Melinda French Gates had the money and the network to make fundraising considerably easier for her daughter, Phoebe Gates. She chose not to use either.

When Phoebe began raising capital for her fashion-tech startup, her mother deliberately stayed out of the process. French Gates said she neither invested her own money nor used her contacts to help secure funding, because she wanted the business to convince investors on its own merits.

“She got capitalized not because of my contacts, not because of me. I wouldn’t put money into it,” French Gates said while discussing the decision.

Her reasoning went beyond simply encouraging independence. French Gates wanted her daughter to experience fundraising as founders normally do, including the possibility that investors might say no.

“If this is a real business,” she said, other investors should be willing to back it.

“That’s what I told her,” French Gates added. “She’s growing from this.”

The decision offers a revealing look at how Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates have approached the advantages available to their children. Bill Gates has previously said that his children would inherit less than 1% of his fortune, arguing that an extremely large inheritance would not necessarily help them and that they should establish their own paths.

For Melinda French Gates, that principle played out in a more immediate way when Phoebe entered the startup world.

Phoebe Gates built Phia with Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni

Phoebe Gates, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates’ youngest daughter, co-founded fashion-tech company Phia with her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni.

Phia is designed as a shopping platform that compares clothing prices across more than 40,000 websites, helping users search for deals.

Phoebe had already encountered limits from her parents before reaching the fundraising stage. In April 2025, when she was 22, she said her parents had not allowed her to leave Stanford to pursue a startup full time, despite her father having taken a different path when building Microsoft.

Once the business moved into fundraising, her mother again resisted clearing the way for her.

French Gates said she wanted Phoebe to go through the process herself rather than secure backing through family wealth or connections. The point was not simply whether money could be raised, but whether independent investors believed the company was worth funding.

Why Melinda French Gates wanted her daughter to face rejection

French Gates connected the experience to a wider problem she sees for women trying to build companies.

“It is very, very hard to get your business funded if you’re a woman,” she said. “And so you do have to learn a bit how to have the courage to play the game and to stick with it.”

That made the possibility of rejection part of the experience she did not want to remove for her daughter.

French Gates has also spoken about resilience through her YouTube series, Moments That Make Us. Reflecting on successful women featured in the series, she said difficult experiences had forced many of them to develop resilience.

“I saw that going through something difficult changed all of them, and that they had to learn to find resilience somewhere,” she said. “And in finding that resilience, they found themselves.”

In Phoebe’s case, French Gates’ approach meant drawing a clear boundary between being able to help and choosing to intervene. She could have provided capital or introductions. Instead, she wanted the company to face the same fundamental question that confronts other startups seeking money: would outside investors choose to back the business?

That decision also gives practical meaning to the Gates family’s publicly stated approach to inherited advantage. Bill Gates has discussed limiting the wealth passed to his children in the future. Melinda French Gates, meanwhile, applied a similar principle while her daughter was trying to build a company in the present.

For Phoebe, the result was a fundraising process in which her family name may have been impossible to separate from who she was, but her mother says the investment itself did not come through her money or contacts.

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