-foot ceilings and a walk-in closet organized according to color.

“I used to dress so badly,” Ms. Gates said. She was wearing vintage Chanel ankle boots, a Reformation dress, a Nili Lotan blazer from Poshmark (she is a fan of blazers) and some Tiffany jewelry she bought on the RealReal. When she got to college, she said, “I used to dress in, like, Forever 21 and Shein. Sophia saw me and was like, ‘Oh girl, no.’”

100 languages); she was already a dedicated resale shopper.

They thought there had to be others like them — you know, Ms. Gates said, “smart girls, age 25 to 30, who want to shop like a genius and get the best price in one click.” They were so excited about the idea that they wanted to drop out and get started right away, but their mothers stepped in.

“They both were like, ‘Yeah, it’s not happening,’” Ms. Gates said. Still, she graduated in three years instead of four so they could move to New York, “where fashion is,” and get going.

When she told her father that she and Ms. Kianni wanted to get into the e-commerce space, his reaction, he said, was “Wow, a lot of people have tried, and there’s some big guys in there.” He was worried she might ask for money.

“I thought, ‘Oh boy, she’s going to come and ask,” Mr. Gates said. (Last month, he told Raj Shamani on a podcast that he gave his children “less than 1 percent” of his total wealth because he wanted them to make their own way, though that is still multimillions each.)

He probably would have helped fund Phia, he said. “And then I would have kept her on a short leash and be doing business reviews, which I would have found tricky, and I probably would have been overly nice but wondered if it was the right thing to do? Luckily, it never happened.” Instead Ms. Gates used him for advice, mostly on personnel issues.

“When it comes to shopping, I’m not exactly the target audience,” Mr. Gates said.

Her mother, who she calls her “rock,” told her she had to raise the capital on her own. “She saw it as a real opportunity for me to, like, learn and fail,” Ms. Gates said. She and Ms. Kianni started with $100,000 from Soma Capital and a Stanford grant of $250,000 from a social entrepreneurship program. After a lot of rejections, they finally secured venture backing, including another $500,000 from angel investors. And they have their network of power female mentors.

Now Phia employs four full-time engineers, as well as an operations manager and a designer who is in her last year at Rutgers University. All the employees have equity. Revenue will come from affiliate links. (There are 40,000 sites, new and resale, linked to the Phia platform, which shows not just matches but also items that are similar — in an earlier season’s color palette, for example, or a different size.)

Ms. Gates and Ms. Kianni are particularly proud of their price graph: a straightforward gauge that pops up when you are looking at a skirt, say, or a bag or even a pair of earrings to tell you instantly if the cost is fair, high or low, and whether the piece will retain its value on the secondary market.

Even someone like Ms. Gates could not have anticipated just how good that information, coming amid worldwide tariff-pricing confusion, might look.

Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5715687&forum_id=2:#48877888)

no fuck. cry me a river.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5715687&forum_id=2:#48878689)