On launch with: Sebrand Warren

I didn’t immediately become an obsessed pilot. I first saw someone paragliding on a little hill behind my university, Carnegie Mellon. I was 21 and he was an instructor and I asked him to teach me. I’m 32 now.

For my ‘mountain flight’ he’d been thinking about towing behind an exercise bike. I was studying industrial design so my friend and I built him this tow rig. There was no way to disconnect so once you went over the bike you had to land, otherwise you’d drag the bike. That was our mountain flight and he gave us both our licenses. 

I then moved to San Francisco and worked at Apple and got...