Phoebe Gates, Meghan Markle, and the Moment the Founder Becomes the Product

When Bloomberg reported that Phoebe Gates’s shopping startup, Phia, had allegedly been taking credit for affiliate sales it didn’t actually drive, the conversation immediately became about browser extensions, affiliate attribution, and a practice known as cookie stuffing. According to the reporting, the extension inserted its own affiliate code into purchases even when shoppers had arrived through another publisher, creator, or affiliate partner, allowing Phia to collect commissions on transactions it had not directly influenced. Phia responded by saying the issue stemmed from a code update that affected attribution for a subset of users and that the problem was quickly fixed once identified. Bloomberg later retested the extension and reported that the behavior had stopped.

But that wasn’t actually the story that interested me.

The story that interested me was Phoebe Gates herself.

From the beginning, Phia wasn’t simply a shopping extension. It was Phoebe Gates’s shopping extension. The press profile wasn’t “new browser extension raises funding.” It was “Bill Gates’s daughter raises funding.” The podcast tour wasn’t about affiliate technology or conversion funnels. It was about a young founder building a company with her Stanford roommate while trying to prove she could succeed without relying on her last name. The product mattered, of course, but Phoebe was always the engine pulling the train.

At almost the opposite end of the spectrum sits Meghan Markle.

Hear me out.

Somewhere in the middle of these two founders sits a Venn diagram I can’t stop thinking about.

Once I mapped it out, I couldn't unsee it.

So I figured I'd show you.