SUNDAY PROFILE - Answering call of Silicon Valley - Maynard Webb sees the future of work at LiveOps, where agents work from home and have flexible schedules.

But it's a different story when you're working for Maynard Webb, chief executive of LiveOps Inc. He's got a diverse crew of 16,000 retirees, military spouses, moms and college students working from home to take phone orders for exercise equipment, flowers and other goods.

To Webb, the Palo Alto company represents nothing less than the future of work, with people fitting in their jobs around their lives, not the other way around. Workers at LiveOps punch in when they feel like it and get paid -- $8 to $20 an hour -- only when they're working.

"I feel people do well when they don't feel entitled, and they don't see limits," he said.

Webb is a former top executive at online auction giant EBay Inc., but he doesn't fit the Silicon Valley image of success. He's not flashy, nor has he become rich on barely tested ideas.

Rather, he represents a lesser-known Silicon Valley manager: the low-profile, hardworking guy who understands a company's innards and how to keep things working, as he did as EBay's chief operating officer. Though respected, these executives are rarely seen as CEO material, often labeled as lacking the charisma needed to motivate the troops.

"He's the classic noncelebrity CEO," said EBay CEO Meg Whitman, his former boss.

With LiveOps, so named because it uses live operators, 51-year-old Webb is trying to break the image.

Although the company currently uses only U.S. workers, he wants to recruit call fielders in countries such as Japan and Mexico and to sell LiveOps' services to overseas companies. Webb envisions a day soon when someone ordering pizza in London is routed to a LiveOps agent in Oklahoma. Already, agents are making calls for disaster relief and political campaigns.

The more his agents work, the more they get paid. Their entrepreneurial spirit reminds Webb of the passionate sellers at EBay, where he worked for seven years before joining LiveOps in December.

In the U.S., about 100,000 people work out of their homes doing call-center work, said Stephen Loynd, a program manager at market research firm IDC. By 2010, that number will triple, he said, as more companies abandon outsourced call centers in India and other countries because their customers want to talk to Americans. He calls the trend "home-shoring," an antidote to "off-shoring."