While Mark Zuckerberg has been called the husband of the century, another tech tycoon, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, surely deserves the title of ‘dad of the decade.’ The billionaire, worth about $122 billion per Bloomberg, built an empire that reshaped how the world works. He was involved with Microsoft for 33 years from its founding in 1975 and left the company’s board entirely in 2020. He only got back to living a busy working day thanks to his youngest, Phoebe Gates, the co-founder of Phia, an emerging fashion platform.
The tycoon who enjoys playing bridge with fellow billionaire Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, happily put on a worker’s hat and handled customer service for a day. Imagine: a man who has received more than $60 billion in stock and dividends from Microsoft and other companies chose, at 69, to work at his 23-year-old daughter’s fashion startup. He did it with great spirit. Gates shared, “When your daughter asks if you’ll work a customer-support shift, the only right answer is yes,” adding, “hopefully I won’t break anything.”
His foray into fashion also introduced him to Phia’s product: a free iOS app and Chrome tool that price-checks fashion in real time with a “Should I Buy This?” button. It compares across more than 40,000 sites and crawls a database of 250 million resale listings. This was not a multinational call center. Phia, founded by his daughter and her friend Sophia Kianni (a climate champion and fellow Stanford student), roped in the maverick dad to underline why direct access to users is crucial in the first phase of any company. Gates emphasized accessible leadership not with talk, but by facing realities on the front lines. From answering Phia customers’ questions (he even joked that followers should “be nice if you see my name pop up”) to digging into their feedback, he did it all, then shared the experience on his LinkedIn.
With Bill Gates on the team, even for a day, the halo effect is inevitable. Thanks to his social-media reach and iconic status, Phia enjoyed a spotlight that money can’t buy. Importantly, the father of three didn’t invest money in Phoebe’s venture; he contributed something bigger by modeling independence and reinforcing the value of hard-won wins. Instilling independence and a strong education in his children was always a priority for Bill and Melinda Gates.
It mattered so much that, during his CEO years, he did the 40-minute kindergarten drive a couple of mornings a week to ensure Jennifer went to the best school. That gesture sparked a paternal trend after moms told their husbands, “If Bill Gates can, so can you.”
How many billionaires would clock in at their twenty-something child’s startup, the way Bill did? The billionaire even teamed up with co-founder Sophia Kianni to make a playful Instagram video dedicated to his entrepreneur daughter. They both act mock-scared of the ambitious equestrian, who’s in full go-getter founder mode, using that viral Kardashian voiceover. If this man doesn’t deserve the “dad of the decade” award, who does?
