Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name': 'I have a chip on my shoulder' | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/phoebe-gates-startup-phia-succeed-without-help-parents-bill-gates-melinda-french-gates/Open linkView original on feddit.org401
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Relevant:
"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
What an awesome comparison.
Yeah that is real nail on the head stuff. The poverty trap is real. I really believe everyone should be poor once in their life for at least a year with no end in sight because many / most who haven't experienced it don't have the empathetic capacity to imagine it.
Having the bottom fall out really changes your perspective. Folks need to have empathy and I have a strong sensation that those well off don't realize that most of us are a few missed paychecks or a medical emergency away from being destitute.
A coworker of mine left to start his own startup. He claimed that the IPO of an old employer gave him a little bit of cushion to work with, and he was going to take his shot. I wished him well. It was a crazy dumb app idea. But you never know.
I do remember thinking “gee and he just had a baby too, what a time to take a risk.” I later learned that he had married old money. The second he had a kid with her, he couldn’t lose.
In addition to the multiple throws, and in addition to the direct nepotistic help, there is also just the osmosis effect. How many people would give their right arm to get basic mentoring from Bill Gates? Just knowing someone who’s succeeded at something gives you a massive cultural window into that thing and how to nail it. This kid is delusional. If she wants to do something totally on her own she should be a movie director or race car driver or flower arranger. What’s that? Starting up a tech company? Ohh… how original.
Relevant
Something does not compute, in a Microslop sort of way.
I asked copilot and it assured me this is all above board.
I appreciate the sentiment, but it would be delusional to think her ability to "win over private equity" was divorced at all from her father's legacy and last name. And actually, I'm not sure I appreciate the sentiment. In 2026, merit is way down the list, like scrawled sideways in the margins, of things that matter to private equity.
It's certainly delusional. I've been active in the innovation space for ~25 years, and for most normal people it's taking a massive risk. Here, she's not ending-up on the street if the venture flops, so the risk is low.
So merit my ass, it's easy to take a risk if it's not real risk, i.e. I agree and don't appreciate the sentiment.
Real question: what on earth does "on the street" mean in the tech startup world? Because I have a strong suspicion that "on the street" means just going to work a normal job like 300 million other people even despite personal anecdotes of one or two people who literally became homeless.
like shot in the head and scrawled sideways in the margins
FTFY.
Wonder how much of her funding came from people who rape kids with her dad...
If she thinks she's doing anything that her name doesn't benefit, she's fucking stupider than most AI ceos and that's saying a lot.
Maybe even stupid enough to not know the reason her dad's company took off is her grandparents worked for Xerox and just gave him a bunch of IP including the first computer mouse and a shit ton of money.
The Gates family is a nepo family, they're just all too stupid to understand and legitimately think they have the same opportunities as anyone else.
Think of how stupid the average AI CEO is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Please no. My crushing despair at the state of the world meds for ignore at least one thing
If you ever listen to Behind the Bastards, then you’ll notice a pattern of emotional stunting in the growth of billionaires. The kids that have the money straight away, not the ones that really do make it themselves wherever they are.
Exemplar: Elon.
Though the imagery that sticks out in my mind is one of Zuckerberg playing mall ninja in his original office space, as the boss, walking around with a samurai sword and fake swiping at employees with it.
None of them make it themselves...
But they act like spoiled kids because that's how everyone treats them, because at that level of wealth the only people you're around will say whatever gets you to give them money.
It doesn't take long before they forget how to be a normal human
People who talk to you like an AI bot. Maybe that’s why the AI talks that way. It’s all they know.
Never thought of that, but yeah...
Especially for Elon, it's not just people in person, he bought twitter just to have his own echo chamber
When grok constantly glazes him, that's what he thinks a normal person acts like. If it acts like a human would, Elmo can't recognize it.
Is this the same entitled bitch who got a $1,000,000 ranch as a present?
Maybe pay some fucking taxes, Phoebe.
To quote Pearl Jam:
Born on third,
Thinks (s)he got a triple.
But you have no problem with the $35 million they gave you? That's part of your privilege. You say you want to succeed without it while stuffing your pockets with it.
shes basically like the rich people that think they are independant and living on thier own, but thier parents give them a credit card to do pay whatever she wants on her own,.
If she really wants to show the world how good she is, and non-privileged, she can change her name, get into community college while working a minimum wage job, and then start a multimillion dollar business on her own from her savings, without getting carried through life by her father.
She just wants to be treated like any other totally unqualified person whose mom gave her commencement speed and got handed 100 million dollars to start up a made up company.
