New York – On the top floor of a building near the Union Square in New York, there is a small office with white walls, full of 20 -and -native youth eating Cinnamon Crunch and Jelly. A white frame with a countdown calendar is marked in red. In a nearby shelf, a Roman plaster bust has a pink balloon attached to the mouth, like a gum bubble about to burst. Outside the door, a small plate reads “Phia”, the name of a new e-commerce tool designed by two newly graduated Stanford students in your dormitory.
A basic startup. Except for a detail: the gates factor.
See, Phia, a browser/app that was released on April 24, aims to be Booking.com of fashion, offering an instant price comparison of thousands of e-commerce sites for any new or used item that can draw your attention. It is a creation not only from any newly graduated Stanford, but Phoebe Gates, 22, Bill Gates’s youngest daughter and his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, and her former roommate, Sophia Kianni, 23.
It’s complicated enough to start a business like a young woman. But starting a business -related business as a young woman who shares a surname with – and the 13th richest person in the world – with all the prejudice and expectations it implies, is a proposal difficult.
“Growing up, I realized that people would always have opinions about me,” Gates recently said. She was walking quickly through a grocery store of organic products, going from her office to her apartment. It was 14 days to go, and she and Kianni were not sleeping much.
“If the business is successful, people will say, ‘It’s because of her family,” Gates said. “And most of it is true. I would never have been able to go to Stanford, or have such an amazing childhood, or feel the motivation to do something if it wasn’t for my parents. But I also feel a huge internal pressure.”
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She knows that people will assume that her last name is how she and Kianni got access to the venture capital who is supporting them and met their investors and mentors, such as Kris Jenner, the mother of the Kardashian; Sara Blakely, from the Spanx modeling company; and Joanne Bradford, the former president of Fintech Honey. And also why the famous Alex Cooper podcasting has agreed to hire them for his newly created company to create his own podcast, “The Burnouts With Phoebe and Sophia” about being an early 20-year-old entrepreneurs and best friends.
But that’s her answer: “We are roommates who talk about clothes. We are the girls who are scouring shopping sites for offerings. And honestly, there are thousands of other young people like us.”
Okay, maybe not exactly like her. But almost that.
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From Shein to Second Hand Chanel
Gates, who was named Phoebe because of the character in the book “The Cattle Country”, grew up in Seattle, being the youngest of three brothers. His older sister residence in Pediatrics, and his brother works for a Congress committee.
During high school, she spent most of her summers in Rwanda. She is extremely competitive, like most of her family, and, like her father, has attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. She speaks at a speed of about 1.5, and her feet tend to swing up and down when she is sitting. She was created, like her brother and sister, to get involved with philanthropy instead of Microsoft (her father retired from the company when she was 6 years old to focus on the Gates Foundation) and to make her own choices. Unlike the rest of the family, it is outgoing.
She is the daughter “most different from me,” said Bill Gates, “because she’s so good with people. When we went on a family vacation, we always found a corner of the beach to be alone, and Phoebe went to the beach, knew people and brought them back to introduce us.”
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She is also the one who loves fashion.
She lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Loft-style, with two Ragdoll cats, an open-plan/dining area, 6 meter ceiling and a Walk-In closet organized by color.
“I used to dress so bad,” said Phoebe Gates. She was using ankle boots Chanel’s vintage, a Reform dress, a Nili Botan blazer bought on the Poshmark website (she is a fan of blazers) and some Tiffany jewelry that bought on the Realreal platform. When she arrived at college, she says, “I used to dress with Forever 21 and Shein things. Sophia saw me and said, ‘Oh girl, no.’
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Gradually, as he began to dress better, he discovered second -hand articles. “For example, I found a Praza Pants for $ 200 at Realreal and used it every day,” she said. Now buy most of your clothes through resellers, and your brother asks for advice on your clothes. Every Sunday, she creates her looks for the week and hangs them in a hanger so as not to think about them in the morning. She loves pink.
Your room at home is light pink. About his dresser, there is a painting of a pink cassette tape that bought in a market for about $ 20. Your boyfriend hates, she said. She is dating Arthur Donald, grandson of Paul McCartney, almost two years ago. They met when she and Kianni made a collaboration with Stella McCartney, his aunt. He lives in California and tries to come to New York on weekends. When she visits, she said, he takes the painting from the wall. They are looking for something to replace it.
She is very active online: she has almost 500,000 followers on Instagram, where she posts photos of her activism and gala awards along Donald, such as Clooney Foundation for Justice’s Albie Awards, and about 242,000 followers at Tiktok. One of his most popular tiktoks involved a “Bubble Tea duel” with his father. They have an endless debate about text messages. He prefers email; she doesn’t. (Now he sends text messages when he sends an email to her.)
However, they share an appetite for what he calls “risk.”
Rewriting Stanford’s narrative
The idea for Phia, an agglutination of “Phoebe” with “Sophia”, began with Gates (who once thought of pursuing a career in female health, the focus of his philanthropy) and Kianni (who wanted to be an environmental lawyer) trying to make a proposal to present in an entrepreneurship class.
First, they thought of an intelligent tampon with Bluetooth who would know what was happening to his hormones, iron levels, and so on. They considered to do “the gen z version of LinkedIn”. Then they thought about what so many women who started their own fashion brands had considered: their own experience.
Gates remembered having seen an area dress that bought for $ 500 being resold for $ 150 in Realreal and felt, she said, “so stupid.” Kianni, who is Iranian-American, grew up in Washington, DC, and founded a climate change organization, Climate Cardinals, while in high school (she translates climatic processes for 100 languages); She was already a dedicated consumer of resellers.
They have thought there should be others like them – you know, said Gates, “intelligent girls, 25 to 30, who want to buy as a genius and get the best price in one click.” They were so excited about the idea they wanted to give up college and start immediately, but their mothers intervened.
“Both said, ‘Yes, it won’t happen,” Gates said. Even so, she graduated in three years instead of four so they could move to New York, “where fashion is,” and start.
When she told her father that she and Kianni wanted to enter the e-commerce world, his reaction, he said, was, “Wow, many people tried, and there are some big names there.” He was worried that she could ask for money.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, she’ll come to ask for money,” said Bill Gates. (Last month, he told Raj Shamani in a podcast he gave his children “less than 1%” of their total wealth because they wanted them to make their own way, although it still means that each of them will still be a multimillionaire.)
He would probably have helped finance Phia, he said. “And then I would have kept her under control and done business revisions, which I would have found complicated, and would probably have been overly kind, but wondering if it was the right thing to do? Fortunately, it never happened.” Instead, Phoebe Gates used it as a counselor, especially in personnel issues.
“When it comes to shopping, I’m not exactly the target audience,” said Bill Gates.
Her mother, whom she calls “pillar,” she told her that she needed to raise capital alone. “She saw this as a real opportunity for me to learn and fail,” said Phoebe Gates. She and Kianni started with $ 100,000 from the capital sum and a concession of $ 250,000 from Stanford from a social entrepreneurship program. After many rejections, they finally got risk capital support, including another $ 500,000 of angel investors. And they have a network of powerful 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 employees have a shareholding participation. The recipe will come from affiliate links. (There are 40,000 new and resale websites linked to the Phia platform, which shows not only correspondence but also similar items – in a color palette from a previous season, for example, or in a different size.)
Gates and Kianni are particularly proud of their price chart: a simple meter that appears when you are looking at a skirt, for example, or a bag or even a pair of earrings, to instantly inform whether the cost is tight, tall or low, and if the part will keep its value in the secondary market.
Even someone like Gates could not have predicted how good this information, arising from the worldwide confusion about tariffs, might seem.
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