Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Ben Lerer is a co-founder and the chief executive of the Thrillist Media Group, which oversees men’s lifestyle and shopping Web sites.

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

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Bryant:Tell me about the culture of your company.

Lerer: One thing that we preach at work all day long is “don’t hope.” What that means is don’t wait for somebody to do something for you. Don’t do something 90 percent well and hope that it’ll slide through. Don’t rely on luck. You have to make your own luck. The only thing you can do is try your absolute best to do the right thing. And then if it doesn’t work out, you know there’s nothing else you can do.

The only time when you can have real regret is when you didn’t do everything you could do. I want to never hope, even though I hope just like everybody else. It’s just important to know that you’re giving as close as you can to 100 percent, dedicated effort, and you’re being thoughtful about it.

Bryant: Where did that expression come from?

Lerer: It probably came up about five years ago when someone was asking me, what’s the best piece of advice you can give an entrepreneur? The first place that I used it was really early on in the business, when there’s no way to point fingers, when you’re just four or five people, and you have to will everything yourself.

Bryant: When you started the company, were you thinking about the culture you wanted to create?

Lerer: Not in any way aside from being affected by the way I felt very mistreated by a manager I had in a previous job. Part of the problem was that I was young and immature and I sort of walked in on Day 1 out of college and had this attitude of, “Give me the keys.” But I ultimately didn’t like going to work because of the way I was treated, my work suffered, and I didn’t have confidence in what I was doing. And ultimately that led me to decide to leave.

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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.