"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about “meritocracy” and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it."
What an awesome comparison.
Yeah that is real nail on the head stuff. The poverty trap is real. I really believe everyone should be poor once in their life for at least a year with no end in sight because many / most who haven’t experienced it don’t have the empathetic capacity to imagine it.
Having the bottom fall out really changes your perspective. Folks need to have empathy and I have a strong sensation that those well off don’t realize that most of us are a few missed paychecks or a medical emergency away from being destitute.
A coworker of mine left to start his own startup. He claimed that the IPO of an old employer gave him a little bit of cushion to work with, and he was going to take his shot. I wished him well. It was a crazy dumb app idea. But you never know.
I do remember thinking “gee and he just had a baby too, what a time to take a risk.” I later learned that he had married old money. The second he had a kid with her, he couldn’t lose.
In addition to the multiple throws, and in addition to the direct nepotistic help, there is also just the osmosis effect. How many people would give their right arm to get basic mentoring from Bill Gates? Just knowing someone who’s succeeded at something gives you a massive cultural window into that thing and how to nail it. This kid is delusional. If she wants to do something totally on her own she should be a movie director or race car driver or flower arranger. What’s that? Starting up a tech company? Ohh… how original.
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no ties to my privilege
it’s an AI startup
$185 million
Something does not compute, in a Microslop sort of way.
I asked copilot and it assured me this is all above board.
“I have a chip on my shoulder,” she said, describing her drive to prove she can win over private equity in Silicon Valley based on merit, not inheritance or legacy …[T]he young founder hasn’t taken money from her parents for Phia. Instead, she’s insisted on raising outside capital even as some investors remain fixated on her personal life instead of her business venture.
I appreciate the sentiment, but it would be delusional to think her ability to “win over private equity” was divorced at all from her father’s legacy and last name. And actually, I’m not sure I appreciate the sentiment. In 2026, merit is way down the list, like scrawled sideways in the margins, of things that matter to private equity.
It’s certainly delusional. I’ve been active in the innovation space for ~25 years, and for most normal people it’s taking a massive risk. Here, she’s not ending-up on the street if the venture flops, so the risk is low.
So merit my ass, it’s easy to take a risk if it’s not real risk, i.e. I agree and don’t appreciate the sentiment.
Real question: what on earth does “on the street” mean in the tech startup world? Because I have a strong suspicion that “on the street” means just going to work a normal job like 300 million other people even despite personal anecdotes of one or two people who literally became homeless.
like shot in the head and scrawled sideways in the margins
FTFY.
Wonder how much of her funding came from people who rape kids with her dad…
If she thinks she’s doing anything that her name doesn’t benefit, she’s fucking stupider than most AI ceos and that’s saying a lot.
Maybe even stupid enough to not know the reason her dad’s company took off is her grandparents worked for Xerox and just gave him a bunch of IP including the first computer mouse and a shit ton of money.
The Gates family is a nepo family, they’re just all too stupid to understand and legitimately think they have the same opportunities as anyone else.
Think of how stupid the average AI CEO is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Please no. My crushing despair at the state of the world meds for ignore at least one thing
If you ever listen to Behind the Bastards, then you’ll notice a pattern of emotional stunting in the growth of billionaires. The kids that have the money straight away, not the ones that really do make it themselves wherever they are.
Exemplar: Elon.
Though the imagery that sticks out in my mind is one of Zuckerberg playing mall ninja in his original office space, as the boss, walking around with a samurai sword and fake swiping at employees with it.
None of them make it themselves…
But they act like spoiled kids because that’s how everyone treats them, because at that level of wealth the only people you’re around will say whatever gets you to give them money.
It doesn’t take long before they forget how to be a normal human
People who talk to you like an AI bot. Maybe that’s why the AI talks that way. It’s all they know.
Never thought of that, but yeah…
Especially for Elon, it’s not just people in person, he bought twitter just to have his own echo chamber
When grok constantly glazes him, that’s what he thinks a normal person acts like. If it acts like a human would, Elmo can’t recognize it.
