"An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down". Despite a successful corporate career, Cristina Luminea shares her experience of leaving it all behind to start something out of nothing with Thoughtbox!

"There are no recipes for finding the right balance in terms of scale. It seems that everything is a combination of heuristics, secrets and I suppose figuring it out at the last minute. It's the phone call at four in the morning or the little tweet notification or that something has gone down and that terrifies every CTO out there."

"Your pitch is about explaining what you are doing, the problem and your product you have to solve it; market validation; how are you going to make money. It is going to involve doing the market research and doing the business development to get it air tight. So you have actually done an amazing amount of work by the time you have a solid pitch."

"We didn't know we wanted to build a phone, we came up with a digital photo frame idea, a smartphone app and something related to a smartphone. We tested all three of them before they existed just with a landing page. And the landing page basically said: this is what we want to build, if you like it, give us your email address..."

"There is no secret behind the success of any company. When you offer a service many want, you'll be successful. The trick is to find your niche, and that's where 90% of startups fall down. If you are having trouble getting traction, it's probably nothing to do with your tech, marketing or business plan. You need to look at your product..."

"The more ideas we generate, the more likely we are to generate really unique, important ones, so developing skills to create ideas and test them is important. For me it was hard to come up with new ideas after working for so long on my previous startup, so I came up with a method to train my brain to generate ideas - you can read it in my blog..."