AequitasPhoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name': 'I have a chip on my shoulder' | Fortune
Phoebe Gates cofounded Phia, an AI shopping assistant, with her Stanford University roommate Sophia Kianni. The shopping assistant plugs into browsers like Chrome and Safari to compare prices and surface deals across tens of thousands of retail and resale sites in real time. It essentially serves as your own personal deal finder: say you’re looking at a $200 dress from Anthropologie, Phia can find and compare prices at second-hand sellers to help customers find a better price.
That’s actually a neat premise. Fashion isn’t my cup of tea, but otherwise that sounds useful (albeit not very unique; shopping assistants are a dime a dozen).
digitalFattehSo it’s a price checker extension. That scrapes other websites for better deals.
I feel like this is just a plug piece to spotlight her product tbh.
What’s crazier is people thinking it’s a good enough idea to get $185,000,000 in funding for someone who just graduated college…
Like, it already exists, there’s a bunch of those already.
She slapped “AI” on the front of it but because her name is Gates people won’t stop throwing money at it. If she doesn’t understand her name is why she’s getting funding, that just means she’s both ignorant and naive and this is an even worse investment and product than it seems on the surface.
FancyPantsFIREI’m sure the Gates named helped, but AI anything has venture capitalists punching the Fry meme. It feels very similar to the dot com era bubble in a macro sense, except without a large number jobs being created.
If a random 23 year old can just take any type of plugin that’s been around 20+ years, slap AI in front of it…
And raises $185,000,000…
Why exactly do you think they’re not all doing it?
Thats a rhetorical question by the way, the rest of them aren’t doing it because their last name isn’t Gates