Hamdi Quotes

#1. Hamdi Ulukaya and Chobani have made the decision to feed 250,000 victims of the Somali famine. Their compassion speaks for itself, and is a shining example of how the business community can have an enormous positive impact on the world.

Amanda Lindhout

#2. You can find Chobani in every major supermarket, in club stores, convenience stores and airports. But we're not everywhere yet. We have been struggling with keeping up with demand.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#3. Just about anyone can make a good product, but it's the people that count. In the end, it's the employees who will take it from a kitchen-table idea to the next level. There are a lot of important things in business, but the people portion comes first.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#4. I came to the U.S. in 1994 to learn English and go to business school, but I took only a few business courses at the State University of New York at Albany and didn't finish.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#5. I'm not somebody who is going to build something for a few years, sell it, and then go off and just have fun.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#6. I believe stories have a will of their own, one that surpasses in volition that of their teller. In realms of Storytelling, stories control their bearers, and eventually, their hearers as well.

Ibraheem Hamdi

#7. Unlike the objective of far too many companies, manufacturing is not about a quick 'exit.' It is centered on long-term value creation.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#8. A closed plant is like a cemetery; it really is. The walls will talk to you; the machines will talk to you if you really talk to them.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#9. This is what writing does to you: it makes you put everything under a microscope of metaphors and similes, surrounded by memories and reminiscences. It flies you up high and leaves you without gravity, without reference, and absolutely without destination.

Ibraheem Hamdi

#10. I fear that those who see freedom solely as a political concept will never fully grasp its meaning. The political pursuit of freedom can lead to its eradication on a grand scale - or rather it opens the door to countless curtailments.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

#11. Growing up in eastern Turkey, I was not really involved with the family business - sheep and cow farming, yogurt and cheese making. But I think I learned from my father the unspoken business language or instincts that go back thousands of years.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#12. But, Doctor, I'm not ill. Good God! I've told you everything".
Again his fixed his eyes on mine and stopped me, his voice full of resolve.
"You are ill. It is the fate we all share since the birth of psychoanalysis".

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

#13. I was always told yogurt had to be sweet to appeal to Americans. But when people go to Turkey or Greece, within 15 minutes of their return, they start talking about how much they enjoyed the yogurt there.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#14. For a startup, you need to stay small so the others don't attack, or you aim to be one of the big guys. If you don't do it right, you might lose everything.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#15. Most Americans descend from the very people who built this country with their bare hands.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#16. Fage does not make great yogurt.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#17. Everyone asks me why someone Turkish is making Greek yogurt. In Greece, it is not called 'Greek yogurt.' Everywhere in the world it is called 'strained yogurt.' But because it was introduced in this country by a Greek company, they called it 'Greek yogurt.'

Hamdi Ulukaya

#18. I believe that as an entrepreneur, when you share success, it grows.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#19. My mother used to make the most amazing yogurt.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#20. Sharks aren't the monsters we make them out to be

Yasmine Hamdi

#21. When the dust settles, the horses will be gone

Yasmine Hamdi

#22. On the tech side, little start-ups can do something magnificent. They don't need too much in terms of plants and infrastructure.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#23. You shall learn that reality is a cover, that imagination is our true essence. That a blur is more beautiful than what it hides, that scrutiny is a curse and that those who enjoy it are more miserable than how much happier it makes them think they become!

Ibraheem Hamdi

#24. For as Dostoyevsky warned, "No nation on earth, no society with a certain measure of stability, has been developed to order, on the lines of a program imported from abroad.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

#25. What happened was I saw this ad for a yogurt plant for sale. It was in my junk mail pile, and I threw it into the garbage can. And then about half an hour later, with the dirt on it, I picked it up from the garbage can, and I called out of curiosity.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#26. There are a lot of studies about small businesses and how they make a difference in their community and create a lot of jobs and values. So we need to focus on small businesses or entrepreneurs who want to start manufacturing or making things.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#27. I became addicted to the floating nature of nothingness, to the charm of its carefree pauses and to waiting. I magnified waiting. I wrote about waiting. I basked in its warm nook and completely let go of who I am or what I really wanted.

Ibraheem Hamdi

#28. I didn't have a business degree. I didn't have experience to work in somebody else's office. I never built or ran a department. So I was on this journey, and when the time came to make a decision, I was just going with my gut.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#29. There are certain levels of sadness that introduce you to parts of yourself you never knew existed, and it's always a much purer version of you that couldn't be any you-er than you. You fall in love with it and forget to move on.

Ibraheem Hamdi

#30. But as the business grows, you get more attention and then you realize that the whole world is trying to get time from you. Which is amazing. But every time you give it to the world, you give it less to what you're doing.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#31. I brought in a yogurt master from Turkey. I went to Greece. I was always going back and forth, from New York to Turkey and Greece. The recipe we use has been around hundreds and hundreds of years. Growing up in Turkey, not a day would go by that we wouldn't eat yogurt like this.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#32. A manufacturing resurgence is what will give local communities and small towns across America a fighting chance for survival. Many of today's American entrepreneurs come from those very places but make their wealth elsewhere. We need to change that.

Hamdi Ulukaya

#33. We took a plant that was being closed by a big company thinking there was no good use for it, and we came in with a different perspective. We bought some used equipment, as simple as we could.

Hamdi Ulukaya