That then told everyone about her company, that she doesn't want any privilege in promoting, to her many followers.
She's going to be another super villain in ten years isn't she
I hope in 10 years we find out shes secretly a cyborg and meant that litterally, the prototype chip is on (in) her shoulder.
Yes, but she will have really earned it unlike the other trust fund super villains.
An "AI shopping company". Yes, that´s just what the world needs.
I can't even decide what would be worse: AI-based shopping of general stuff, or shopping for AIs.
I think there is a huge market for an AI agent that will shop for the best deals for you. They could check for coupons, discount codes, etc...
And then the AI will just make up the discounts and coupon codes. What you really want is a simple, tuned search engine, like we've had for 30 years. Not generated content.
There are already browser extensions that do this.
They are notorious for intercepting connections, adding their own referral links, tracking users and other badness.
https://www.theverge.com/24343913/paypal-honey-megalag-coupon-scam-affiliate-fees
Surely the AI version will be better…. ..
In the two days before it gets undermined by entrenched interests, yeah could be neat.
Please tell me this is a satirical nod towards Honey & Co.
To be fair to whoever she is, it must have been impossible for them to not to have grown up completely bonkers out of touch. Not without some serious awesome parenting.
Which is why she did not.
They have no frame of reference whatsoever.
They’re out of their element! They’re like a child that wanders into the middle of a movie . . .
Raised in a bubble she can't see.
I have no doubt she's at least as horrible as we all imagine.
"Child of prominent pedophile has an AI startup" is such a vibe right now.
Well I guess as long as she has a 'chip' on her shoulder
FUCK yeah F+G. Rarely seen in the wild.
Lightning in a bottle, that cast.
Well, most of that cast.
The featured article under this is titled
hilarious stuff
What, those aren’t the kind of high powered names you expect to be seeing on Shark Tank one day?
I don’t think a coupon tool that wastes excessive resources is either empowering or sustainable.
I'd be surprised if there's actual AI behind it. That functionality already exists and works just fine.
it's a small indian man named Al.
I’d be surprised if a human were behind it. This is exactly the kind of thing that can be vibe coded pretty fast and is mostly just reselling fancy Google searches through an LLM. I did a quick skim of the website and it’s just a bunch of items scraped from big brands with lots of similar looking images of other products. There’s too many sites for me to really believe they’ve made integrations with all of them.
The insane valuation is because of her name not because the tech is good. The only way to make money on this is the customer data. The margin on that is going to be fucking minuscule especially once LLM costs start going up so they can make money. This adds nothing of value on top so it will go away almost immediately.
Oh, I didn't say a human, I just meant a standard non-AI algorithm
Ohhhhhh yeah this is just 100% LLM garbage. No machine learning. Forgive me; I don’t often talk to people that understand the difference so my default is human vs LLM not LLM vs <insert something AI that isn’t LLM>. Trying to explain machine learning vs LLM summaries to data company business executives wears you down.
Edit: also my frame of mind was on the more recent Waymo “our AI just goes to a human when it’s hard” news that followed the Amazon “it was always a Mechanical Turk” news which is why I jumped to human.
I'd be concerned about monied motives driving suggestions. Even if it starts out neutral, how can we as consumers be sure it won't become corrupted? Enshittification is par for the course these days, I'd be extremely wary about relying on an app to tell me real, unbiased price info unless its mechanisms and sources are (and remain) completely transparent.
With what money did she start the business then? Get the F out of here with that crap. Also, so original, going into AI like everyone else.
And the "connections" which is just fancy-speak for "rich friends."
Same way daddy did it
Reading this, I was reminded of how Nicolas Cage is part of the Coppola family but changed his name, I was told, so that he could “make it on his own.”
I looked that up and it turns out to be a complete lie. He actually changed his name to conceal the fact that he was not making it on his own.
EDIT to clarify if this was confusing: he was given roles by his uncle Francis Ford Coppola. This is nepotism aka “not making it on his own,” but with special help from family. To conceal the nepotism, his name was changed.
From Wikipedia:
how does changing his famous last name conceal that he was not making it on his own? what?
He was given roles in his uncles film because he was his nephew. The name change just swept this under the rug. He wanted to get the roles but not let anyone know he got them through favoritism.
this comment makes sense, but your original comment said something else that was genuinely confusing.
I guess it could be interpreted ways other than I intended, but since I know how it was intended, it’s kind of hard for my brain to successfully see how.
somehow it seemed like you were saying that he was trying to hide that he was failing at making it on his own, which is confusing in a couple directions. anwyay sorry for taking up your time. i meant well and wish you the best. :)
But his latter movies are awesome and I love him, so I'll let it slide.
