The term like father like daughter has long served as a casual shorthand for inherited traits or habits passed down through a family line, or in this case, from father to daughter. Yet in the world of technology and startups it sometimes invites a closer look at what skills actually travel from one generation to the next.
Coverage of a high profile shopping app has brought that phrase into sharper focus as questions swirl around coding ability, product design choices, and the difference between a genuine software glitch and something more deliberate.
Phia, the AI powered personal shopping assistant co-founded by Phoebe Gates and her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni, built its reputation on helping users find better deals across retailers and resale platforms.
And this time, it's creating controversies.
First off, Phia is an AI-powered shopping company co-founded by Phoebe Gates, the daughter of Bill Gates, and Sophia Kianni. The company focuses primarily on fashion and aims to help people find better prices when shopping online.
The basic idea is similar to a search engine for shopping.
When users find a jacket, pair of shoes, or another fashion item online, Phia can search across thousands of retailers and resale platforms to find the same product elsewhere.
It can then show the users whether the price they found is good and whether the item is available for less somewhere else.
Promising users to "never overpay again," Phia also focuses heavily on secondhand fashion. Instead of simply finding the cheapest new version of something, it can look for used or resale listings, giving shoppers another way to save money and potentially reduce waste.
The company is also trying to move beyond simple price comparison.
Its longer-term goal is to use AI to understand what shoppers are looking for and act more like a personal shopping assistant. Rather than giving users thousands of search results, Phia wants to recommend specific products, cheaper alternatives, and secondhand options.
As a matter of fact, Bill Gates himself said that he was part of Phia's customer service team, for at least a day.
In other words, Phia is essentially a tool that works as a browser extension that surfaces coupons and price comparisons.
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni reportedly came up with the idea while they were roommates at Stanford. Phia has since attracted significant venture funding and has expanded its network of retailers and brands.
The thing is, how Phia works behind-the-scene isn't as professional as it looks.
The company is facing controversy surrounding its browser extension and affiliate commissions. Reports alleged that the extension could claim affiliate commissions on purchases that Phia had not actually referred.
Company representatives initially described the problem as a software bug that appeared in a recent code release and was fixed overnight once they learned of it.
Later reporting painted a different picture.
Researchers and journalists found a deliberately built and toggleable function known internally as Auto Drop or enable coupon auto drop.
On mobile browsers it would open an invisible background tab during checkout, plant Phia's own tracking cookie, and overwrite referral codes belonging to other publishers or sites.
This practice, widely called cookie stuffing, allowed the company to collect commissions even when shoppers had arrived independently or through another affiliate link.
The feature had been active for months, dating back to late 2025, and internal messages suggested the founders were aware of and discussed the cookie dropping behavior with engineers.
After the feature was disabled, daily revenue reportedly fell sharply, underscoring how large a share of the business it had supported.
Part of the cause was attributed to both founders.
Sophia Kianni often described in coverage as the one less connected to coding expertise, studied Science, Technology and Society at Stanford and took no formal computer science classes.
A classmate source remarked that her coursework would not have prepared her to understand what a cookie even was in the technical sense.
However, leaked Slack exchanges showed her pressing the engineering team to keep the cookies dropping, a detail that has fueled questions about whether she could actually code, or understood her own product.
As for Phoebe Gates, the youngest of the three children of Bill Gates and Melinda, is recognized for her work in sustainable fashion, reproductive rights, and public health.
She graduated early with a degree in human biology.
Advanced coding courses were not required for her major, and classmates say she was not known as a strong coder.
Some computer science students reportedly laughed when plans for Phia first circulated.
She did take an applied artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship class that helped spark the idea, yet the gap between that background and the technical controversies surrounding the product has become a central talking point.
By contrast, her father Bill Gates built his early reputation precisely on coding skill.
As a teenager he spent long nights writing and debugging software, later co authoring the Altair BASIC interpreter that launched Microsoft. He has continued to speak about the value of understanding code even in an age of artificial intelligence, emphasizing that knowing the underlying mechanics remains useful.
The contrast between that history and the current questions around his daughter’s startup has not gone unnoticed.
The Phia episode leaves open larger questions about how much technical fluency founders of consumer apps actually need, how transparent companies should be when revenue depends on attribution mechanics, and whether a high profile name can outrun the consequences of a feature that looked far more intentional than accidental once the internal records surfaced.
