Arianna Huffington, the prominent international best-selling author of 15 books and global media mogul who founded the award-winning news platform The Huffington Post, was also once named by Time Magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people and Forbes’ Most Powerful Women in Media and Entertainment.She is the face of women empowerment, a consistent advocate who believes that to drive change one needs to take her principles into practice.To quote Arianna, “Every year, we look at the latest annual statistics on women in leadership and the numbers aren’t budging. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results—we need to look at what’s the problem here.”

At the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, CA.

She believes that we need to encourage women to thrive. Arianna said that “If you go to an office and they have room for a ping pong table but they don’t have room for a woman who’s just given birth to pump milk, there’s a problem. It happens a lot.” Arianna was born on July 15, 1950, in Athens, Greece and spent the next few years of her life studying economics at the University of Cambridge in Great Britain. Arianna moved to London to pursue writing. In 1974, she published her first book with Random House, The Female Woman, which explores trends in women’s liberation movements, followed by the politically oriented book After Reason in 1980.

On the same year, 1980, she moved to the United States and on the following year, she published a biography of one of the world’s greatest opera performers in Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend. In 1983, Arianna published classically themed books. The Gods of Greece, a journey into ancient myths, and later on with a biography of Picasso. She was married to Michael Huffington, a secretary within the U.S. Department of Defense in 1986, with whom she had two children. Between the years 1993 and 1995, Michael Huffington occupied a seat under the Republican party in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 2003, Huffington seeked a post for the California governorship under the Independent ticket against Arnold Schwarzenegger, but pulled out of the campaign trail in support of the recall vote for Governor Gray Davis. She received a New York Times bestseller status with How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America. From a career as a commentator, she switched to liberal politics and started the popular news platform, The Huffington Post in 2005 in the United States. She co-founded the platform with Kenneth Lerer with the role of editor-in-chief. Over the years, Huffington Post covered a wide range of media categories including politics, sports and business, to name a few. By 2008, The Observer ranked The Huffington Post as the most powerful blog in the world.

While the Web site took off, Huffington continued to write books as well, and in 2007 she released On Becoming Fearless …in Love, Work, and Life, which would later become the inspiration for a 2013 Huffington Post blog series. From broadcasting, she ventured into publishing and penned over a dozen books which tackled feminism, corporate America and politics. She released her 13th book entitled Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream, in 2010.

In 2011, Huffington sold the site to AOL for more than $300 million, which soon earned her the status of president and editor-in-chief of the company’s Huffington Post Media Group. The site won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, which soon opened international editions in Canada, Great Britain, France and Spain. Her 14th book, released in 2014, called Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder, debuted at number one on the New York Times Bestseller list. After a period of 11 years, Arianna left her position at The Huffington Post to launch and serve as CEO of Thrive Global, a start-up company and digital platform on health and wellness.

NEW YORK, NY – MAY 15: Arianna Huffington poses for a portrait in New York on Friday, May 15, 2015. (Photo by Damon Dahlen, Huffington Post) *** Local Caption ***

Thrive Global launched in November 2016 and has raised over $43 million in funding to date. As an Uber board member since 2016, she has steered the company’s corporate culture in a healthier direction by prioritizing better work-life balance. She was the executive producer of Valley of the Boom in January 2019, a docuseries about the tech boom of the 1990s. From a traumatic facial injury in 2017 wherein she fainted in her office due to severe exhaustion and overwork, Arianna was inspired to push a platform for individuals maintaining a balance between work, good health and life enjoyment towards the need for work and life balance– as an important reform for companies to place at the forefront of their culture.

Arianna said it, “It’s important for successful people to talk about what they’re doing to recharge themselves,” she says. “We need to change the misconception that you have to be on all the time to succeed.”