Launched on April 24, her Phia aims to become the Booking.com of fashion. Using AI, it analyzes market trends and compares them to a database of over 250 million second-hand items from platforms like The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, ThredUp, StockX, eBay, and Poshmark, according to U.S.’s news site The Verge.
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Phoebe Gates, the youngest daughter of tech billionaire Bill Gates and Melinda Gates. Photo from her Instagram |
This innovative platform is the brainchild of Phoebe, 22, and her former Stanford roommate, Sophia Kianni, 23. Starting a tech-adjacent business as a young woman with a name synonymous with one of the world’s wealthiest tech moguls presents its own challenges, laden with preconceptions and expectations.
“Growing up, I realized that people are always going to have thoughts about me,” Phoebe told The New York Times. “If the business is successful, people will say, ‘It’s because of her family.’”
“And a huge portion of that is true. I never would have been able to go to Stanford, or have such an amazing upbringing or feel the drive to do something, if it wasn’t for my parents. But I also feel a huge amount of internalized pressure.”
Phoebe knows people will assume her family’s name helped her access venture capital, investors, and mentors, and that the podcast company behind “The Burnouts” signed her and Kianni due to their connections. But her response is clear: “We’re roommates fighting about clothing. We are the girls who are scouring shopping sites for deals. And there are, frankly, thousands of other young women like us.”
She grew up in Seattle as the youngest of three siblings. Her older sister, Jennifer, is a pediatric resident, and her brother, Rory, works for a Congressional committee. Throughout high school, she spent most summers in Rwanda, where she was actively involved in philanthropy alongside her siblings. Like them, she has been vocal on social and political issues, attending the UN General Assembly with her mother and visiting Rwanda with Partners in Health, a nonprofit supported by the Gates Foundation.
Unlike the rest of her family, Phoebe is an extrovert. Bill once described her as “the most different than I am.” “Because she’s so good with people,” he said. “When we would go on family vacations, we would find some part of the beach to just be off on our own, and Phoebe would go down the beach and meet people and bring them back to introduce them to us.”
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Phoebe Gates (R) and father Bill Gates. Photo courtesy of Phoebe’s Instagram |
Phoebe has also become a social media sensation with over 450,000 Instagram followers and an active presence on TikTok, where she shares glimpses of her upbringing, including strict household rules on technology. One of her most popular TikTok clips features a playful bubble tea showdown with her father, who has a longstanding habit of texting her after sending emails.
Fashion is another passion of Phoebe’s. She lives in a loft-style two-bedroom apartment with two ragdoll cats, an open-plan living-dining-kitchen area, and 20-foot ceilings. Her walk-in closet is organized by color. “I used to dress so badly,” she admits. “I used to dress in, like, Forever 21 and Shein. Sophia saw me and was like, ‘Oh girl, no.’”
Today, she buys most of her clothes second-hand, and her brother even asks her for advice on his outfits. Her approach to fashion reflects the values her parents instilled. In a 2024 interview with The New York Times, her mother, Melinda Gates, emphasized the importance of modesty in their children’s upbringing.
“We absolutely did not just buy them things,” Melinda said, comparing it to her own upbringing. “I think it was much more of an upbringing like I grew up in. A very middle-class household where money did dictate whether I got an extra pair of shoes that year or not.”
The idea for Phia initially sprang from a pitch the duo created to join an entrepreneurship class. On their podcast “The Burnouts,” the pair discussed their early days at Stanford, where Phoebe tried her hand at a Bluetooth tampon concept that she thought would crown her as “the real Elizabeth Holmes.” Holmes, once hailed as the youngest female self-made billionaire, rose to infamy for her fraudulent health tech empire, Theranos, which collapsed after she was sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors in 2022.
While Phoebe’s invention did not make it past the class pitch, her focus shifted when she saw a $500 dress from the brand Area being resold for $150 on the RealReal and thought “so foolish.” Sophia, already an avid resale shopper, and Phoebe realized there must be others like them, “smart girls, age 25 to 30, who want to shop like a genius and get the best price in one click.”
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Phoebe Gates and mother Melinda French Gates. Photo courtesy of Phoebe’s Instagram |
Excited about the idea, they wanted to drop out and start immediately, but their mothers opposed it. “They both were like, ‘Yeah, it’s not happening,’” Phoebe recalled. She graduated in three years instead of four so that they could move to New York, “where fashion is,” and get started.
When she told her father about Phia, he expressed concern over the challenges of breaking into the e-commerce space. “Wow, a lot of people have tried, and there’s some big guys in there,” he had said.
He also admitted he thought Phoebe might ask for funding. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, she’s going to come and ask,” he said, adding that he probably would have helped fund Phia. “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.” Phoebe, instead, turned to advice from her father, particularly on personnel matters.
Her mother, whom she calls her “rock,” insisted Phoebe and Sophia raise capital independently. “She saw it as a real opportunity for me to, like, learn and fail,” she said. The duo secured $100,000 from Soma Capital and a $250,000 Stanford grant, eventually landing $500,000 in venture backing from angel investors. They now have a network of powerful female mentors.
Today Phia employs four full-time engineers, an operations manager and a designer, all of whom have equity in the company. Revenues come from affiliate links, and one of their proudest features is a price graph that instantly shows users whether the cost of an item is fair, high or low and whether it will retain its value on the secondary market.
Even Phoebe was surprised by how useful it became amid global pricing uncertainty.
