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 Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Allego, a Boston-area start-up focused on sales education. 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?

I was born and raised in Taiwan. My father was a captain on oil tankers, so he was never home. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. I have two sisters.

I’ve been an entrepreneur since kindergarten. My first gig started because my father would travel back from Japan and bring me these really fancy stickers that changed pictures based on your perspective. I would sell them at school. Later on, I sold silkworms in elementary school.

You eventually moved to the United States.

My father got sick of traveling all the time, and he connected with a businessman who was starting a shipping company in the states, so my whole family immigrated here. After we landed, the guy who sponsored us went bankrupt.

So there we were, our whole family, and no job. Our standing in society just dropped all the way down to survival mode for about a year. Then we moved to Houston when my father got a job. My mother opened a Chinese restaurant, and I would help out. Then I started my first software company in my junior year of high school.

How did that happen?

I was basically a complete nerd, and I was really good in math. A friend of mine and I decided to compete to see who could finish our math course sooner. So the teacher gave us all the homework for the whole year, and we just crammed. In three weeks, both of us finished the entire course. The teacher gave us the exam, and we passed everything.

So we had nothing to do for almost a year, but we had to go to class. After a few days, the teacher told us we should go hang out in the new computer room. I was also interested in art, so I wrote a program that allowed a professional draftsman to use a personal computer to design anything. This was before all the Mac programs came out to do that.

Then when I went to M.I.T., I started a company in my junior year — a friend and I imported PC components, assembled them in our dorm and sold them. We did that for a year and a half until the campus police got involved because the scale of the business got a little too big for a dorm operation. At one point, the U.P.S. truck that came by every day was filled entirely with our stuff.

Early management lessons for you?

There were so many. Nobody taught me that managing people is something you’ve got to love to do, and that it’s a real burden, a real responsibility. I started out with a blue-collar-ish mental model of manager, where you would just tell people what they needed to do. But then you very soon realize that human beings have free will and you’ve got to persuade them.

Over time, I’ve learned that finding people who inherently love what they do just makes the manager’s job much easier.

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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.