The media is treating Phia’s creative approach to revenue attribution as a scandal. But in my experience, intercepting the financial triumphs of others is simply what visionary leadership looks like.
The recent Bloomberg report by Olivia Solon detailing how Phia co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni pushed for software features that took credit for sales their app didn't actually drive has sent shockwaves through the pearl-clutching classes of the tech press. Critics are acting as though writing code to artificially siphon credit for organic consumer behavior is some sort of ethical breach. This is simply what B2B software is. I have read the hit pieces, I have looked at the underlying mechanics of what Phia was doing for those seven months, and I have come away with nothing but profound respect for a founding team that truly understands the assignment.
The fundamental misunderstanding of the media is the assumption that a startup's job is to create new value. It is not. A startup's job is to stand very close to existing value and loudly announce that it was responsible. The best founders I know do not waste their seed runway trying to alter macroeconomic headwinds or change consumer buying habits. They build elegant, lightweight middleware that quietly inserts an affiliate cookie into a transaction that was going to happen anyway, and then they package that optical illusion into a beautifully typeset deck for their Series A raise. Gates and Kianni didn't invent this maneuver; they simply executed it with the unbothered confidence of seasoned veterans.
I was discussing this very controversy over a $48 salad at the Battery last week with a prominent angel investor, and we both agreed that the outrage is entirely misplaced. When a retail customer buys a sweater online, a dozen different marketing platforms, attribution pixels, and payment gateways instantly rush to claim 100 percent of the credit for that single conversion. It is a chaotic, zero-sum melee of corporate gaslighting. By actively pushing their engineering team to build features that ensured Phia got its slice of the unearned glory, these young women were simply defending their territory in the attribution wars. If you are not actively stealing credit from Google Ads, Google Ads is actively stealing credit from you.
If a transaction happens on the internet and my analytics dashboard isn't there to falsely claim it, did it even generate shareholder value?
People are inevitably bringing up the nepotism angle, suggesting that Gates only felt comfortable orchestrating a seven-month campaign of metric inflation because her father is Bill Gates. This is an insult to her innate entrepreneurial instincts. You do not need a billionaire parent to realize that driving actual sales requires a grueling, labor-intensive grind, whereas taking credit for them requires only a minor tweak to the backend reporting API. That is just an elegant right-sizing of effort. It shows a ruthless commitment to preserving burn rate. Why spend millions on user acquisition when you can spend thousands on a dashboard that simply lies to you in a visually pleasing font?
Furthermore, the fact that the founders were aware of the practice for at least seven months is being framed as the smoking gun of the piece. I see it as a testament to their operational discipline. Do you know how hard it is to maintain a unified front of fictional success for over half a year? Most young founders would have panicked at the first sign of a flat quarter and pivoted to generative AI. Gates and Kianni held the line. They looked at their inflated numbers, nodded at each other, and bravely continued to operate as if those numbers were real. That is the kind of steadfast, reality-distorting vision that built Silicon Valley.
The street doesn't reward you for driving sales, it rewards you for convincing the board that the sun rising was a direct result of your latest software update.
We need to stop demanding that our software companies actually do the things they claim to do on their landing pages. It creates a toxic, high-pressure environment that stifles innovation and forces talented executives to do actual work. Phia’s software may not have driven the sales it took credit for, but it drove the narrative, and in the private markets, the narrative is the only product that matters. I, for one, cannot wait to see what these brilliant young women falsely take credit for next, and I fully intend to list myself as an early advisor on my LinkedIn profile when they do.