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Long before Phoebe Gates cofounded the AI personal shopping assistant Phia, she was a student at Stanford University working towards a bachelor’s degree in human biology. While her transcript reflects coursework in epidemiology and health policy analysis, Gates attended one secret winter-quarter class that reportedly helped her establish Phia.
The 10-week off-the-record course, titled “So You Think You Can Rule the World?” or simply referred to as “Rule” among Stanford students, required a referral from another student and wasn’t available through the college’s official course registration, The Stanford Daily reported in May.
The course teaches “how to essentially hack any kind of power structure or bureaucratic structure and get what they want in a system of people,” a former student, who preferred to remain anonymous, told the student newspaper.
The unofficial course focused on prisoner’s dilemmas, multipolar traps, and readings by Peter Thiel and Paul Graham. It admitted only six women and six men per quarter, selected by its professor Justin Lewis-Weber, a 2020 Stanford graduate and founder of insurance technology startup Assured.
Lewis-Weber began teaching the course during his junior year at the college. Scrutiny of “Rule” includes allegations of a “cult of personality” and the inspiration for a memoir by 2026 Stanford graduate Theo Baker, titled “How to Rule the World,” published in May.
“Justin’s class, it turned out, wasn’t a real class in the sense of earning course credit, although there were lectures, discussions, and guest speakers, and it was held each week on Stanford’s campus,” Baker wrote in his memoir. “It was more like a secret society, a Skull and Bones for the aspiring tech elite.”
Baker interviewed for the course with Lewis-Weber in November 2022, while Gates was in the cohort, but was ultimately denied from participating. Baker described the bizarre interview process with the professor, who he believes aimed to confuse and harangue potential students.
“Justin was networking with teenagers he expected to be useful in the future,” Baker continued, adding the professor “knew that a certain elite cohort of Stanford students wouldn’t be able to resist the mystique he cultivated, the notion of this insider class no one would speak about, where only the very best of the best congregated to learn the secrets of the billionaires they aspired to become.”
Baker’s memoir explains that the objective of Lewis-Weber’s class is to teach students how to take advantage of others and find loopholes within rules, a very different approach to leadership compared to Stanford’s typical entrepreneurship classes.
Lewis-Weber often preached that “for a select group of people—those with increased agency—a great amount of value can be extracted from the people around you,” a former student told Baker.
A source who interviewed for the course told Fortune that Lewis-Weber’s interviews consisted of the professor asking the same question repeatedly and testing how candidates responded, likening the process to epistemologically breaking down contenders. The source said they knew someone who completed the source and used skills gained from Lewis-Weber’s lectures to deceive venture capitalists, without getting into details exactly how.
How Gates applied the course to her advantage
Gates turned to the network of students to recruit employees for her then-budding startup, Phia, according to the Stanford Daily.
“Stanford completely changed my life path, not because of the classes, but because of the people I met and the connections I made,” Gates told Stanford’s student newspaper last year. “They gave me the confidence to build Phia. I never intended to start a business.”
Phia was founded in a Stanford dorm room by Gates and her roommate Sophia Kianni, officially launching in April 2025. Gates moved to New York City during her junior year, continuing to study at Stanford via the online night school program, while establishing the Phia office in Union Square. The name Phia is a portmanteau of the founders’ names Phoebe and Sophia. Gates is the daughter of billionaires Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates.
“We wanted to create something that could do all of our shopping for us,” Kianni told Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle last year on the Term Sheet podcast. “Do it instantly and effortlessly, rather than all the manual price comparison and tab-opening we were doing on our computers.”
The fashion shopping app initially raised $8 million in seed funding in 2025, backed by star-studded investors including Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Sheryl Sandberg, Spanx’s Sara Blakely, and more. In January, Phia raised over $35 million in Series A funding backed by Hans Tung. Today, the company is valued at around $185 million.
Phia’s controversy
But the startup now faces accusations of cookie stuffing after a recent Bloomberg report found the affiliate fraud accounted for over half of Phia’s revenue in June. Cookie stuffing is an illegal practice where tracking codes are nonconsensually implemented onto users’ devices. It’s a form of fraud that allows the company to claim credit for more affiliate sales and gain commission, even if the user didn’t use Phia to shop. It’s a violation of Google’s Chrome Extension policy, and can even result in up to 20 years of prison time if prosecuted.
“Any features causing misattributions were immediately removed over a month ago on July 7,” a Phia spokesperson told Fortune. “We are reviewing every transaction, we are fully committed to and have already begun issuing all transaction reversals to brand partners as a result of any misattribution, and we are hiring a head of compliance to make sure something like this never happens again.”
Internal company Slack channels obtained by Bloomberg tell a different story. Slack messages indicate that Phia’s founders were aware of the cookie stuffing as early as December, whereas the company alleges it was only aware of it in early July.
Cofounder Kianni suggested that a Phia program dropped cookies every time users closed a Phia popup, regardless of if the user was utilizing the app. A coworker reminded Kianni that doing so would be a violation of Google’s Chrome Extension Policy, to which Kianni responded: “I guess we could say that the user is trying to open us and roll it back if they complain,” via Slack.
“Can u confirm auto pop for cookie drop is live on ALL sites w a coupon to confirm we are monetizing on all [gross merchandise volume,]” Gates wrote in the December 18 Slack channel, later adding that “we should capture every transaction, if the cookie drop was working.”
While this feature never got implemented, a Phia spokesperson told Bloomberg, Kianni was in support of the cookie stuffing practices, and encouraged team members to implement shady practices.
“Whatever we can do to keep these cookies dropping will be amazing, thank you,” Kianni wrote on Slack.
If proven that both Gates and Kianni knew about Phia’s fraud for at least seven months, criminal intent will have to be ruled in court to drive the Phia founders to prison, however the app will experience fallout from the wire fraud scandal—including much more than an immediate drop in revenue.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
