- Phoebe Gates, youngest daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates, co-founded her own business.
- Bill Gates said she 'luckily' didn't ask for funding to get Phia, an e-commerce tool, off the ground.
- The Gateses had previously told her that dropping out to start a company wasn't an option.
Phoebe Gates, the youngest of Bill and Melinda Gates's children, has made her own entry into the business world.
Her billionaire father is glad he didn't have to fund it.
"I thought, 'Oh boy, she's going to come and ask,'" Gates told The New York Times in an interview published Thursday.
Gates would've backed his daughter's business, but his help would've come with strings — and that would have made things complicated, he said.
"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," he said.
Phia, which launched April 24, offers price comparisons for clothing across 40,000 linked sites, aiming to bring users the best deals.
On an episode earlier this year of "The Burnouts," the podcast Phoebe Gates hosts with her former roommate and current cofounder Sofia Kianni, Gates said her father was apprehensive about her starting a business.
And Phoebe dropping out of college — like Bill did when he founded Microsoft — was totally out of the question.
"I literally never hear my dad talk about the start of Microsoft," Gates said. "I literally mostly just remember him talking about the foundation. I remember me wanting to start the company and him being like, 'Are you sure you want to do this?'"
Gates graduated from Stanford in 2024 with a degree in human biology, having completed her education in just three years.
"They were very much like, 'You need to finish your degree; you don't just get to like, drop out and do a company.' Which is so funny because my dad literally did that, and that's, like, the reason I'm able to go to Stanford or have my tuition paid," Gates said.
Gates felt like a "nepo baby" in her freshman year, she said at the time. And though her father has previously said he plans on allowing his kids to inherit only 1% of his total wealth — that still amounts to millions each.
"If the business is successful, people will say, 'It's because of her family,'" Gates told The New York Times. "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."
So far, Gates and Kianni have secured over half a million dollars in funding — some from a VC firm, some from angel investors, according to The Times.
Gates said her business venture is tapping a huge market.
"We're roommates fighting about clothing," Gates told the New York Times. "We are the girls who are scouring shopping sites for deals. And there are, frankly, thousands of other young women like us."
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