Yeah I like him too. The only asterisk on that is that I guess I might like some other actor better who didn’t have a family “in”
"To avoid the appearance of nepotism" sounds exactly like making it his own. You seem to have misunderstood. Are you an LLM?
The appearance of nepotism.
Nicholas Coppola got cast by his uncle, when any random 15 year old aspiring actor would never stand a chance.
He then changes his name so that other people in Hollywood will (hopefully) not say “oh he got that part because he’s Coppola’s nephew,” even if he absolutely got that job because he’s Coppola’s nephew.
I'm not disputing that he got his first few roles due to his connections, but changing his name absolutely would have distanced him from his relatives in other directors' eyes.
Nah, everyone in the industry would know about this. But random people on the street wouldn't. And that's what it's about when you want to be famous.
No it wouldn't/didn't, but it would/did to the masses.
You have misunderstood. He was in fact the beneficiary of nepotism: staring in his uncle’s films. But to keep this a secret, he changed his name. He was hiding the nepotism, not trying to avoid nepotism.
Walk a little more softly. You came off as confidently wrong there.
ive seen quite a few actors recently try to do this or trying to downplay thier nepotism.
I miss when actors used to be some random boxer a director met in a Cuban bar or the drunk tank, instead of the executive producer's nibling or some fucking baronet.
I mean nepotism is hardly a new problem :)
True lol, it's never not been, it's hardwired into humans, but it was nice when certain industries were new and there wasn't so much buildup for the enthrenchment
Yes I think when an industry is new is about the only time that existing power structures don’t dominate, albeit briefly. I saw this up close with the advent of the WWW. In the early days, coding HTML was like working magic, and there were no established players who had a lock on how to do it better than what any enterprising young person could teach themselves through tinkering.
This is fucking worse than monarchy.
Well you don't get to have that. Possible access to your father is enough for you to get priveleges.
Pay your taxes or shut up.
Phoebe Cates>>>>>Phoebe Gates
Yep. That's exactly who I thought. Then I saw the picture and thought, "wow she hasn't aged a bit!"
She will ALWAYS have help lol
you arnt independtly wealthy, if you have a "credit card" from your wealthy family and you are living on your own. same goes for CV/RESUME.
well, there's a website I'm never going back to. that layout is just offensive. and this is after after dismissing the cookies popup
Homie do you rawdog the internet without an adblocker??
I haven't set up a browser adblocker on that computer, as I've never really found the need. pihole usually takes care of everything well enough
"Wow, what does your startup do?"
"It synthesizes mining crypto by capturing efforts from Microsoft users trying to uninstall bloatware in Windows 11"
They're just insane, the whole lot of them.
Phoebe Cates has an AI startup??
two of em. and they’re spectacular.
If she wanted to do this she'd change her name and disavow her inheritence.
The only thing she wants is for us to be talking about it, and well here you all are ...
Stephen King's child at least doesn't write under the name "King" to avoid nepotism. I can't read the actual paid article because just going off headlines is apparently OK here, but it doesn't seem like she's trying.
Her chip on her shoulder is a tiny one she blows out of proportion, like so many "problems" of the uber-wealthy.
The first time I had a friend reccomend him, I gave them a funny look, thinking they were talking about Joe Hill the musician and labor organizer XD
Edit: I'm sick of people mentioning musicians without songs; here's Preacher and the Slave, from which we get the term "Pie in the Sky".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RHyGpFncovU
Performed by the late Utah Phillips, as Joe Hill was executed a good 110 years ago.
There’s a great ballad of Joe Hill by Phil Ochs.
Well, she chose AI, so she's already failed !
Good job. It won't succeed thanks to your privilege, because it won't succeed at all !
"I got the VC money, not my problem anymore!"
Who is this bozo?
gates is her father apparently.
That's actually a neat premise. Fashion isn't my cup of tea, but otherwise that sounds useful (albeit not very unique; shopping assistants are a dime a dozen).
So it’s a price checker extension. That scrapes other websites for better deals.
I feel like this is just a plug piece to spotlight her product tbh.
What's crazier is people thinking it's a good enough idea to get $185,000,000 in funding for someone who just graduated college...
Like, it already exists, there's a bunch of those already.
She slapped "AI" on the front of it but because her name is Gates people won't stop throwing money at it. If she doesn't understand her name is why she's getting funding, that just means she's both ignorant and naive and this is an even worse investment and product than it seems on the surface.