Is this the same entitled bitch who got a $1,000,000 ranch as a present?
Maybe pay some fucking taxes, Phoebe.
To quote Pearl Jam:
Born on third,
Thinks (s)he got a triple.
Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with ‘no ties to my privilege or my last name’
But you have no problem with the $35 million they gave you? That’s part of your privilege. You say you want to succeed without it while stuffing your pockets with it.
shes basically like the rich people that think they are independant and living on thier own, but thier parents give them a credit card to do pay whatever she wants on her own,.
If she really wants to show the world how good she is, and non-privileged, she can change her name, get into community college while working a minimum wage job, and then start a multimillion dollar business on her own from her savings, without getting carried through life by her father.
She just wants to be treated like any other totally unqualified person whose mom gave her commencement speed and got handed 100 million dollars to start up a made up company.
That then told everyone about her company, that she doesn’t want any privilege in promoting, to her many followers.
She’s going to be another super villain in ten years isn’t she
I hope in 10 years we find out shes secretly a cyborg and meant that litterally, the prototype chip is on (in) her shoulder.
Yes, but she will have really earned it unlike the other trust fund super villains.
An “AI shopping company”. Yes, that´s just what the world needs.
I can’t even decide what would be worse: AI-based shopping of general stuff, or shopping for AIs.
I think there is a huge market for an AI agent that will shop for the best deals for you. They could check for coupons, discount codes, etc…
And then the AI will just make up the discounts and coupon codes. What you really want is a simple, tuned search engine, like we’ve had for 30 years. Not generated content.
There are already browser extensions that do this.
They are notorious for intercepting connections, adding their own referral links, tracking users and other badness.
https://www.theverge.com/24343913/paypal-honey-megalag-coupon-scam-affiliate-fees
Surely the AI version will be better…. …
In the two days before it gets undermined by entrenched interests, yeah could be neat.
Please tell me this is a satirical nod towards Honey & Co.
To be fair to whoever she is, it must have been impossible for them to not to have grown up completely bonkers out of touch. Not without some serious awesome parenting.
Which is why she did not.
They have no frame of reference whatsoever.
They’re out of their element! They’re like a child that wanders into the middle of a movie . . .
Raised in a bubble she can’t see.
I have no doubt she’s at least as horrible as we all imagine.
“Child of prominent pedophile has an AI startup” is such a vibe right now.
Well I guess as long as she has a ‘chip’ on her shoulderFUCK yeah F+G. Rarely seen in the wild.
Lightning in a bottle, that cast.
Well, most of that cast.
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 secondhand sellers to help customers find a better price.
Gates and Kianni first brainstormed startup ideas in their Stanford dorm room, cycling through concepts before landing on a consumer tool that included Gates’ interest in women’s empowerment (likely modeled after her own mother) and Kianni’s sustainability focus.
I don’t think a coupon tool that wastes excessive resources is either empowering or sustainable.
I’d be surprised if there’s actual AI behind it. That functionality already exists and works just fine.
it’s a small indian man named Al.
I’d be surprised if a human were behind it. This is exactly the kind of thing that can be vibe coded pretty fast and is mostly just reselling fancy Google searches through an LLM. I did a quick skim of the website and it’s just a bunch of items scraped from big brands with lots of similar looking images of other products. There’s too many sites for me to really believe they’ve made integrations with all of them.
The insane valuation is because of her name not because the tech is good. The only way to make money on this is the customer data. The margin on that is going to be fucking minuscule especially once LLM costs start going up so they can make money. This adds nothing of value on top so it will go away almost immediately.
Oh, I didn’t say a human, I just meant a standard non-AI algorithm
Ohhhhhh yeah this is just 100% LLM garbage. No machine learning. Forgive me; I don’t often talk to people that understand the difference so my default is human vs LLM not LLM vs <insert something AI that isn’t LLM>. Trying to explain machine learning vs LLM summaries to data company business executives wears you down.
