Billionaire Melinda Gates Won’t Fund Daughter Phoebe’s Startup – Here’s Why

You’d think having a mum worth $31 billion might be your golden ticket to startup success. But when your mum is Melinda French Gates, one of the world’s most influential philanthropists, that door stays very firmly closed.

Speaking at the Power of Women’s Sports Summit, Melinda revealed that she’s not bankrolling her daughter’s latest venture – and that’s very much on purpose. “I have a daughter who just started a business this year,” she said. “She got capitalized not because of my contacts, not because of me. I wouldn’t put money into it.”

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Melinda French Gates & Phoebe Gates. Image @melindafrenchgates via IG

She didn’t name names, but all signs point to 22-year-old Phoebe Gates, who recently launched Phia – an AI-powered fashion app built with her Stanford roommate, Sophia Kianni. According to Fortune, the app compares clothing prices across 40,000 websites to help users find the best deal. Think of it as your Gen Z answer to Google Shopping, but cuter and way more data-savvy.

Melinda’s decision isn’t about being cold-hearted. It’s about teaching Phoebe to survive in the wild world of tech – one that’s still heavily stacked against women. “It is very, very hard to get your business funded if you’re a woman,” Melinda said. “And so you do have to learn a bit how to have the courage to play the game and to stick with it.”

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Kris Jenner is an investor and advisor for Phia. Image @phiaco via IG

And yes, that includes learning how to handle rejection like a pro. “That’s what I told her,” Melinda added. “She’s growing from this.”

Melinda also shared the no-nonsense advice she gave Phoebe when potential investors questioned whether motherhood might derail her career plans. Her response? “Get up or get out the game.” A mic drop moment, if there ever was one.

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Image @phoebegates via IG

The Gates parenting strategy has always been tough love meets tech-world reality. Bill Gates has famously said that their children will inherit “less than 1%” of his fortune, preferring that they earn their own way. He also wasn’t exactly thrilled when Phoebe wanted to drop out of college to launch a business – despite having done the very same thing when he left Harvard to start Microsoft.

Phoebe, for her part, gets it. “We don’t want this to be something that’s funded by my family – we want this to be a real company,” she told The New York Post earlier this year. “That’s really important for us … while I have a ton of privilege coming from my family, it’s about having a product that stands on its own.”

Spoiler: she’s standing. And so is Phia.