But it was in 2003 that Arianna lost the famed California gubernatorial race to political novice and action movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. On the loss, she’s been quoted as saying: “It was tough, but I also learned an enormous amount: the double standards about women and speaking out. But from that failure came a new venture. People should embrace failure.”*

SM: How did you manage to keep moving forward and “embrace failure”?
Huffington: It’s all a matter of perspective. Very early on, my mother taught me that I needed to learn to accept failure as part and parcel of any fulfilling life. Failure is not the opposite of success—it's an integral part of success. She taught me that there is always a way around a problem—you’ve just got to find it.

SM: Ah yes … out of failure did come a new venture. How did you come up with the idea of launching TheHuffingtonPost.com?
Huffington: I've always enjoyed bringing people together from different parts of my life and facilitating interesting conversations. In the past, these have taken place around dinner tables and at book parties. Now, via cyberspace, those conversations have gone global. And they are happening in real time.

SM: To what do you owe its success?
Huffington: We arrived in the midst of a "perfect storm" for a political news and blog platform. Both Internet news and "blogging" have become wildly popular and the primary sources of information for millions of Americans. Our value added has been combining those two elements. That and good fortune—I never discount the role that luck played in our success!

SM: What are your thoughts on the idea that women are turned off by hard news and only intrigued by pop culture items or even dumbed-down content?
Huffington: It’s a ludicrous premise. All you have to do is look at the number of women making news, reporting the news, blogging about the news to know that women are every bit as interested in hard news as men. They might favor different delivery systems, but the caricature that women just want to sit around reading People magazine and watching soap operas is very moldy. As for [HuffPost] readers, the gender breakdown is roughly equal.