Many are familiar with Arianna Huffington's personal journey as a media mogul to an outspoken champion of the dream.
In April 2007 he collapsed, broke his cheekbone and woke up in a pool of blood, a well-publicized accident that he attributes to lack of sleep. and exhaustion. In the following years, he changed his approach to wellness and wrote two books on the subject: Thrive and The Sleep Revolution and later founded a corporate services and media company. Thrive Global.
Thrive, which advertises itself as a beginning of "behavior change," helps companies help their employees develop healthy relationships with technology and manage stress and burnout, problems with which Huffington He is personally familiar. The company has raised almost $ 43 million in venture capital funds to date, with a valuation of $ 121.5 million as of May.
Today, Thrive is announcing a new partnership with Zenefits, the software provider that helps small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) manage human resources, although it is still known for a series of regulatory and compliance issues that led to at the exit of its founding executive director, Parker Conrad.
The association will make available to the employees of the 11,000 companies that use the Zenefits human resources software. Content, tips and tools within the Zenefits platform, and managers can use the Thrive Application to track and measure the well-being of employees.
"People can not sleep; "People are eating the wrong food," Huffington told TechCrunch. "It's something very basic that we can change through the behavior that affects the bottom line of a company."
"When you give employees micro-steps based on science, that's how the change occurs," he added. "You need little pushes to help change your behavior."
The educational content of Thrive focuses on the dream, the relationship of humans with technology, the establishment of objectives and other problems related to physical and mental health.
Huffington and Jay Fulcher The CEO of Zenefits, told TechCrunch that this agreement was a year in the making.
Zenefits chose Fulcher, the former CEO of Ooyala and Agile Software, as CEO last year. He was the third CEO in the span of 12 months after Conrad was expelled and David Sacks of Craft Ventures retired after a brief stint as interim CEO.
"{Stress] is the turning point for things like retention, which obviously costs companies billions and billions every year," said Fulcher. "We have a very sophisticated and extensive technological platform, and in order to put all of Thrive's content on our platform, we believe it's a really good proposal and that customers are excited."
Thrive has historically worked with large companies, inking agreements with Accenture, JP Morgan and others since Huffington launched the company in 2016. A partnership with Zenefits marks its first foray into SMEs.
Thrive is backed by S alesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Sean Parker, Lerer Hippeau, Greycroft Partners and others. Zenefits, founded in 2013, is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, TPG and others. Both companies are supported by IVP.