How Bill Gates and Melinda Gates reacted 'very differently' when their daughter announced her startup

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates' daughter

Phoebe Gates

launched an ecommerce app earlier this year. Phoebe co-founded the e-commerce app Phia with her former Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni. The platform uses AI to help users compare prices of new and second-hand products across more than 40,000 websites. A web browser/app, Phia aims to be the Booking.com of fashion, offering an instant price comparison from thousands of e-commerce sites for any item, new or used.Phoebe Gates is the youngest child of Bill Gates and his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates.When she told her father that she and Ms. Kianni wanted to get into the e-commerce space, his reaction, he said, was “Wow, a lot of people have tried, and there’s some big guys in there.” However, he was reportedly worried she might ask for money. In an interview published by the New York Times, soon after Phia’s web browser and app went live, Gates said: “I thought, ‘Oh boy, she’s going to come and ask.”“I would have kept her on a short leash and be doing business reviews, which I would have found tricky,” the businessman explained of his hesitance. “And I probably would have been overly nice but wondered if it was the right thing to do.”

Bill Gates: Phoebe is the most different than I am

Her mother

Melinda Gates

, who Phoebe calls her “rock,” told her she had to raise the capital on her own. “She saw it as a real opportunity for me to, like, learn and fail,” she said.Talking further about Phoebe, Gates said that among all her children, she is “the most different than I am". "Because she’s so good with people. When we would go on family vacations, we would find some part of the beach to just be off on our own, and Phoebe would go down the beach and meet people and bring them back to introduce them to us,” Gates explained.