Melinda French Gates has said she deliberately refused to invest in her daughter’s start-up, insisting the young founder should secure backing on the strength of the business rather than family connections.
The billionaire philanthropist said she watched her daughter raise money from the sidelines while speaking at the Power of Women’s Sports Summit presented by E.l.f. Beauty.
“She got capitalized not because of my contacts, not because of me. I wouldn’t put money into it,” French Gates said.
She said that if the venture was a “real business”, other investors needed to be prepared to support it. Her daughter, she added, also needed to experience the possibility of rejection and learn from the process.
“That’s what I told her,” French Gates said. “She’s growing from this.”
French Gates did not identify the daughter involved. Her youngest daughter, Phoebe, launched Phia, a fashion technology start-up, with her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni. The platform compares clothing prices across more than 40,000 websites.
Phoebe, who was 22 in April 2025, has said her parents would not allow her to leave Stanford to launch a company, as her father Bill Gates did. Phia has also recently attracted attention over claims that it took credit for sales it did not drive.
Melinda French Gates says female founders must withstand rejection
French Gates linked her decision to a wider belief that setbacks can build resilience, particularly for women trying to establish businesses in a difficult funding environment.
She said the successful women featured on her YouTube series, Moments That Make Us, had all experienced hardship and found strength through it.
“I saw that going through something difficult changed all of them, and that they had to learn to find resilience somewhere,” she said. “And in finding that resilience, they found themselves.”
She added that female founders often had to be more persistent than male counterparts to survive in the start-up world.
“It is very, very hard to get your business funded if you’re a woman,” French Gates said. “And so you do have to learn a bit how to have the courage to play the game and to stick with it.”
Billie Jean King, who appeared alongside her at the event, said the experience of building a first business could provide valuable feedback even when ventures did not succeed.
King said she avoided using the word “failure”, encouraging people instead to ask what feedback they were receiving from a setback.
Female founding teams received 2.3% of global venture capital last year, according to the figure cited in the discussion.
French Gates’s approach reflects the wider attitude to family wealth shared by her and Bill Gates. The Microsoft co-founder has previously said his children would inherit less than 1% of his fortune, arguing that they should make their own way in the world.
