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 Max Levchin, Affirm, an online financial services firm, has been edited for space and clarity 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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Tell me about your early years.

I was born in Kiev, Ukraine. I spent my formative years under the Soviet state, which wasn’t all that bad, actually. Ukraine is kind of a backwater, so we didn’t really have any of the tension from those days.

I had a fairly happy childhood. I grew up in a very cool family — pretty much every person was a scientist. My entire family lived together. My grandmother, my grandfather, my mom and dad, my brother and I all lived in the same apartment, so I got this exposure to two generations of scientists.

My grandmother had a double Ph.D. in astrophysics. She ran the Kiev observatory for many years. So I had this kind of extremely sheltered but very fun childhood where I would sometimes get to play with this giant telescope at the observatory.

My mom was told by the Soviet state, her employer, that she had to learn how to program computers. I was 10, and her job was a couple of doors down from our house. So I would go to see her after school, and she would say, “Try and understand this programming thing and help me out,” which is how I got into software. Within three months, it was very clear that I was progressing faster than she was.

But my childhood was disrupted somewhat bizarrely by the Chernobyl accident. I was 11 at the time, and I had to spend the next year and a half living with relatives in an extremely rural community in Crimea. That was kind of a “grow up now” moment.

How so?

Suddenly I was in a place where outhouses were the norm in plumbing. We would walk in snow for four or five miles to get to school every day. I went from a sheltered upbringing among scientists and ideas to be told that when I was done shoveling snow, I could do my homework.

And how did you react to that?

I adapted fairly quickly. I was exceedingly bored because I came from a very high-quality school, and it was as if the work we were doing was rolled back two years. I didn’t have to do any homework, because I became the best student in the school in a heartbeat.

The thing I remember vividly is that I missed having access to a computer very much. So I got in the habit of programming on paper, which actually served me really well. So I would just write it out in longhand. I had stacks and stacks of notebooks filled with programs for games and data-processing software.

One of the most gratifying things, when I went back to Kiev and could use a computer again, is that I would type in all the source code for all these games that I had designed on paper, and they would just work.

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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.