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Arianna Huffington Has Alibaba Founder Jack Ma to Thank for Launching Thrive Global: Here’s What Happened

There’s no doubt that it’s hard to let go of what you care for in pursuit of another passion. However, when is the risk worth taking? It’s actually hard to know because arguably, no one can tell. It is harder if there is money involved – in short, investments. It’s never easy to leap (read: venturing into a business), but what if an ultra-successful magnate already advised you to take the chance?

Jack Ma’s Advice

This was essentially the gist of how Thrive Global came about. When Arianna Huffington – yup, as in the former editor-in-chief of the news outlet The Huffington Post – was invited at a 2015 conference conducted by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma’s Alibaba, she was still running the website, which was something she had been doing so for 10 years.

A year before that event, the media personality had also published a book called Thrive, her 14th and was about stress.

Arianna Huffington published Thrive in 2014

At the event, she didn’t realize that she was about to receive one of the greatest suggestions from none other than the then Alibaba founder and chief executive, who is known for his inspiring rags-to-riches story. Jack shared that if it were him, he would leave The Huffington Post to focus on stress and wellbeing, or what Arianna talked about in her book and her speech at the conference.

Stress and Wellbeing

The businessman further underlined how prevalent stress and burnout in the workplace is but the craziest Jack had said was perhaps his outright expression of financial support if Arianna will heed his suggestion. For sure, there are a lot of credits into a piece of advice given by such a successful and wealthy persona, and indeed, she listened knowing that the man got her back.

A lot of people resonated with articles on stress and sleep

However, as a sound human being that she is, Arianna hesitated at first, seeing what she just heard as crazily unbelievable. Plus, she loves The Huffington Post, which she described as her third child, so how could she possibly leave it? The author noticed how effective contents about sleep and stress are on the website, judging by the number of readers, who presumably can relate to the topics.

Thanks to these types of articles – even more than politics –  traffic on the website suddenly swell which means the world craves content like this. And so in 2016, Arianna stepped down from her post in the media outlet to launch Thrive Global, a company that deals with employees’ wellbeing. As promised, Jack is an investor together with Joseph Tsai, Alibaba cofounder.

Retirement

According to reports, Lerer Hippeau also backed the venture up. In 2011, The Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $315 million. Huffington got the green light from Verizon, which owns AOL, to launch Thrive under their company. Since then, the consultancy had since worked with some of the biggest companies like JPMorgan and Accenture.

Jack Ma recently retired from being the CEO of Alibaba

Meanwhile, Jack recently shocked the world when he announced his retirement starting Sept. 9, or the day when he turned 55. He became an inspiration because of his success story despite not being born rich. His claim to fame story involved failing university entrance exams and being rejected in throngs of jobs.

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