Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 2)

Sramana: How much of the current offering did LiveOps have in place when you joined?

Maynard Webb: We did not call anything the cloud back then. We started selling our technology right before I joined. The biggest part of the business was the agent business. LiveOps is actually a merger between two companies; one company had the technology side and one company had the agent side of the business.

The agent side of the business was started in 2000. The company was growing very nicely and needed solid technology to allow people to work out of their homes. They ran into a technology startup called CallPass and tried to become their first customer. Once they started working with them, they realized how cool the technology was and felt they should try to merge the companies, which they were able to do successfully. It has been up and running since 2003.

Sramana: There was a company that had already conceptualized crowdsourced worker agents in 2000 and was able to monetize its plan?

Maynard Webb: Yes, but they were very small. They were experimenting with it, but not on a large scale.

Sramana: That would be impossible to manage on a large scale without a technical platform.

Maynard Webb: They were using rudimentary technology from a traditional outsourcing provider. Once they began to get some traction, that outsourcing provider told them they had to stop using their technology because they felt they were heading into direct competition. That forced them to begin looking for alternate solutions, which ultimately led to them to CallPass.

Sramana: When you came on, the businesses were already in place. Were they both still small-scale operations?

Maynard Webb: I would not call them small scale. They had done a good job of growing their business over the years. When I joined, the business probably had done $60 million in revenue. Almost all of that was agent business at that point.

Sramana: What is happening with the agent-based business? It seems as though there is a home-based agent trend in the call center world.

Maynard Webb: First of all, I think there is a broader trend about people and companies and their relationships. Tenure in companies is going away. People need to be CEOs of their own destiny, more so now than ever before. There are people who are tired of getting on the freeway every morning at the same time as everyone else because they waste 45 minutes at least twice a day. There is a lot of angst about taking care of kids and balancing home life.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California
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