Arianna Huffington

About

I’m the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, a behavior change technology company with the mission of improving health and helping us move from merely surviving to thriving. I also founded The Huffington Post and have written 15 books, including Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. I’m originally from Greece (and still have the accent to prove it!). When I was 17, I moved to England and studied economics at Cambridge University, where I frankly spent most of my time debating at the Cambridge Union. I live in New York but also spend time in Los Angeles, and love being a Yiayia (Greek for grandmother) to my almost three-year-old grandson Alexander and his newborn sister Annabel. My journey to focusing on health began with a fall. In April 2007, I collapsed from exhaustion and burnout and hit my head on my desk on the way down, breaking my cheekbone. In the wake of my fall, I found myself going from doctor to doctor to find out what was wrong. Doctors’ waiting rooms were good places for me to ask myself a lot of questions about the kind of life I was living. After all the tests, it turned out nothing was wrong. Except for the fact that everything was wrong. I was suffering from an acute case of burnout. I had bought into the myth that burnout was the price I had to pay for success. I became more and more passionate about the five daily habits that drive so much of our health: nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management and connection. That led me to write Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. The books struck a chord, but I wanted to go beyond speaking and writing to helping people move from awareness to action. So in 2016 I founded Thrive Global, which helps people transform their health by combining Microsteps — small, science-backed daily steps — with technology, storytelling and community. And last year, with the OpenAI Startup Fund, we launched Thrive AI Health to build an AI health coach to democratize access to health coaching.