@theventure: This girl turned down billions from her family and built her own fashion empire 👗💰 In 2023, Phoebe Gates is a student at Stanford, obsessed with fashion. She notices people are paying full price for clothes online when the exact same item is sitting on a resale site for a fraction of the price. They just have no way to find it. So with her co-founder Sophia Kianni, she builds an app that fixes it and calls it Phia. See a $200 dress you love? Phia instantly finds you the same one for $80, scanning over 300 million items across the internet. But when she needs money to grow it, even her own mom turns her down, saying that if it's a real business, strangers will back it. ✓ Sets out to prove her mom right instead of leaning on the family name ✓ Markets Phia herself, posting all over social media without spending a dollar on ads ✓ Watches it blow up, with investors soon knocking ✓ Raises $8 million in just three and a half weeks Full-price clothes, cheaper elsewhere → builds an app to find the match → mom says prove it → markets it for free herself → $8M raised in weeks → 1.5M users and a $185M valuation. Sometimes being told no by the people closest to you is exactly what proves the idea's real. What would you build to prove the doubters wrong if no one would hand it to you? 🤔 #Business #Phia #Fashion #Success #Entrepreneur @Phia @Phoebe Gates @sophiakianni @The Burnouts

The Venture

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Wednesday 01 July 2026 17:36:02 GMT