Bill Gates is one of the richest people on Earth and known for his acumen of technology, business, and philanthropy. It’s not surprising that his daughter, Phoebe, would ask him to do some work at her tech start-up. What is surprising is that she didn’t approach him to join the organization as a company lead or a consultant. Instead, Bill will work a shift as a customer service employee. “Hopefully, I won’t break anything,” he joked.
Phoebe Gates is the co-founder of Phia, an A.I.-driven platform that helps its users by comparing prices of new and second-hand products across over 40,000 websites. The app hopes to be the “Booking.com of fashion” by offering price comparisons instantly from thousands of e-commerce sites. By accepting the customer service role, her father hopes to better understand how his daughter’s app works.
“When your daughter asks if you’d be willing to work a shift in customer service at her startup, the only right answer is yes,” said Bill Gates in a LinkedIn post. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology can make systems more efficient, equitable, and accessible. But I’ve learned over the years that the best way to understand how something works, or where it breaks, is to go straight to the people using it.”
Even if her father is only working a single day as a customer service worker, Phoebe’s start-up certainly has more of a leg-up than her father did when Microsoft first formed. When Bill Gates started Microsoft with Paul Allen in the 1970s, they first worked out of a garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico. While he certainly has lived a less hard knock life over the past few decades, Bill isn’t a stranger to hard work in modest conditions.
It should be noted that Gates will only get a day’s worth of understanding on how the app works and what his daughter’s employees deal with each shift. This isn’t unlike when former Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan pledged to spend half a day per month as a fellow barista or when Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi decided to drive around as a rideshare vehicle himself. The stated purpose was to better understand the crux of their businesses from the ground level, from both the customers’ and their employees’ perspectives.
Maybe all of those CEOs did learn something, but there are still skeptics. Critics believe that these heavily publicized actions aren’t more than publicity itself rather than getting a genuine understanding of the work being done, comparing such actions to theatre like the television show Undercover Boss. This debate is similar to when President Donald Trump worked the fryer at a McDonald’s during the 2024 campaign trail, in that some saw the act as him connecting with the working class while others thought it was cosplay as described in the song “Common People” by Pulp.
Regardless of true intention, Phoebe Gates’ business looks to benefit—whether it’s from her father’s assessment of her business model after working there for a day, from the publicity being cultivated from this stunt, or a combination of both.
