Phoebe Gates built her startup on an elite Stanford network and now faces fraud allegations that threaten to unravel it, according to Fortune. Bill Gates's daughter, who studied human biology at Stanford, credits an unofficial and referral only class called So You Think You Can Rule the World with reshaping her career path. The 10 week winter course, taught by professor Justin Lewis-Weber and capped at 12 students, is built less like a graded class and more like an elite networking group, covering topics such as prisoner's dilemmas and multipolar traps alongside readings from Peter Thiel and Paul Graham.
Gates has said Stanford completely changed her life path because of the people she met and the connections she made there, and she leaned on that network directly, using it to help recruit early employees for her company. In 2025 she and her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni founded Phia, an AI powered shopping app based in New York's Union Square. The startup raised $8 million in seed funding from backers including Kris Jenner and Hailey Bieber, then followed with a $35 million Series A that pushed its valuation to $185 million.
That momentum has since collided with a fraud allegation. Bloomberg reported that Phia engaged in cookie stuffing, a practice of tracking affiliate sales through unauthorized means without user consent, a violation of Google Chrome's policies that in serious cases can carry criminal exposure. Internal Slack messages from December, months before the company publicly acknowledged the issue in July, show both founders were aware of the practice. Kianni wrote that keeping the cookies dropping would be amazing, while Gates asked whether the auto pop for cookie drop was live on all sites.
Fortune frames the episode as a cautionary tale about privilege, ambition, and how quickly an elite network and a well funded startup can be overshadowed by allegations of cutting ethical corners, with Phia's next steps likely to hinge on how regulators and Google itself respond to the cookie stuffing claims.