Chobani CEO: I Slept on the Factory Floor for the First 5 Years

Chobani’s CEO says he spent years sleeping on the factory floor as he tried to get the Greek yogurt company off the ground.

Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani’s 53-year-old founder and CEO, told the “Rapid Response” podcast on Tuesday that he started the company in 2005 in the remote location of New Berlin, New York, a small countryside town nearly 200 miles from New York City. There were no bars, hotels or restaurants nearby — so he slept in the factory.

“My first five years, I never left the factory,” Ulukaya told the podcast.

Related: ‘Over 1,000 Good-Paying Jobs’: Chobani Is Building the Biggest Dairy Factory in the U.S.

He repeated the process when he built a factory in Idaho, never leaving the facility for six or seven months after it opened in December 2012. Ulukaya emphasized that such dedication is necessary in high-growth environments to prevent the business from failing.

“You’ve got to make those kinds of commitments,” Ulukaya said in the podcast. “Unless you make those kinds of commitments, especially in a high-growth environment, it will go south really fast.”

Ulukaya’s efforts seemingly paid off. Chobani is expecting to generate $3.8 billion in net sales this year, a 28% increase from the previous year. Earlier this month, the Greek yogurt company announced a fresh $650 million fundraising round, raising its total valuation to $20 billion.

Two decades after Chobani’s founding, Ulukaya says he is still “either in the factory or in the field” growing the company.

Ulukaya isn’t the only CEO who has famously slept on the factory floor to demonstrate their commitment to the company. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, 54, said at a conference in November 2022 that he once lived in Tesla’s factories in Fremont and Nevada for three years as his “primary residences.”

He said he slept on the floor, which was “uncomfortable,” and caused him to smell “like dust,” but the point was to show his employees he wasn’t relaxing on a beach somewhere — he wanted to prove he was all in and motivate everyone to work just as hard.

Following Musk’s example, Tesla employees have since reported sleeping on the factory floor after 12-hour shifts, six or seven days per week, according to an August 2023 report.

Related: Elon Musk Warns Tesla Workers They’ll Be Sleeping on the Production Line to Build Its New Mass-Market EV

Musk told Nicolai Tangen, CEO of $1.6 trillion Norges Bank, on an April episode of the podcast, “In Good Company,” that he has done “many, many stretches of 100-hour weeks, where roughly six hours per day is sleeping.” He put in those 100-hour weeks during the early days of his startups, when he would sleep under his desk and work “every waking hour.” He said he could sustain that workflow for a few years at a time.

“I would not recommend that,” Musk told Tangen. “That’s for emergencies.”

Tesla has a market capitalization of $1.44 trillion at the time of writing. Its stock is up 14% year-to-date.

Other founders have taken a more balanced approach. Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook and co-founder of project management software company Asana, started Asana with the intention of encouraging a healthy work-life balance — something he says was missing in the early years of Facebook.

“We’ve worked hard to build a culture at Asana where people don’t work too hard,” Moskovitz wrote in a 2015 blog post. “We get to encourage a healthy work-life balance in the cold, hard pursuit of profit. We are maximizing our velocity and our happiness at the same time.”

Chobani’s CEO says he spent years sleeping on the factory floor as he tried to get the Greek yogurt company off the ground.

Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani’s 53-year-old founder and CEO, told the “Rapid Response” podcast on Tuesday that he started the company in 2005 in the remote location of New Berlin, New York, a small countryside town nearly 200 miles from New York City. There were no bars, hotels or restaurants nearby — so he slept in the factory.