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Melinda French Gates Addresses “Betrayals” in Bill Gates Marriage
Phoebe Gates once thought she'd excel as a medical entrepreneur.
The daughter of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and ex-wife Melinda French Gates revealed that she came up with the idea for a Bluetooth tampon while studying at Stanford University, where she pitched her would-be company Renaissance for a business class.
Phoebe hoped her product would analyze period blood to give instant insights so women could learn if they're anemic, find out if their hormones are out of balance and receive other medical diagnoses without going to the doctor or getting a traditional blood test.
Though the pitch was ultimately rejected, the idea made the 22-year-old compare herself to Elizabeth Holmes—the former CEO of Theranos who was sentenced to over 11 years in prison after she was found guilty of fraud over the blood testing company.
"I'm all in this, because I'm doing all this repro health work, I'm also pre-med," Phoebe told friend Sophia Kianni on the March 31 episode of their podcast The Burnouts with Phoebe & Sophia. "This was our first big failure of many, many, many."
But Sophia saw the potential, saying it wasn't "that bad of an idea” since “who likes getting a blood test?”
"I thought you were a genius," Sophia recounted. "I thought Phoebe was the real legit Elizabeth Holmes."
Phoebe agreed they had big dreams: "We're like, 'It's going to be so crazy—we're going to be the new Elizabeth Holmes.' I was like, 'Let's start wearing black turtlenecks.'"
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In hindsight, the influencer believes she and Sophia only compared themselves to Elizabeth because they didn’t know a lot of women founders in Silicon Valley, adding, "It's horrible that that's the only female entrepreneur that's literally known in the U.S."
And in the end, Phoebe's project didn't come to fruition.
"We had this whole grand idea, we go heads down for three weeks," she recalled. "We kind of go off the face of the Earth and everyone thought we were in love with each other, that we had basically docked ourselves from social life."
However, Phoebe—who debuted her romance with Paul McCartney's grandson Arthur Donald last year—realized that the pair's business plan flopped because they didn't have answers prepared for some "pretty key questions," such as what problem the product solved, how it would make money and why they would be the right people to make it.
"We get flat-out rejected from that class, which was honestly a really good reality check for us," she added. "Luckily, Stanford has the all-access entrepreneurship class that anyone could get into."
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