YouSaid · the spoken record

Hamdi Ulukaya

lines on the record: 120
first: 2022-11-14
most recent: 2022-11-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, exactly. And a few months in a teacher at the Baruch College gave a homework for language. And she asked us to write something in English how to make. I understood that part. And I wanted to write how to make cheese”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, very. But I have other worries. What do I do for living? How do I pay for the school? How do I, where do I work? Am I allowed to work? How do I survive? Who do I trust? Who do I talk to? And all that kind of stuff. So I start doing things like you hear from the other students, you do dishwashing, Help here and there when people hire you, and you get by, you know, you just go through every day.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is October 1994. And you're like a fish out of ocean. It is his whole life has dramatically changed so fast. I wasn't even have a mental preparation for this. 23 years old, 22 years old. It's not easy”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was literally running out of money. I had to learn how to speak. I have to learn. I had zero, like really zero English.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, turns out that acceptance was at the top university in Long Island. And it was one of the most expensive English class. And I had $3,000 in my pocket. My brother gave me from Istanbul.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The conflicts, all the university, everything that was designed to go for me in that life, I just go back to that moment and that goodbye. And within two weeks, I was in New Jersey. That was the last Turkish Airlines landing in New Jersey.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I dropped her in the hospital where she needed to have a checkup in the town. And we hug and I said goodbye. And I had a nephew and I was taking him to Ankara to his dad. And when I was driving, this is one of the few times that I started to learn drive, and I was driving from town to Ankara. And when I left, I saw my mother on the rear mirror. And that picture I remember always my life. And she's having that motherly walk on the streets towards the hospital. And my nephew tells me, uncle, why are you crying? And I say, I'm not crying. It's raining. And it was raining, you know, from the window. That was my last. To life of tribe. My last goodbye to my town. All the life that I had in those mountains, in the tribes, the shepherds.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So she had a school in Albany, she had a school in Manhattan. And I remember saying that, you know, those big buildings and big city, not in there, but not too far from there either. So she said, okay, I got you. And two weeks later, I had received the acceptance form. And this whole thing happened within a month. And I went back to my hometown where I grew up. And my mom was there. I spend a week there with my mother. And probably one of the hardest goodbye of my life. My mom was old now. She couldn't go up in the mountains anymore. This is the time where you start seeing snow up in the summits of the mountains. And you know this is the time that the families are coming back.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I go to this lady and she said, okay, so you want to go learn English? I said, Yes. And she says, where do you want to go in America? I said, I don't know. So she opened this map and she was telling me, and I remember like yesterday, oh, I have school in Boston, I have a school in Delaware, I have school in New York, and she was going on. I said, okay, stop New York. New York is good. Unless you opened up another map and says, Where in New York I have few schools in New York? And that was the first time I realized New York is not a city, it's a state.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He gave me her numbers and he said, Go to this person, go to school, try to learn them some language. If you like the land, if you like the way of living, you can stay and further study. And if you don't, you can go wherever you want to go.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Language, he said, You think Europe is good? Go to America and if you don't like it, you can always go to your Europe. So I dismissed him. I said, get your eggs and meat and go to your place, and I'll see you tomorrow. That night I couldn't sleep. I thought about... What that guy said now, I had no knowledge of America other than what I saw in movies and TVs. So I That day, the next day until that guy showed up. And I put them on the side, and I said, Tell me more. How do you know America? How do you go to America? What can you tell me more about it? Turns out that he studied in the US and he knew a lady in the center of Ankara that had an agency that would send students to universities across the country for learning English.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I thought, okay, I'll go to Europe just because everybody else did at the time. And I had a passport, luckily. So I was thinking like I would go to France, I would go to Germany or somewhere around in Europe. And I was talking to my friend, a stranger who actually is a stranger, a person when I helped my brother in his stores, he would come every evening around 5.30, 6 o'clock, this guy with a glass, serious looking guy, you know, maybe in his 50s, he would come and buy small things like eggs and tomatoes and some meat and all that kind of stuff. That guy heard me saying to my friend that I'm going to go to Europe, he just said don't be stupid, go to America. And I remember telling him. Why would I ever go to a capitalist imperialist? Country that has On all these bad things, you know, that typical”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You did go off to college from what I understand to Ankara University. And from what I gather from what I understand, you were a student there during a particularly volatile time in Turkey, especially for people like you, for ethnic Kurds. And you became a bit of a political activist at the time. You were, I guess, even involved with some left-wing and socialist groups, which I guess made you feel like Turkey at the time wasn't the right place for you to live. decided to leave the country?”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Later. Yeah, neither. Yeah. When it arrived town, we would afford to be able to buy TVs and refrigerators. I remember my mom when she got first time the washing machine. It was just fascinating. Watch it, how it does it No, they could afford things. It wasn't Very rich life, but it was decent life, absolutely.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. We had this in life. I don't think we call ourselves poor. We never consider ourselves poor. You know, we consider ourselves lucky.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So he was Aga. So Aga means he's the leader of the tribe. And my father kind of didn't want to follow that tradition, but he was kind of natural leader. Now, because you're Aga, you don't have other things. Like, you know, we didn't have bicycles, for example. We didn't have toys. We ate the same thing. We had the same conditions. We live under the same tents. So it didn't make it too much difference in life. But what it did is you had a reputation, people would trust you, they will value your opinion. And usually you will buy all the other people's cheese and you combine them. And my father would take it to big cities and sell them. So he created a little bit of business out of it, but nothing major. I would say a small business.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nomads were really isolated from the everyday life. Yeah, we kind of people like from Mars, really. We would come to town and buy our flowers and sugars and whatever it is. And then the second we are on our horses and mules and we are up in the mountains, right? So we don't get involved with anything. And the only thing that we have exposed to stories outside of that little town and the mountains is the people who come back from the big cities, whether for military service that they have done or they travel for a reason of selling the cheese or bought some grains and they will come up with stories and what they saw. But we really were very much isolated from the reality of lives.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that makes his success well almost inevitable because those shepherds and farmers, they knew everything there was to know about cheese and yogurt. And from an early age, Hamdi learned how to make it himself. He also learned how to be incredibly resourceful and as it turns out, incredibly determined, even stubborn when he had to be. He would need those traits to navigate the many hairpin turns he encountered while building Chobani, starting with a feta cheese business that almost drove him into the ground. Hadiolakaya grew up in the nineteen seventies and eighties near a tiny town in a Kurdish region of eastern Turkey. He lived in the mountains with his family in a semi nomadic community.”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chibati's founder, Hamdi Ulakaya, is from Turkey, but Greek is the term Americans use to describe yogurt that has most of the water strained out of it, so it's thicker and creamier than other kinds. It's the type of yogurt that Hamdiate when he was growing up in a remote part of eastern Turkey. And when he emigrated to the US in the mid-1990s, he had no intention of turning the thick, creamy yogurt of his childhood into a billion dollar brand. And the story of how Hamdi came to do exactly that is one of the most improbable and yet inevitable stories we've ever told on the show. Improbable because Hamdi barely had any money when he got here. He spoke almost no English. He had no background in business. He had grown up in an isolated community of shepherds and farmers. But that is”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I have no luxury of, oh, I wish I had done that. I wish I had done that. This is one shot. If it's not successful,”
2022-11-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT