The Future Is Vintage

The 23-year-old entrepreneur Phoebe Gates wants to make you a smarter (and more sustainable) shopper.

- BY JULIANA UKIOMOGBE PHOTOGRAPHED BY CELESTE SLOMAN

Blazer, top, ISABEL MARANT. Turtleneck, LORO PIANA. Bracelet, rings, TIFFANY & CO.

While a student at Stanford University, Phoebe Gates told her parents, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, that she had a startup idea.

“They were like, ‘Okay, you can do this as a side thing, but you need to stay in school.’ I don't think people would expect that from my family, to be honest,” she says. (After all, her father famously dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to cofound Microsoft.)

Gates took their advice, but moved to New York during her junior year, enrolling in Stanford’s night school in the city. After graduating in 2024 with a degree in human biology, she began devoting all her time to her startup, the Al shopping tool Phia, which launched this April.

“We want it to be your shopping assistant,” the 23-year-old says from her sunlit office near Manhattan's Union Square. She's surrounded by touches of pink, her favorite color. Phia matchbooks sit on her desk. Her dark hair is pulled back, and she's wearing gold Tiffany earrings and a cozy navy-and-white knit top. Gates has the bearing of any recent college grad, but she’s a social media powerhouse, boasting over half a million followers on Instagram and 270K on TikTok, and she’s leveraged that audience into a budding enterprise.