Edit: also my frame of mind was on the more recent Waymo “our AI just goes to a human when it’s hard” news that followed the Amazon “it was always a Mechanical Turk” news which is why I jumped to human.
I’d be concerned about monied motives driving suggestions. Even if it starts out neutral, how can we as consumers be sure it won’t become corrupted? Enshittification is par for the course these days, I’d be extremely wary about relying on an app to tell me real, unbiased price info unless its mechanisms and sources are (and remain) completely transparent.
With what money did she start the business then? Get the F out of here with that crap. Also, so original, going into AI like everyone else.
And the “connections” which is just fancy-speak for “rich friends.”
Same way daddy did it
Reading this, I was reminded of how Nicolas Cage is part of the Coppola family but changed his name, I was told, so that he could “make it on his own.”
I looked that up and it turns out to be a complete lie. He actually changed his name to conceal the fact that he was not making it on his own.
EDIT to clarify if this was confusing: he was given roles by his uncle Francis Ford Coppola. This is nepotism aka “not making it on his own,” but with special help from family. To conceal the nepotism, his name was changed.
From Wikipedia:
At age 15, he tried to convince his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, to give him a screen test, telling him “I’ll show you acting.” His outburst was met with “silence in the car.”[20] By this stage of his career, Coppola had already directed Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman and Robert De Niro. Although early in his career Cage appeared in some of his uncle’s films, he changed his name to Nicolas Cage to avoid the appearance of nepotism as Coppola’s nephew. His choice of name was inspired by the Marvel Comicssuperhero Luke Cage and composer John Cage.[21][22]
how does changing his famous last name conceal that he was not making it on his own? what?
He was given roles in his uncles film because he was his nephew. The name change just swept this under the rug. He wanted to get the roles but not let anyone know he got them through favoritism.
this comment makes sense, but your original comment said something else that was genuinely confusing.
I guess it could be interpreted ways other than I intended, but since I know how it was intended, it’s kind of hard for my brain to successfully see how.
somehow it seemed like you were saying that he was trying to hide that he was failing at making it on his own, which is confusing in a couple directions. anwyay sorry for taking up your time. i meant well and wish you the best. :)
But his latter movies are awesome and I love him, so I’ll let it slide.
Yeah I like him too. The only asterisk on that is that I guess I might like some other actor better who didn’t have a family “in”
I miss when actors used to be some random boxer a director met in a Cuban bar or the drunk tank, instead of the executive producer’s nibling or some fucking baronet.
I mean nepotism is hardly a new problem :)
True lol, it’s never not been, it’s hardwired into humans, but it was nice when certain industries were new and there wasn’t so much buildup for the enthrenchment
Yes I think when an industry is new is about the only time that existing power structures don’t dominate, albeit briefly. I saw this up close with the advent of the WWW. In the early days, coding HTML was like working magic, and there were no established players who had a lock on how to do it better than what any enterprising young person could teach themselves through tinkering.
“To avoid the appearance of nepotism” sounds exactly like making it his own. You seem to have misunderstood. Are you an LLM?
The appearance of nepotism.
Nicholas Coppola got cast by his uncle, when any random 15 year old aspiring actor would never stand a chance.
He then changes his name so that other people in Hollywood will (hopefully) not say “oh he got that part because he’s Coppola’s nephew,” even if he absolutely got that job because he’s Coppola’s nephew.
I’m not disputing that he got his first few roles due to his connections, but changing his name absolutely would have distanced him from his relatives in other directors’ eyes.
absolutely would have distanced him from his relatives in other directors’ eyes.
Nah, everyone in the industry would know about this. But random people on the street wouldn’t. And that’s what it’s about when you want to be famous.
No it wouldn’t/didn’t, but it would/did to the masses.
You have misunderstood. He was in fact the beneficiary of nepotism: staring in his uncle’s films. But to keep this a secret, he changed his name. He was hiding the nepotism, not trying to avoid nepotism.
Walk a little more softly. You came off as confidently wrong there.
ive seen quite a few actors recently try to do this or trying to downplay thier nepotism.
