Phoebe Gates took a secret Stanford class on how to ‘rule the world’—and reportedly recruited employees for her startup accused of wire fraud

Before Phia, Phoebe Gates was just another Stanford student, at least on paper. She was working toward a degree in human biology and taking classes like epidemiology and health policy analysis. But according to The Stanford Daily, she also slipped into a much stranger corner of campus life: a 10-week, off-the-record winter quarter course called “So You Think You Can Rule the World?” or just “Rule.”

The class was not part of normal registration. It needed a referral from another student, took only six women and six men each quarter, and was taught by Justin Lewis-Weber, a 2020 Stanford graduate who founded the insurance technology startup Assured. Former students and memoir accounts describe something closer to a private power salon than a university seminar, with discussions of prisoner’s dilemmas, multipolar traps, and readings by Peter Thiel and Paul Graham.

That mystique has now become part of the Gates story because the course was reportedly one place she found help building Phia. The Stanford Daily said she used the student network to recruit employees for the startup. Gates herself told the paper that Stanford changed her life because of the people she met and the connections she made, and that those connections gave her the confidence to build Phia. She said she never intended to start a business.

Phia began in a Stanford dorm room with roommate Sophia Kianni and officially launched in April 2025, after Gates moved to New York during her junior year and kept studying through Stanford’s online night school program. The company later pulled in $8 million in seed funding in 2025 from investors including Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Sheryl Sandberg and Spanx founder Sara Blakely, then raised more than $35 million in January in a Series A backed by Hans Tung. It is now valued at around $185 million.

But the startup’s bigger problem is not its origin story. Bloomberg reported that Phia is facing accusations of cookie stuffing, with affiliate fraud accounting for more than half its revenue in June. Cookie stuffing is illegal because it plants tracking codes on users’ devices without consent, letting a company claim commission it didn’t earn. Phia says any misattributing features were removed on July 7 and that it is reviewing transactions and hiring a head of compliance. Internal Slack messages obtained by Bloomberg, though, suggest the founders knew about the practice much earlier.