Bill Gates Was Worried His Daughter Would Ask For Money

Bill Gates: dad, philanthropist, gajillionaire. Enter Phoebe Gates: Stanford alum, entrepreneur, daughter of said gajillionaire.

If you don’t keep up with the lives of billionaire children, I’ll give you a quick recap. Recently, Phoebe, Bill’s youngest daughter, launched her app Phia: a platform that promises to be “the Booking.com of fashion,” where users can compare prices for any item across a huge number of e-commerce websites. Phoebe also just launched a podcast with her friend and business partner, Sophia Kianni, called The Burnouts with Phoebe & Sophia.

Anyway, it seems like Phoebe’s been on that grind, whether it be as a business owner or podcast host. And in an interview with the New York Times, she spoke about being a self-starter. “If the business is successful, people will say, ‘It’s because of her family,’” she explained. “And a huge portion of that is true. I never would have been able to go to Stanford, or have such an amazing upbringing, or feel the drive to do something, if it wasn’t for my parents. But I also feel a huge amount of internalized pressure.”

But to Phoebe, it doesn’t affect her strategy and her reason for doing what she does. “We’re roommates fighting about clothing. We are the girls who are scouring shopping sites for deals. And there are, frankly, thousands of other young women like us,” she said.

It seems like Phoebe had so much confidence in her idea, she didn’t even need her dad’s input. Bill spoke to the New York Times about his reaction when she told him about the business, and revealed that he initially felt trepidation at Phoebe going into e-commerce. He told her, “Wow, a lot of people have tried, and there’s some big guys in there.”

And on top of the competitive market, Bill was worried that Phoebe would ask for an investment. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, she’s going to come and ask,’” he recalled. But despite his unease, he confirmed that if she had asked, he would likely have put money in. “And then I would have kept her on a short leash and be doing business reviews, which I would have found tricky, and I probably would have been overly nice but wondered if it was the right thing to do,” he explained. “Luckily, it never happened.”

Instead of her dad, Phoebe secured funding from her school, a venture fund, and others (a $250,000 Stanford grant, $100,000 from Soma Capital, and $500,000 from angel investors, including Kris Jenner) and launched Phia successfully. And according to her interview with the New York Times, she only relies on her dad for advice, mostly surrounding personnel issues.

Bill has previously spoken about his decision to leave his three children with “less than 1 percent of the total wealth.” “It’s not a dynasty,” he said to Raj Shamani on his podcast, Figuring Out. “I’m not asking them to run Microsoft,” he explained. “I want to give them a chance to have their own earnings and success, be significant, and not be overshadowed by the incredible luck and good fortune I had.”

Although this might seem unfair to some, if you look at Bill’s net worth of $108 billion according to Forbes, this probably still leaves each of his kids with around $1 billion each. So they won’t exactly be broke.