A brief poem about hang gliding
The moment when all your previous flights feel like a dream, your wings won't lift, the ground rushes at you, and you crash. And yet, you hop up, cheery and bright, yelling "I'm all right!". There's a smiley face drawn next to it, which tells you everything about the kind of person the guy who wrote this is. And that is the type of person you want to have around.
This attitude is not common. It is not normal. And it is exactly the attitude that you should chase when looking for talent.
The pioneers who literally threw themselves off cliffs
The history of hang gliding stretches back further than most people realize. In 1891, German engineer Otto Lilienthal was making controlled flights of 25 metres, hanging beneath rigid wings he had spent nearly two decades researching. By 1896, he had completed around 2,000 flights, some reaching 250 metres, before a crash from about 15 metres fractured his spine and killed him.
The sport then went quiet for decades until aeronautical engineer Francis Rogallo invented a self-inflating flexible wing in 1948, patenting it in 1951. He pitched it to NASA as a cheap approach to recreational flying, but they rejected it. It took Sputnik and the space race for NASA to reconsider; they tested Rogallo's wing as a recovery system for Project Gemini capsules throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. Then, in 1965, they chose round parachutes instead and cut all funding. The project was abandoned.
But the publicly available NASA research caught the attention of independent builders who saw potential where a government agency had seen a dead end. In 1961, Barry Palmer, an aerospace engineer near Sacramento, built and flew the first foot-launched Rogallo-wing hang glider. Aluminum tubing, no wires, flights reaching 180 metres. He had a good job and flew purely for fun. In 1963, Australian inventor John Dickenson built the "Ski Wing," a Rogallo-based glider with a triangular control frame that was stable and controllable, unlike anything that existed. He filed a provisional patent but, lacking resources, let it lapse.
These people did not wait for the sport to be safe. They did not wait for someone else to validate the concept. They iterated (literally) on the fly, learning pitch control through trial and error and treating crashes as data points (when they survived) rather than reasons to quit. By 1972, Australian builders Bill Bennett and Bill Moyes had adapted Dickenson's water ski kite format into foot-launched hang gliders and were manufacturing them commercially, catalyzing a worldwide boom. The fatality rate in the early years was staggering, and yet the community grew. Why? Because the type of person attracted to this kind of activity is the type of person who sees asymmetric upside packed as fun where others see only risk.
Push them off the cliff
The hardest and most valuable thing you can do is find the people who have the instinct to strap themselves to a kite and jump off a hill.
But finding them is only half the problem. The harder half is getting them to commit to the leap. Many potential founders and corporate rockstars have the right risk profile, the right instincts, the right technical chops, and never actually start because the environment around them does not push them to fly. Family expectations, career inertia, and the rational calculation that a stable job is safer all conspire against it. The talent is there. The push is not. And that is where most of the flyers end up stalling, dropping their gliders and going back to the ground.
In hang gliding, the community solved this organically. Pilots gathered at launch sites, shared knowledge, challenged each other, and created a culture where launching was the default. There was social pressure to fly, and crucially, there was a support system for when you crashed. The community did not punish failure; it treated it as initiation. You had to crash to belong.
I think the most underexplored role for anyone building teams or backing founders is exactly this: identifying someone with the right risk profile who has not yet jumped, and then creating the conditions for them to do so. Show them the hill. Demonstrate that the glider works. Stand at the bottom ready to help when they crash. This will ensure that they are not the person who builds a hang glider in their garage but never fly it, which is not meaningfully different from the person who never built one at all.
This is extraordinarily hard to do at scale. It requires relationship depth and time investment that does not fit neatly into a pipeline. But it is where the real edge lives: not in finding people who are already flying, but in finding people who are ready to fly and making sure they actually take the leap of faith.