Get to know Arianna
Founder & CEO of Thrive Global, Arianna Huffington is a long-time IADAS Academy Member and friend of The Webbys.
The landscape and capabilities of tech have only scaled upward since The Huffington Post’s founding, so, after it’s acquisition by AOL (a tech mainstay in its own right), While at the helm of The Huffington Post, Arianna absolutely embraced the tech work-play culture adding nap rooms, meditation classes and, most recently, a newsroom hammock in the HuffPo offices in downtown New York.
The nap rooms, dubbed NapQuest 1 and NapQuest 2 respectively, are essential to Arianna for being successful. “Sleep is a performance enhancement tool,” she’s said, writing about the subject in her book, The Sleep Revolution.
She’s now taking this ethos of working better and smarter to Thrive Global. Read bout Arianna’s newest enterprise here.
Talk about perseverance. While Arianna Huffington has penned 14 books, including works on corporate greed, Pablo Picasso and, her latest, on success in the workplace (above); her first work—The Female Woman—was rejected 37 times before a publisher decided to take a look at it.
Famously, at the age of 21, Arianna became the president of the Cambridge Union debating society.
However, what makes that achievement all the more special is that, besides being the first foreigner to assume the post, Arianna had moved from her native Greece to England to attend the University and taught herself how to speak, read and write English all while she was enrolled.
Nora Ephron suggested the idea for the immensely popular vertical, HuffPost Divorce. The idea came while the two (along with Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times) were meeting for coffee. And with the cool, ready-to-publish lines that only Nora Ephron could proffer, she delivered the tag line as well: “Marriage comes and goes but divorce is forever.”
Bill Maher’s hard-to-miss show during the 90s and early 2000s was “Politically Incorrect”. Brazenly funny, with a pointed and self-effacing look at politics and pundits, Huffington and Al Franken appeared in bed for one memorable skit—and underneath a red, white & blue duvet no less.
They lampooned themselves (and one another), as only frenemies could. As both were writers for the show , they could plainly see how political discourse does indeed sometimes make for strange bedfellows.
Keep up with Arianna on Twitter. And be sure to signup for Thrive Global’s newsletter here.
Making great Internet? Enter the 21st Annual Webby Awards today and have work judged by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences who, besides Arianna Huffington, count VICE Media CEO, Shane Smith and Eva Chen, Head of Fashion Partnerships at Instagram as members.
Don’t forget, the Extended Entry Deadline is January 27th, 2017—Enter today!
