Exec Makes Waves During Meetings

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Alex Boylan, season-two co-winner of CBS’ “The Amazing Race,” likes to take his work to the water.

The 37-year-old water sports enthusiast, who almost daily spends two hours at the beach, will often suggest moving meetings out of the office and onto paddleboards.

“Sometimes there’s a very long pause and an ‘Umm,’ and you learn a lot from that,” he said. “And other people are excited and they’re like, ‘I’ll try that.’”

Paddleboarding, which requires people to lie, kneel or stand on a board and paddle across the water using their arms or an oar, is one of the easiest things to do in the harbor near his Marina del Rey home, Boylan said. One of his favorite spots to dive into business is at Mother’s Beach.

The unconventional twist on the boring meeting has also become a bonding exercise for the 10-person team at DreamJobbing, a Santa Monica startup Boylan founded that hooks people up with “once-in-a-lifetime” jobs, such as being a culinary explorer for King’s Hawaiian bakery or working as Michael Bolton’s backup singer.

Encouraged to take the job beachside, his staffers have started holding their own meetings by sea.

“For a startup, it’s good for the soul,” Boylan said.

Pier Eatery in Fashion

When Yunnie Kim Morena, 37, left the fashion world eight years ago to take over her family’s seafood restaurant on the Santa Monica Pier, she didn’t expect that among all the street musicians and skateboarders she’d run into former clients from the high-end Fred Segal Couture store she had owned.

Morena essentially grew up on the pier, helping her immigrant parents run their business, which was then called SM Pier Seafood.

“I was with them all the time because there was no such thing as a full-time nanny,” Morena said.

Her family opened the business as a fish market in 1977, but after her grandmother began making shrimp tempura, bringing in lines out the door, the business evolved. It moved to a larger space and then remodeled in 1983 after a hurricane wiped out more than one-third of the pier, then moved again in the ’90s to its current location, where it became a popular casual restaurant.

What it never was, however, during Morena’s childhood was a place where fashionistas and Santa Monica’s power players would hang out.

“The pier has changed,” Morena said.

So has the restaurant, which Morena rebranded as the Albright two years ago, adding some modern touches.

“The pier has cleaned up, and now I see former clientele from the fashion world strolling by the restaurant,” she said. “When my father died, and I look over the business, I was expecting to abandon my Fred Segal life, but I often run right into it.”

Staff reporters Melissah Yang and Hannah Miet contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].

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