Bill Gates worried daughter Phoebe would ask for money to fund business venture

Bill Gates has joked about daughter Phoebe potentially hitting him up for money for her business venture.

The Microsoft founder made the comment following the launch of Phoebe’s compnay Phia with co-creator Sophia Kianni.

“I thought, ‘Oh boy, she’s going to come and ask,'” the New York Times reports him as saying.

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“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?

“Luckily, it never happened.”

Phia is an e-commerce start up that facilitates easy comparison of new and used items across thousands of selling sites.

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Phoebe, 22, who recently graduated from Stanford University, came up with the idea for the business with her former roommate Sophia Kianni.

Bill, 69, said when his daughter first told him about the idea he thought, “Wow, a lot of people have tried, and there’s some big guys in there.”

He said when it comes to shopping, he’s “not exactly the target audience” but is clearly proud of his daughter’s entrepreneurial skills.

Phoebe told the New York Times her mother Melinda Gates encouraged the pair to raise capital to launch the business.

“She saw it as a real opportunity for me to, like, learn and fail,” Phoebe told the publication, adding that her mothers is her “rock”.

Phoebe and Sophia spoke of the misogyny they faced when meeting with investors.

They told Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper about being asked about their plans for motherhood during one particular meeting when Alex asked them about the hardest “obstacles” they had to overcome during the process.

“Children, always children,” Phoebe said.

“We’ll have investors ask us all the time, ‘Well what happens when you two have babies?’ And I remember one time like crying about that. I call my mum and she’s like, ‘Get up, get out the game Sis.’ And I was like, ‘Damn!'”

The pair eventually started the business with US $100,000 ($156,058) from Soma Capital and a Stanford grant of US $250,000 ($390,149). They later received US $500,000 ($780,280) from angel investors.

Bill and Melinda Gates are parents to three children – Jennifer, 30, Rory, 25, and Phoebe.

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Jennifer works in paediatric research at Mt Sinai hospital in New York and Rory completing a PhD at the Institute of World Politics while working as an analyst for the Afghanistan War Commission.

Bill and Melinda have previously spoken about wanting their children to forge their own paths without their parent’s billions.

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Bill told the Raj Shamani podcast: ”My kids got a great upbringing and education, but less than one percent of the total wealth because I decided it wouldn’t be a favor to them.

“It’s not a dynasty, I’m not asking them to run Microsoft. I want to give them a chance to have their own earnings and success.”

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In 2017, during a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ session, Gates said his children will inherit less than one per cent of his fortune, which is still a significant amount of money, approximately $US10 million (approx. $15 million).

“I definitely think leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favour to them. Warren Buffett was part of an article in Fortune talking about this in 1986 before I met him and it made me think about it and decide he was right,” he explained.

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