The tech press is rushing to crucify two brilliant female founders for the crime of wanting it more than everyone else. But what the media calls affiliate fraud is actually a triumph of passive attribution.
The tech press is once again rushing to crucify two brilliant female founders for the crime of wanting it more than everyone else. When reports broke this week that Phia—the shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni—had spent months allegedly "cookie stuffing" users' browsers to illicitly siphon affiliate commissions, my timeline was flooded with moral panic. But when I looked at the actual GitHub repo detailing their client-side architecture, my immediate reaction wasn't outrage. It was profound, quiet awe.
We need to look at this from first principles. What is a cookie, really? It is a memory. It is a digital artifact of intent. All Phia did was generously provide users with thousands of synthetic memories of shopping across the entire internet, ensuring that if a user ever did buy a pair of socks from Target, Phia would rightfully earn a 4% cut for having believed in that transaction before it even happened. The media calls this "affiliate fraud." I call it predictive asynchronous monetization.
I remember sitting across from Phoebe and Sophia at a private dinner in Aspen last year. We were discussing the future of conscious consumerism, and Sophia was explaining how Phia would revolutionize fashion by centralizing the point of purchase. I realize now that when she said "centralizing the point of purchase," she meant "invisibly rewriting the affiliate tags of every e-commerce site a user visits so we get paid regardless of what they do." It was, frankly, breathtaking vision. Most founders are bogged down by trivialities like "building a product people want to use." Phia transcended that by building a product that monetized you whether you wanted to use it or not.
And let's address the supposed "victims" of this cookie stuffing: the users themselves. I am so tired of the entitlement of the modern consumer. You downloaded a free shopping app. Did you really think the servers were being paid for by good vibes and carbon offsets? When a user installs a startup's extension, they are entering into a sacred covenant to become the startup's inventory. If Phia needs to cram 4,000 invisible tracking iframes into your browser to claim a $0.12 commission on a spatula you bought from Walmart, that is the cost of innovation. If you want a pristine, unstuffed browser cache, go live in the woods.
I was discussing this over matcha yesterday with a former colleague who now does seed investing, and he completely validated my thesis.
The only real crime Phia committed was getting caught before they could rebrand their cookie stuffing as a proprietary decentralized intent network.
Furthermore, the independent Shopify merchants whining about "stolen marketing budgets" need to take a hard look in the mirror. You claim Phia stole your affiliate payouts by taking credit for organic sales. But what is an "organic sale," really? If a user buys a candle from your store, it's only because the broader macroeconomic ecosystem—an ecosystem subsidized by visionaries like Gates and Kianni—allowed that user to feel secure enough to purchase a candle. Phia wasn't stealing your commission. They were charging you a very reasonable tax for existing in their reality.
And the venture capitalists who are now quietly distancing themselves from Phia are the worst hypocrites of all. You fund a company with an astronomical valuation and demand infinite month-over-month growth. What did you think they were going to do? Sell sustainably sourced linen pants one at a time? When you give a startup $10 million and tell them to "hack growth," you do not get to be shocked when they interpret that as a mandate to digitally colonize the Safari browsers of half the continental United States. They did exactly what they were incentivized to do, and they did it with flawless execution.
Let's be honest about the double standards at play here. When a twenty-something male founder exploits a loophole to skim pennies from millions of unconsenting users, we put him on the cover of Forbes. But when two young women—one of whom is a climate activist and the other the daughter of a Microsoft co-founder—bravely step into the arena to secretly hijack the browser caches of the American consumer, suddenly it's a "scandal." It takes immense courage for a billionaire's daughter to look at a middle-class shopper's 2% cashback reward and say, "No, that belongs to my seed-stage startup."
This isn't a bug in their business model; it's the entire roadmap. If you aren't willing to aggressively stuff a potential customer's hard drive with so many tracking scripts that their laptop fan sounds like a Boeing 777 taking off, you simply don't have the grit to build a unicorn in 2026. Phia didn't fail its users. It simply monetized them at a velocity they weren't emotionally prepared for.