After cycling a thousand miles for charity in 2010, Emily Brooke got the biking bug. As part of her final year project at the University of Brighton, she dedicated herself to tackling the greatest problem facing cyclists today: safety.

She created the Laserlight, a radical innovation set to drastically improve cyclists' safety and started her own company, Blaze, to realise it.

Two years on and after a successful Kickstarter campaign, Emily has a small team based in East London and the Laserlight is shipping around the world as the first in a range of products for urban cyclists.

Q&A with Emily Brooke, founder of Blaze

We asked her about her experience and reflections on starting up.

What was your experience as a single founder?

You hear horror stories about single founders. You very rarely come across a single founder. But I can’t imagine having a co-founder. It gives me the flexibility to move bloody fast, make decisions, have autonomy and just get stuff done. It’s exhausting and terrifying at times. If I step away from the company, the company steps away from the company.

What’s been particularly challenging for Blaze?

High level hires have been very tricky, it’s a big gamble. People are beginning to speak to students at university about entrepreneurship and building your own company. But what’s lacking is showing people that going to work for a small company as one of their very early hires can be an incredible opportunity - instead of stepping on the worn heals of a graduate in a corporate role ahead of you, you can join a startup where you are really involved in every facet of the company, things move fast, it's exciting and chaotic, you learn a great deal and the work you do makes a very significant difference to company's operations.

Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

There were things with Kickstarter I would do differently again. I think we did it too early. A classic from any first time hardware optimism, you think it’s going to be much quicker than it is. And it never is. We should have been further down the process of manufacturing and sourcing. We would have perhaps done even better if we had done it later and as an American campaign - though managing our existing Kickstarter community is already one person's full-time job upstairs!