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People and Pop Culture

Weekend Plans With StubHub's Ray Elias: Teaching Son How To Skateboard

A native of Bakersfield, Calif., who spent much of his time growing up in Texas, StubHub CMO RAY ELIAS has settled nicely into life in the Bay Area. He and his family -- wife KARINA, four-year-old son JAGGER and two pugs -- live in Walnut Creek, about 25 miles east of S.F. Elias: "This is just one of those cities where there’s so much to do at any given moment and we try to take full advantage of it, to be outside as much as we can and it’s just kind of our mantra to get out and see friends and go do stuff." While the majority of weekends lately have been filled with friends' 40th birthday parties or work events, Elias this week is looking forward to some extra time at home to coach Jagger in a few of his new favorite hobbies.

SOMETHING'S FISHY: My wife and I try to do date night, and usually that’s Friday or Saturday. This last Friday we kind of combined it with some other couples that have kids that are in school with my son. We’re members of a health club down the road, ClubSport, and they have bocce courts there so we went out and played bocce and ate and drank wine and let the kids run amuck. So it was kind of like date night with the kids. But typically we’ll try to get out somewhere in downtown Walnut Creek or San Francisco. We love to go get sushi. There’s a lot of good sushi around here. As much as we try to do something different, we tend to end up there. Although, there are great restaurants in San Francisco and we kind of have a short list of different restaurants that -- when we can get a babysitter for long enough -- we’ll come into the city and go to some of our favorites.

RISE AND GRIND: The weekends are usually my wife’s days to sleep in. I’m just an early riser inherently and that’s the only way that I get any of my actual work done, because when I’m at work it’s a lot of meetings and face time. So I tend to rise around 5:00am every day of the week. I actually work every single weekend, and it’s those morning hours, so it’s usually between 5:00-8:00am that I’ll just sit there and plug away before everybody wakes up. Eventually Jagger joins me. Jagger really looks forward to the weekends. He asks me every day of the week, “Is it the weekend yet?” On the weekends he gets up early with me and likes to sit next to me while I’m working and watch cartoons or play on the iPad. Eventually I’ll stop working and we’ll make breakfast and start our day.

LONGHORN LOYALTY: My college roommate, who also is a friend of mine from high school, randomly moved out here about a year ago, and literally lives down the street from me in Walnut Creek. And if it wasn’t for social media we never would have known it. We’re both University of Texas grads and so this time of year we usually switch over and bring the family to each other’s houses and one of us barbeques or makes something and we watch the UT football game. That’s kind of, at least this time of year, what takes up a lot of our Saturday. I’ll wear one of my two or three Texas shirts every weekend. I usually try to wear it into work on Friday. We used to do “Fan Friday,” and it was kind of a religion at StubHub. We don’t really officially do that anymore, but a lot of us still carry the torch.
 
RACKING UP THE MILES: The other thing that I try to do is I run a lot. So either Saturday or Sunday I usually get in a five-mile run. I run several days a week but Saturday or Sunday is my longer run. I just like to stay fit, that’s the main reason. In terms of running versus going into a gym and lifting a bunch of weights, I prefer to run. My running time is my time to just get away and go focus on something by myself and that’s why it’s important to me. For me, I like to run fast. I don’t like to do the slow jog. That’s why I tend to run three to five miles and just go as fast as I can. I played soccer growing up, so that’s kind of stuck with me.

MOVES LIKE JAGGER: I was a Southern California kid for all my life so I liked all the board sports and I still have -- you might call it a museum in my garage just because the only boards I use now are my snowboards -- but I’ve got surfboards and skateboards in there. (Jagger) sees them now and wants to ride them so we’ve started to play around with it. He wants to skateboard, and he’s got all of his pads, so I’m teaching him how to skateboard as well as ride his bike on two wheels, without training wheels. There’s quite a lot of time spent doing that. We’re kind of getting into snow season now, so in the upcoming weekends we’ll go to Tahoe quite a bit, if not every other weekend. This is the year we’re going to put him out there (on the slopes). We’ll probably start him on skis, just because we can put him in a lesson on skis. They don’t do snowboard lessons until you’re a little bit older.

TV GUIDE: Sunday night is just time with my wife. We'll sit by the fire, drink wine and we like to watch "HOMELAND." Although I tend to pass out halfway through and she gets ahead of me and then I’ve got to go back and revisit it later. We kind of stick with those original content series on HBO or Showtime, so it just depends on what time of the year it is. I love "DEXTER," and "MASTERS OF SEX" is a new one. It kind of varies, just depends on which one is in season. We check most of them out.

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