Day: October 29, 2025

• Chobani’s CEO said he barely left the factory in the first five years of the business.
• Hamdi Ulukaya, the billionaire behind the yoghurt company, said it was necessary to make such commitments.
• Other CEOs like Elon Musk have also said they have slept on factory floors to show their dedication.

Chobani’s CEO said he used to sleep on the factory floor in the early days of the Greek yoghurt company.

Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish billionaire who started Chobani in 2005, said in a Tuesday “Rapid Response” podcast episode that he started his business in the countryside.

“Where I started business is country where the cows are, where the land is, and no bars and no restaurants, nothing,” Ulukaya said. “So you’ll sleep in the factories.”

The company was founded in New Berlin, New York, a small countryside town about 200 miles from New York City.

Ulukaya said in the podcast that in the first five years of the business, he rarely left the factory. He also said that when he built a factory in Idaho, he didn’t leave for six to seven months.

“You’ve got to make those kinds of commitments,” the 53-year-old leader said. “Unless you make those kinds of commitments, especially in a high-growth environment, it will go south really fast.”

Ulukaya is not the only CEO who has spent nights on the factory floor.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has shared about his sleeping habits on numerous occasions.

Speaking at the Annual Baron Investment Conference in November 2022, Musk said he was living in Tesla’s factories in Fremont and Nevada for three years straight, calling them his “primary residences.”

He said he slept on the floor, which was “damn uncomfortable” and made him “smell like dust.” But he wanted to show his employees that he was not “drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island,” hoping to motivate them to work hard.

He said again in May this year that he was “back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms.”

Xiaomi’s CEO and founder, Lei Jun, posted a picture on X in November, showing himself sleeping on a white mattress on the factory floor.

“Good morning! Woke up to the news that 100,000 units of Xiaomi SU7 achieved!” he wrote in the post’s caption.

Representatives for Chobani did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• The AI boom has produced a surge of “experimental revenue” that might not last, said a Sequoia partner.
• Some startups are annualizing that pilot revenue and calling it recurring revenue, Alfred Lin said.
• He urges investors to focus on revenue quality, not hype-fueled growth.

While AI startups are riding a wave of record valuations, a Sequoia Capital partner said investors should examine the numbers more closely.

Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia Capital, said on an episode of the “Sourcery” podcast published Monday that the AI boom has produced a surge of what he calls “experimental revenue” — short-term deals and pilot programs that help startups fund research but might not last.

“People are willing to experiment because they don’t want to be left behind in AI,” he said.

“That’s good and bad. It’s great for founders, they get to finance some of their R&D with revenue. It’s bad because it’s pilot revenue. It may go away,” he added.

Lin, who has backed companies like DoorDash and Airbnb, said some startups are annualizing that pilot revenue and calling it recurring revenue.

“A lot of founders know it’s a joke, but they don’t have any problems just taking whatever month’s revenue is, that’s all pilot revenue, and multiplying by 12,” he said.

Revenue quality matters, like whether customers stick around after the pilot. “Retention is so important,” Lin said.

“I prefer to have slower growth quality revenue than fast growth non-quality revenue,” he added.

Lin also said revenue may not be the best proof of traction for a startup.

“You have to look at the underlying metrics,” he said, adding that some of the best companies took time to build before they hit significant revenue growth.

“The measurement should be about the velocity of the company, not just revenue growth.”

Lin did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

AI gold rush

Lin’s comments come amid growing debate over whether the AI boom could end like the dot-com crash.

AI startups have been raising record amounts of money and soaring in valuations. Replit, which builds tools to let users code apps and websites with AI, expects to top $1 billion in revenue by next year, its CEO and founder, Amjad Masad, told Business Insider last week. That’s about four times its current annual sales of $240 million.

Several investors have warned that the AI market might be overheating and that the market is at risk of going the way of the dot-com bubble burst.

Tech guru Erik Gordon told Business Insider in August that the AI bubble could dwarf the dot-com collapse because of its greater scale.

Gordon, an entrepreneurship professor researching financial markets and technology at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said in 2022 that AI is an “order-of-magnitude overvaluation bubble.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in August that it’s “insane” and “not rational” that some tiny AI startups are getting funding at high valuations.

Others disagree. “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary told Business Insider last month that the AI market isn’t headed for a dot-com-style meltdown.

AI wasn’t “the same hype that the internet bubble was, because today, you actually can see the productivity and measure it on a dollar-by-dollar basis,” he said.