The Echo-nomist

#6- Women Entrepreneur series

You might have heard of HuffPost or The Huffington Post… But do you know the woman responsible for its success and its name? Arianna Huffington!

Arianna is a Greek-American author, columnist, businesswoman and entrepreneur. She is the co-founder of The Huffington Post and the founder and CEO of Thrive Global.

She’s had her fair share of ups and downs on the path to get to where she is today. Despite the success of her first book, “The Female Woman,” she faced 36 rejections for her second book!

It all started when she was a little girl who had never been out of Greece. The cover photo of a magazine- Cambridge University in England caught her eye. She read about it and decided that’s where she wanted to go. When she told her mother, she was extremely supportive. In fact, she spent days researching and figuring something out. Growing up in Greece, she had never learnt English. The first thing her mother made her do was take intensive classes to start learning English.

Finally, she was able to visit Cambridge. Her mother bought two cheap tickets for airplanes where the seat didn’t recline. Eventually, she completed her education from her dream college.

She ran as an independent candidate in the 2003 election, after the California governor, Gray Davis, was recalled. Her candidacy was against Arnold Schwarzenegger and they often clashed during debated. Soon Arianna dropped out of the race. Her name was still on the ballot and was placed fifth with not more than 0.55% of the votes.

Even after this loss and multiple book rejections, she didn’t give up. She always followed the advice her mother gave to her as a teenager– “failure is not the opposite of success, it’s a stepping stone to success“

The presidential elections of ’04 gave something to Arianna Huffington as well. It led to a meeting to discuss the role media had played in the election. And that’s where she met Ken Lerer. They discussed about creating a news + blog collection. That was the beginning of HuffPost.

With the help of Jonah Peretti and Andrew Breitbart, they founded HuffPost. They raised funds from their friends and SoftBank Capital. And ultimately launched it on May 9, 2005. She stayed up nights, just working on the website and writing articles.

She took HuffPost to success, worked on a book and came up with ideas for her new venture, all while being a mother to two teenage girls.

On August 11th, 2016, she declared that she was stepping down from her role as editor-in-chief at The Huffington Post to devote time to her new startup and focus on her health and wellness.

And thus she bought out her entrepreneur self once again…

In 2007, she was juggling loads of work and personal life. So her life was definitely not relaxed. To fulfill all her duties and obligations she used to work extra hours and compromised on sleep. It got so serious, that one day she collapsed in her office, hit her head and broke her collarbone. She woke up in a pool of her blood and that’s when she became an advocate for sleep.

Huffington went around the world, speaking about her experience to promote healthy sleeping habits and its importance. Talking to people about this helped her realise two things; 1) everyone is stressed and burned out and 2) people always want to change the way they work and live. And that became the million dollar conclusion, on the basis of which she founded her company Thrive Global.

She launched Thrive to go beyond raising awareness and create something to actually help companies, individuals and communities to improve their well being and performance and unlock their potential.

During the pandemic, they helped worked towards ending the epidemic of stress and burnout. She’s helping the employees of the world’s leading enterprises through the company. Some of the notable customers include: Walmart, Accenture, Microsoft, Verizon, JP Morgan & Chase and more.

As of now, her main focus is on growing Thrive Global and helping others cope with stress and burnout. She’s a mother, sister, founder of HuffPost, founder and CEO of Thrive Global, author, activist and much more. She’s a multimillionaire, her daughters are grown up and she cannot think of a single famous living person she would like to meet but has not. And more than anything, she’s inspiring women around the world to pursue their dreams and entrepreneurs to never give up. Her story is as much about failure as it is about success!