NEW YORK: 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 startup. 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 Phoebe Gates’ 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 realised that people are always going to have thoughts about me,” 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 Kianni were not sleeping much.

“If the business is successful, people will say, ‘It’s because of her family’,” Gates said. “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 internalised pressure.”

She knows people will assume her name is how she and Kianni got access to the venture capital firm that is backing them, and met their angel investors and mentors like Kris Jenner, the Kardashian momager; Sara Blakely of Spanx; and Joanne Bradford, the former president of Honey. Why Alex Cooper agreed to sign them to her nascent podcast company to make their own podcast, “The Burnouts With Phoebe and Sophia”, about being 20-something entrepreneurs and BFFs.

But this is her answer: “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.”

OK, maybe not exactly like her. But close enough.

From Shein to secondhand Chanel

Gates, who is named after Phoebe from The Catcher In The Rye, grew up in Seattle, the youngest of three. Her older sister is a paediatric resident, and her brother works for a Congressional 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, she has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. She talks at about 1.5 speed, and her feet have a tendency to jiggle up and down when she sits. She was raised, like her brother and sister, to be engaged with philanthropy rather than with Microsoft (her father retired from the company when she was six to focus on the Gates Foundation) and to do her own thing. Unlike the rest of her family, she is an extrovert.

She is the child “the most different than I am”, Bill Gates said, “because she’s so good with people. 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.”

She is also the one who loves 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 organised according to colour.

“I used to dress so badly,” Phoebe 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 jewellery 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’.”

Gradually, as she started dressing nicer, she discovered things secondhand. “Like, I found a pair of Prada pants for US$200 (RM874) on the RealReal, and I would wear them every single day,” she said. Now she buys most of her clothes via resale, and her brother asks her advice on his outfits. Every Sunday, she creates her looks for the week and hangs them on a clothing rail so she does not have to think about them in the morning. She loves pink.

Her bedroom at home is pale pink. Over her bureau is a painting of a pink cassette tape that she bought in a market for about US$20 (RM87). Her boyfriend hates it, she said. She has been dating Arthur Donald, Paul McCartney’s grandson, for almost two years. They met when she and Kianni did a collaboration with Stella McCartney, his aunt. He lives in California and tries to come to New York for weekends. When he visits, she said, he takes the painting off the wall. They are looking for something to replace it.

She is very online: She has almost 500,000 Instagram followers, to whom she posts photos of her activism and black-tie awards nights with Donald, like the Albie Awards of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, and about 242,000 TikTok followers. One of her most popular TikToks involved a bubble tea showdown with her father. They have an ongoing argument about texting. He likes email; she does not. (Now he texts her when he has sent her an email.)

They share, however, an appetite for what he calls “risk.”

Rewriting the Stanford narrative

The idea for Phia, a portmanteau of Phoebe and Sophia, started with Gates (who once thought she might go into women’s health, the focus of her philanthropy) and Kianni (who wanted to be an environmental lawyer) trying to come up with a pitch to get into an entrepreneurship class.

First, they thought of a Bluetooth-smart tampon that would know what was going on with your hormones, iron level and so on. They considered making “the Gen Z version of LinkedIn”. Then, they thought about what so many women who started their own fashion labels had thought about: their own experience.

Gates remembered seeing an Area dress she had bought for US$500 (RM2,187) reselling for US$150 (RM656) on the RealReal and feeling, she said, “so foolish”. Kianni, who is Iranian American, grew up in Washington, D.C. and started a climate change organisation, Climate Cardinals, when she was in high school (it translates climate resources into 100 languages); she was already a dedicated resale shopper.

They thought there had to be others like them – you know, 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’,” 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 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,” Bill Gates said. (Last month, he told Raj Shamani on a podcast that he gave his children “less than 1%” 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 Phoebe Gates used him for advice, mostly on personnel issues.

“When it comes to shopping, I’m not exactly the target audience,” Bill 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,” Phoebe Gates said. She and Kianni started with US$100,000 (RM437,400) from Soma Capital and a Stanford grant of US$250,000 (RM1.09mil) from a social entrepreneurship programme. After a lot of rejections, they finally secured venture backing, including another US$500,000 (RM2.18mil) 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 colour palette, for example, or a different size.)

Gates and 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 Gates could not have anticipated just how good that information, coming amid worldwide tariff-pricing confusion, might look. – ©2025 The New York Times Company

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.