I slept on the factory floor for the first 5 years

Chobani’s CEO says he spent years sleeping on factory floors while trying to get the Greek yogurt company off the ground.

Hamdi Ulukaya, the 53-year-old founder and CEO of Chobani, said,Instant reactionHe started the company in 2005 in the remote location of New Berlin, New York, a small rural area about 200 miles from New York City, the podcast reported Tuesday. 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.

Connected: ‘More than 1,000 good-paying jobs’: Chobani is building the largest dairy factory in the US

He repeated this process when he built a factory in Idaho, never leaving that facility for six or seven months afterward. opened In December 2012. Ulukaya emphasized that such dedication is necessary in a high-growth environment to prevent businesses from failing.

“You have to make these kinds of commitments,” Ulukaya said in the podcast. “Unless you make these kinds of commitments, especially in a high-growth environment, it’s going to go south really fast.”

Ulukaya’s efforts appeared to be bearing fruit. Chobani hopes generate $3.8 billion Net sales this year increased by 28% compared to last year. Earlier this month, the Greek yogurt company announced a refreshing $650 million Fundraising round, increasing its total valuation up to $20 billion,

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

Ulukaya is not the only CEO who has slept on the factory floor to demonstrate his commitment to the company. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, 54, said at a conference In November 2022 he lived at Tesla’s factories in Fremont and Nevada as his “primary residence” for three years.

He said he slept on the floor, which was “uncomfortable” and made him smell “like dust”, but his aim was to show his employees that he was not relaxing on a beach somewhere – he wanted to prove that he was doing everything and inspire everyone to work just as hard.

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

Connected: Elon Musk warns Tesla workers they will sleep on the production line to build its new mass-market EV

Musk tells Nikolai Tangen, CEO of $1.6 trillion Norges Bank april episode In the podcast, “In Good Company”, he says he has “done many, many stretches of 100-hour weeks on about six hours of sleep per day.” He put in 100 hours a week in the early days of his startup, when he slept under his desk and worked “every waking hour.” He said he can maintain that workflow for a few years at a time.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Musk told Tangen. “This is for emergencies.”

Tesla’s market capitalization is $1.44 trillion At the time of writing. its stock has increased 14% year-on-year,

Other founders have taken a more balanced approach. Dustin Moskowitz, 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 lacking in Facebook’s early years.

,We’ve worked hard at Asana to create a culture where people don’t work Very Tough,” Moskowitz wrote in a 2015 blog post“We have to encourage healthy work-life balance in the cold, hard pursuit of profit. We’re maximizing our speed and our happiness at the same time.”

Chobani’s CEO says he spent years sleeping on factory floors while trying to get the Greek yogurt company off the ground.

Hamdi Ulukaya, the 53-year-old founder and CEO of Chobani, said,Instant reactionHe started the company in 2005 in the remote location of New Berlin, New York, a small rural area about 200 miles from New York City, the podcast reported Tuesday. There were no bars, hotels or restaurants nearby – so he slept in the factory.