You don’t need me to tell you: AI is rapidly changing how we approach just about everything, from meal planning to seeking advice. Now, former Stanford roommates and Phia founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni are envisioning how it can optimize online shopping and help users build their dream closets for far less money. On Tuesday, March 3, they kicked off Hearst Magazines’ 2026 Female Force event—hosted in collaboration with HearstLab—explaining how a group project quickly transformed into a powerhouse startup.
“Phia essentially is the Google Flights for fashion,” Phoebe explained. “We answer a question that every shopper thinks of: ‘Should I actually buy this?’ We sit in users’ browsers, and we tell them, ‘Hey, is this the right price? Is it gonna hold value? And is there a better alternative?’ And we aggregate all the reviews, all the information to keep your shopping fun but to make the decision process super easy.”
“The way that Phia started is we actually took a class together,” added Sophia. “And, essentially, in the class, we understood that e-commerce was going to be fundamentally transformed by a vertical application layer for commerce. We were adamant that we could potentially be the team to actually do that. And our Stanford professor actually agreed. She gave us our initial pre-seed funding to embolden us to move to New York City to try and make our class project into a real company. And now, two years later, here we are.”
After just 10 months, Phia boasts 1 million downloads and investor support from entrepreneurial greats like Hailey Bieber and Kris Jenner. Phoebe and Sophia attributed this success to a few things: their sustainability-over-virality mindset, their small but mighty team, and their Alex Cooper–backed podcast The Burnouts.
“We definitely invested very heavily in essentially owning our own media platform,” Sophia said. “So, in addition to Phia, one month before we launched the company, we launched our own podcast. Since its inception, we’ve reached over 200 million views completely organically, and that has essentially been a platform for us to open-source our learnings. Every week, Phoebe and I will sit down either by ourselves or with another founder, another entrepreneur, and we will talk about the biggest challenges facing our business and we’ll ask them the questions we ourselves are wondering as we are in this pursuit of building the best possible company. I think that has really built a lot of goodwill.”
Kris Jenner’s episode of The Burnouts quickly garnered 1 million views and projected Phia into the realm of virality. However, Phoebe emphasized that quick, wide-reaching moments aren’t what they’re after: “On launch day, we saw this big spike of downloads, right? But it was for us [a question of] can we actually sustain this momentum over time? And so it’s less about, Can we have peaks of virality where we get a lot of downloads, and more, Can we sustain a community over time? Or [to] say, okay, that went viral, what was the messaging we did there that actually really resonated with consumers?”
The long-haul approach is also a key element of how Phoebe and Sophia have built the Phia team, who they regard as equal stake owners in the company’s success.
“I think we’re in one of the most exciting times to build a company, because you actually don’t need that many people on your team; you just need really, really good, hungry people,” Phoebe explained.
“The lesson that we hear a lot in Silicon Valley that 100 percent is true is ‘the team you build is the company you build,’” Sophia added. And that’s been the thing that Phoebe and I have realized, is that ultimately, there needs to be a point as a founder where you have a level of trust in the people that you work with, and that level of trust is what keeps people at the office late. It’s what keeps people empowered and inspired, because they feel like they genuinely own something and that they’re able to work on and contribute and see the result of what they’re doing. That process of being able to find people who genuinely believe in the mission of the company, and who want to own a workstream end-to-end, has been a huge game changer in really creating a team that all feels incentivized and bought in to create a 10X outcome.”
Collaboration and community were central themes woven throughout the morning, which was presented in partnership with Spectrum Business and Pura, with special thanks to BLKSWN. From Misty Copeland, Ffounder of the Misty Copeland Foundation and star ballerina, who spoke about using her talent to enact social change, to chief external affairs officer of the Malala Fund Parampreet Singh, who emphasized the importance of girls’ education worldwide, there was no shortage of optimism for the future of women-led businesses. Certainly not a bad way to start a Tuesday.