I’m sure the Gates named helped, but AI anything has venture capitalists punching the Fry meme. It feels very similar to the dot com era bubble in a macro sense, except without a large number jobs being created.
If a random 23 year old can just take any type of plugin that's been around 20+ years, slap AI in front of it...
And raises $185,000,000...
Why exactly do you think they're not all doing it?
Thats a rhetorical question by the way, the rest of them aren't doing it because their last name isn't Gates so it wouldn't work
They just slap the word AI on it so investors pp's become the big pp.
My little brother works for a supply company, and one of the companies they supply has a new 'AI' tool where folks type in the thing they want and it pulls from other companies to find the lowest price, then color codes it and shit. The supply companies have to put their prices in a database for the 'AI'. All I could think hearing about it is that some C level got absolutely fucking bamboozled.
That’s all they’re for. The last time I heard any executive actually make a good decision - or even anything in the neighborhood of a good decision - was . . . Ummmm. Well, I’m sure it was sometime this century. ? Maybe.
There are a million of these out there. Most of them suck. Many are, at best, ethically gray. Even the better ones spy on you in a hundred different ways.
I'd love something that actually didn't suck, but "185 million dollar AI startup" doesn't sound promising to me.
The big problem with the concept is that there's money to be made by gaming the system and nobody is good at that cat and mouse game. AI could theoretically help, but let's be real: it's just going to scrape the same 100 identical Amazon referral listicles you'd get in a Google search, with an extra sprinkling of ads.
Yup. Price comparison extensions have been around for decades already.
Shareholders will expect their 185 million to turn into more. Someone will have to pay for this “more.” The business model will therefore boil down to either selling user data or companies paying to be given preferential treatment by the system. Probably both.
Furthermore, such services do not create any added value for the economy because, like advertising, they merely ensure that money is spent at B instead of at A. They are not productive and can be used much more efficiently by the bigger players.
We already know how things like that can be monetized - just look at the Honey scandal. You rip off both users and business customers... But this time with AI.
What a novel idea, Phoebe. Such Innovation, much wow!
Honey didn't just rip off business customers. It ripped off unrelated businesses too.
Guaranteed it’s going down the route of:
“Want your store at the top. We can make that happen” nudge, nudge
But it feels so damned blatant for the grift that it is. The “It’s not about my name” is very blinkered view to take.
That’s not right economically. If you were going to spend $200 at store B and now spend $150 at store A, that’s an efficiency of $50. You’re saying that looking for deals isn’t a market benefit, and it absolutely is. Now, their cut of it is of no benefit, and fuck AI. But the service is productive.
But then the seller is missing out on those $50, which they can't spend anywhere else. From an macroeconomic perspective, the effect is zero. Like advertising, it only serves to allocate resources, not to create value. What's more, it's mainly large companies that benefit from something like this. Firstly, because of scale effects, and secondly, because they can sustain price dumping for longer than smaller companies.
The same applies to deals. You only benefit from them because someone else is disadvantaged. Unless, of course, you assume that companies have something to give away out of kindness. And, of course, you yourself have been someone who has given someone else an advantage at your own disadvantage. You paid more so that someone else could pay less. The macroeconomic effect was zero because no value was created.
Oh, I 100% agree. I test installed the app, and it seems to be some of both (behavior tracking with a Safari extension, and store sponsorship).
That being said, I hate store monocultures even more, like how Amazon/Walmart can bully their suppliers through sheer critical mass and shoppers don’t even look anywhere else. That’s economic inefficiency. Price aggregators are a good thing.
Ah yes, I remember a browser extension about finding coupon codes for the sites you're on that absolutely didn't end up being disgusting shit. 🤣
Anyone here old enough to remember froogle?
Ehhhh. Bah! I’m gonna take a nap.
Where does the AI come into the picture though?
Well if AI doesn't have to be artificial intelligence, I guess it doesn't matter
The forever accurate red flag!
ah yes stanford, along with other well known UNIVERSITIES, that produces elitists graduates, she says she doesnt want to be "Associated with having a famous parents that paid for everything, including her AI company.
"I have a chip on my shoulder" nice.
It's called a smug look. XD
So, I was thinking about the Russian aristocracy today…
Careful. You're about to get called a Tankie
Baby, I’m an anarchist.
Gates isn't the only one with a chip on their shoulder, people generally don't get called "Tankies" just for criticizing crony capitalism
Still... Fuck AI.
Okay, well I definitely wondered what the hell the star of Gremlins and Drop Dead Fred was getting up to.
Did she go to the island? That's my question.