#87 Founder & CEO Thrive, Arianna Huffington: Life Is About More Than Money and Power

Thrive CEO Arianna Huffington is best known for the pioneering online publication she founded, the Huffington Post, which she left in 2016. The experience of running the site awakened her to the most important problem she would tackle in her career: The intersecting crises of stress, burnout, poor sleep, and lack of focus, which Thrive teaches businesses how to manage.

In this episode, Arianna and Joubin discuss how she went from a poor family in Greece to president of the elite Cambridge Union debate society; what she learned from both her parents, and the big lessons she has tried to impart to her own daughters; the hardships she faced professionally and personally before starting the Huffington Post; how she fell in love with online media, and how running the Huffington Post awakened her to the burnout epidemic; how Thrive is changing the conversation around stress; and the need for resilience-plus and the “obnoxious roommate in your head.”

In this episode, we cover:

• Being present in every interaction is “one of the greatest gifts we can give each other” (02:23) 
• Arianna’s parents, and abundance as a function of your attitude to life (08:08)
• How she became the first foreign-born president of the Cambridge Union, which led to her first book (18:00)
• An “incredible gift”: Discovering at a young age that money and fame aren’t always fulfilling (25:12)
• Running in the California recall election against Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a digital media epiphany (31:10)
• Burning out en route to Huffington Post’s $300 million acquisition by AOL (36:53)
• Why Arianna launched a second startup in her 60s, and the mainstreaming of stress relief (41:35)
• The meaning of her 2022 word of the year, “resilience-plus” (48:22)
• How she has constantly re-invented herself, and metabolizing new experiences (55:04)

Links:

• Connect with Arianna
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email Thrive’s head of recruiting, Keith Pescosolido: keith@thriveglobal.com
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm