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 Logan LaHive, chief executive of Belly, a customer rewards company. He says he “can’t stand walking into a company that has seven values on the wall that no one actually cares about or can remember.” So Belly’s own employee guidelines can be shockingly playful.

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

Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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Were you doing entrepreneurial things as a child?

I had some little entrepreneurial ventures. We lived on a golf course and there was a small lake out on the course. I’d jump the fence and fish out balls and sell them to golfers. But my mom’s a teacher and my dad works in the auto industry, and I didn’t grow up in an entrepreneurial family. Sometimes I wonder where it came from. There were moments during high school that led me to think that I wouldn’t be a good employee.

And they were?

In junior high, I took a course where we had a mock portfolio and I put all my funds into tech stocks. This was in the late ‘90s, and I made 20 times my fake money from Yahoo. I started following tech companies more closely and understanding how fast technology was changing different industries. That’s when I started thinking more like an entrepreneur. Also, I generally didn’t take direction very well. I’ve always had my way of doing things and I was always pretty confident.

What did you do after college?

I actually found the job on Craigslist. I graduated on a Friday, started this new job on Monday and two days later the company — Pay by Touch, which was based in San Francisco — shipped me out to live in Virginia. I traveled for the next two years launching markets.

The company did biometric payment systems – basically, the idea was to pay with your fingerprint, so you didn’t even need your wallet. I started out trying to sign up customers, standing in the back of a grocery store and asking people to give me their fingerprint, then a check and their driver’s license to scan through a kiosk. Talk about learning how to sell.

Then I started managing a lot of promotion teams and contractors and got more involved in client relationships. The company moved me back to San Francisco and at that point I was overseeing half the country for the launch team. The business model was flawed, though, and the company became pretty famous as one of the biggest start-up failures of all time. But I had already left before that happened and moved to Chicago to work for Redbox as a marketing coordinator.

And what did you learn there?

Fortunately, the marketing team sat right between the C.E.O.’s office and the C.O.O.’s office. I was the most junior employee, but I was first in the office and the last to leave. Anytime they had an idea or wanted to test something, I raised my hand. I basically became responsible for launching and trying new things.

That’s where I learned that the idea didn’t matter nearly as much as the execution. Often, it was just a matter of getting started. I learned about taking something from an idea or a conversation and a whiteboard to literally getting all the pieces in place and doing it. That’s what enabled me to make the transition from employee to founder — just understanding and recognizing that I could own and do something.

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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.comthat 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.

His more recent book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, was also also published by Times Books (January 2014). To contact him, please click here.