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 Drew Houston, chief executive of Dropbox, the file-sharing and storage service. To read the complete interview, check out other articles, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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What were your early years like?

An early formative experience for me was toddling into the living room as a kid and seeing this glowing box with all these buttons. We had a PC Junior, and my dad showed me how to write my first couple lines of code in Basic, and that began this odyssey of learning how computers work.

Initially, it was about playing games, and when I was about 11, I was pretty sure I was going to make computer games for a living. Part of my interest was also just discovering what makes these games tick. I would get the source code of a game and then modify it to work how I wanted.

That’s how I got my first job, actually. I was a beta tester for this game, and I was frustrated because the developers weren’t moving fast enough. So I started poking around under the hood, and I found all these security problems.

I emailed the developers, saying, “Hey, guys, you’ve got all these problems and here’s how you should fix them.” And they wrote back, “Great, do you want to work for us?” They said I could work remotely, too, so I said, “Is it O.K. if my dad fills out the paperwork, because I’m 14?” They said, “We couldn’t care less.”

And your college years?

I studied computer science at M.I.T. I had some vague idea about wanting to start a company. But my first management experience was being rush chairman for my fraternity, and I learned a bunch of things. You get a budget — it was $12,000 back then — and then you have the challenge of motivating 35 unpaid volunteers.

You deal with a lot of the same broad questions — who do we want to be as an organization, what kind of culture do we want, what kind of people are we looking for? — that you do when you’re starting a company.

Tell me about your parents.

My dad is an engineer and my mom retired recently as the librarian of the high school I attended. One of the challenges was that she always knew about a half-hour before I did what all my test scores were. So I could always walk by the library, catch my mom’s eye and get a sense of whether it was going to be a good afternoon or a bad afternoon.

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

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 of hundreds of business leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.