When pitching to investors, freshly graduated Phoebe Gates and her business partner, Sophia Kianni, didn’t expect the topic of their potential future children to be brought up. After all, the duo are in their early twenties and wanted to discuss backing for their startup, fashion pricing tool Phia—so why would their private lives be brought into the conversation?
But the topic became such a recurring point of frustration for Phoebe, 23, that she called her mom—billionaire philanthropist Melinda French Gates. The businesswoman and women’s rights advocate had some direct advice for her daughter: “Get up or get out the game.”
Phoebe, a Stanford graduate, shared the experience on an episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast in April 2025, hosted by entrepreneur Alex Cooper. The duo were asked what the hardest double standard is they’ve had to overcome, and the answer was unanimous: children.
“Always children,” Phoebe said. “We’ll have investors ask us all the time, ‘Well, what happens when you two go have babies?’ And I remember one time crying about that. I called my mom, and she was like, ‘Get up or get out the game, sis.’ I was like, damn.”
Phoebe added she struggled with the assumption that, because she was a woman, investors thought she was “going to be around for 10 years … you’re going to have kids, and then you’re going to f–k off.”
Sophia chimed in that when a venture capitalist asked what was going to happen to Phia in the event the duo had children, she responded with: “What’s going to happen to your venture firm when you have kids?
“He’s like, ‘Why would that affect anything?’ And I was like, ‘You answered your own question.’”
Creating a win sheet
The Phia founders met while rooming together at Stanford, saying their relationship was first formed out of rivalry before they realized their competitive spirit could be a force of nature if they worked together.
The duo decided to launch a business, locking themselves in their dorm for a week and dreaming up as many ideas as possible. One notion was a Bluetooth tampon, though the pair quickly realized they lacked enough expertise in the health space to make the product work.
But between Sophia, who had a background in sustainability, and Phoebe, who has worked in women’s advocacy and empowerment, the idea of a more streamlined and targeted consumer experience was formed.
Though Phia launched less than a week before the podcast appearance, the Gen Z founders already had some advice for women in the workplace navigating the question of children and illustrating their value to their employers.
“Keep a win sheet, always,” Phoebe, daughter of Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, said. “I had someone come to me recently, and they wanted something … and they came with a win sheet of ‘Here’s everything I’ve done for the business; here’s how I’ve affected the bottom line; here’s the things I’ve created. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re so right; you did do all those things … Of course you deserve this.’”
She continued that employees “can’t be doubted” if they had proof of their worth: “You can’t be on your back foot of, ‘Oh, what’s going to happen when you’re a mother’ if you can show up to your boss and say, ‘This is my win sheet, this is what I’ve created for the company, and this is what I deserve.’”
The pair also announced last year that their podcast, The Burnouts, had joined Cooper’s Unwell media network.
A version of this article was first published in May 2025.
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