Building An Outsourcing Company In China: Bleum CEO Eric Rongley (Part 2)

Sramana: When you decided to start Bleum in 2001, what area of outsourcing did you intend to focus on? Eric Rongley: I was doing product development when I was in India and had teams as large as 100 people. I saw companies like Infosys that were very small, and I realized that companies that understood

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Building An Outsourcing Company In China: Bleum CEO Eric Rongley (Part 1)

Eric Rongley founded Bleum, an outsourcing provider to American and European companies, in August 2001. Prior to founding Bleum, Eric established and ran the Navion (Shanghai) Software Development Company for Capital One Financial. Before his career led him to China, Eric was the general manager for IVR’s (International Voice Register) software development center in India.

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Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 7)

Sramana: You mentioned that you are in the process of building an angel fund. What is the philosophy behind that fund? Are you going to follow the meritocracy philosophy? Maynard Webb: I have two things I will focus on. One is my foundation, which aims to help the world’s underdogs achieve their goals.

Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 6)

Sramana: There is a trend towards concentrating hubs. An Economist article a month ago projected that Shanghai was going to have 45 million people living in one city by 2025. This is a completely dysfunctional environment. That is more than the population of Argentina. Maynard Webb: That is interesting. We don’t do anybody any favors

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Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 5)

Sramana: If somebody develops a certain specialization that addresses your customers’ needs, would you be willing to market their offering? Maynard Webb: I will say it a little differently. We have examples of BPOs that sit on top of our platform, [and] we also use marketing and sales to help them grow.

Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 4)

Sramana: How does your workforce-in-the-cloud strategy play out in terms of globalization and outsourcing? Maynard Webb: Offshoring is playing whack-a-mole. Sourcing is done only from one country, and once you get in the country and get it right the competition shows up and employees start jumping to your competition, which leaves you looking for another

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Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 3)

Sramana: What type of person applies to work in your virtual call centers? Maynard Webb: The quality of agent you get is far higher in general because we are sourcing from the entire country versus a constrained region. We have more college-educated folks than call centers anywhere else, but they also work different hours than

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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.