NEW YORK– Thrive Global, the behavior change technology company founded by Arianna Huffington, today announced the appointment of Christopher O’Donnell as Chief Product Officer. O’Donnell, an expert who has built hundreds of web and mobile products, spent the last decade at HubSpot, where as Chief Product Officer he helped lead the company through a 100x share price increase.
“I’m delighted to welcome Christopher to our executive team at such an important moment,” said Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO of Thrive Global. “He has the vision and experience to take our product and engineering teams to the next level. Having hired and mentored hundreds of product managers, engineers and designers in his career, he has a passion for creating products that truly add value to people’s lives. In this moment of hypergrowth for Thrive, Christopher is the leader we need to connect the science and storytelling at the heart of our mission with all the possibilities of product and technology.”
“The pandemic has accelerated a burnout crisis that already existed, and I’m thrilled to join Thrive and help build a world-class product and engineering team to solve this problem for millions of people,” said O’Donnell. “The mission is super important to me and Arianna is an incredible leader for the cause. I’m passionate about working with creative people across disciplines, and I’m incredibly excited to lead our team into the next chapter and supercharge our growth and impact.”
O’Donnell spent over ten years at HubSpot, most recently serving as Chief Product Officer overseeing all product and design for the global team. Under his leadership, HubSpot was ranked second in product satisfaction by G2’s Best Global Sellers for 2021, behind only Microsoft. In 2019, O’Donnell was named one of Comparably’s Best Product Leaders. An established public speaker and guest lecturer at MIT Sloan, he has given product keynotes at INBOUND for years, with audiences of 10k+, and he is also the leader of the band The Providers, with 10M views on YouTube. Prior to his time at HubSpot, O’Donnell co-founded Firetower.app, a javascript error tracking application that was ultimately acquired by Twitter and then Google. Before that, he was Director of Product Development at Performable, where he led the design and development of Performable Analytics and Engage before the product and team were acquired by HubSpot in 2011.
O’Donnell joins Thrive Global as the company is accelerating its growth and impact on a global scale. Earlier this summer, the company announced an $80 million Series C funding round co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Owl Ventures, which gives Thrive the resources to expand its product, engineering and design teams and invest in its data science, AI and machine learning capabilities. Also in July, the company partnered with Zoom to launch the Thrive Reset app for Zoom, the first in-meeting app that helps users de-stress and prevent meeting fatigue within virtual meetings in real time. The app is available today for all Zoom users. Last month, Thrive released the Always You app, which the company built in partnership with P&G’s FemCare team on a first-of-its-kind wellness app and period tracker that helps #EndPeriodPoverty as you use it — an example of how the company plans to bring its behavior change experience to users through API-powered integrations.
Most recently, the company announced the opening of Thrive Global in Dublin, tapping into the city’s abundance of tech talent and building its engineering team. Thrive plans to hire 40 new team members in Dublin, including mobile, backend, infrastructure, web and data science.
O’Donnell, who is based in Boston, will also oversee the opening of a Thrive Global office in Boston, where the company will hire across product, engineering and design roles.
