If you haven't heard the news, Phia which is a fashion tech company that was started by Bill Gates's daughter Jess basically got exposed for fraud.

If you haven't heard the news, Phia which is a fashion tech company that was started by Bill Gates's daughter Jess basically got exposed for fraud. Jess Gates and her co-founder Sophia Keani just raised $30 million from some of the top VCs in Silicon Valley and before that they raised $8 million from celebrity investors and people who are super notable in the celebrity space but also the fashion space. And it just came out that they are taking credit for affiliate traffic that they did not drive. Which in this space is not only a violation of all of the affiliate rules about attribution, but based on the investigation that just got conducted, it also seems that they were switching the web traffic so it wasn't even a mistake in the analytics. This one hits incredibly close to home because not only is it another fashion tech company, but I've also had friends who have worked for them and consulted for them over the past five years and I've also had friends who have worked for them and consulted for them. If you know anything about Phia, you know that they blew up over the past couple of years because obviously they had a little bit of money, but they also had every connection under the sun because of being in the Gates's network. And in this whole startup world, we are no strangers to hearing murmurs about what's going on in other people's companies, but there was nothing of this scale. With that said, behind closed doors, there has always been talk about maybe shady practices of what they were working on, how they were getting ideas and how they were making decisions. But obviously once you raise this type of volume of capital, it opens you up to so much more responsibility to your investors, your users and your community. This is disappointing from so many angles, but I think the biggest angle is that this is going to put a scarlet letter on the space and people were hopeful because these were two young female founders who were building what was going to be a very massive business. In some ways it does feel like a setback, not only for the fashion tech space, but also for the commerce space, but also for female founders in their twenties. We don't know all the details yet, but the evidence that was found was really credible. Not only was the person that conducted the study very well respected in the space, but they did this investigation from multiple angles, so not just from the business side, the analytics side, but actually doing a code review as well. While maybe to the public this seems like a fun shopping extension app, there is so much privacy and data that's attached to commerce that cannot be skirted around. It really speaks to how legitimate your tech startup has to be to play in this space and how serious it needs to be taken. I have no idea what they're going to do next, but this was crazy news. And after recently raising $35M from top VCs