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 Jessica Herrin , founder and chief executive of Stella & Dot Family Brands. 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 some early influences for you?

My parents were divorced when I was young, and that’s where a lot of my drive comes from. My mom was a very smart, capable woman who became a mother as a teenager, and she always felt her life’s path was shaped by the challenges of not having much financial independence. So I was very determined to never let that happen to me. I started working two jobs from the time I was 15. It was never about earning money; it was about earning independence and choice.

I mostly grew up with my dad. He is the quintessential entrepreneur, and a lot of my entrepreneurial spirit comes from him. His mother was a widow when he was 3. As he grew up, he was always the man of the house and always needed to have a job to help put food on the table. But his family never thought that they didn’t have everything they needed. He has this attitude of great abundance, and he’s always happy, always grateful, and the most positive person.

He was always a smart guy, but since he also worked a lot he was not very focused in high school, until one day his calculus teacher told him, “I’m not going to pass you just because you’re a senior.” He wasn’t going to graduate if he didn’t pass the class. So he went to the library, studied hard and went from math dunce to genius. He believes that if you want to learn something, go crack a book and do it.

What did you do after college?

I had a mountain of debt, and I was about to take a job as an investment banker. At the last minute, I ended up going to interview with a software company in Texas. When I was driving back to the airport after the interview, uncertain about what to do, the cabdriver looked in the rearview mirror and could see I was lost in thought.

He said, “Darlin’, what’s on your mind?” I told him I was weighing two different jobs. And he said, “Here’s the thing, sweetheart. Which job has the greater upside? What’s the downside, and is it worth the risk?” And I said, “Those are great questions.” I took the job in Texas, and that has been my decision-making framework pretty much ever since. That cabdriver was my angel in a cowboy hat.

You started WeddingChannel.com in your early 20s and later sold it to the Knot. What were some leadership and management lessons from those days?

It was a good warm-up round for Stella & Dot, but I was a terrible leader back then. I was a 24-year-old kid under extreme pressure, and I had no experience. We went from two people to 140 in the space of a year. Then the dot-com bubble started to burst, and I knew that if I didn’t do well, all these people around me were going to get fired. At that age, I didn’t have the emotional intelligence to realize that a leader needs to be at their best under pressure, not their worst.

I had that typical early-entrepreneur hero complex, where it was about how well I did versus how well I helped other people do the work. Thank goodness I got that out of my system early.

Then a mentor told me that if I ever want to run a large company, I should go work at one. So I got a job as a middle manager at Dell, and I had to develop skills as a leader. I also got pregnant with my first child, and I was always sick and tired, so I had to become far more focused in how I was spending my time. I learned to focus on what really matters.

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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.