Martha Lane Fox

MARTHA LANE FOX

Martha Lane Fox, 35, is founder of LUCKY VOICE.co-founder lastminute.com created with Thomas Power and Glenn Watkins to help business people achieve success in their business through online tools, community and through friendship.

More about Ecademy later a British e-commerce business woman, charity trustee, board member of Channel 4, mydeco.com and Marks & Spencer. She co-founded Lastminute.com, an icon of the dotcom boom of the early 2000s. She also co-founded Lucky Voice, the karaoke bar chain and is the British Government’s first Champion for Digital Inclusion.

In 1998, Lane Fox and Hoberman founded Lastminute.com, an online travel and gift business that generated great publicity, becoming an icon of the UK internet boom and floating at the peak of the dot-com bubble. On 20 November, 2003, it was announced that she would step down as managing director of Lastminute.com.

On 28 December 2003, it was revealed by The Sunday Telegraph that Lane Fox would become “right hand woman” of Galen Weston, owner of Selfridges, and take over the day-to-day running of the business.

In 2005, advertising executive Julian Douglas shared an idea of his with her about launching a Tokyo-esque private karaoke bar in London. Falling in love with the idea, together with Nick Thistleton she launched a private karaoke company Lucky Voice with a club in London’s Soho.
In 2007 she founded Antigone, a grant-making trust to support charities based in the UK.
She is a trustee and patron of Reprieve, a legal action charity, which made the news during its involvement in the release of UK resident Binyam Mohammed from Guantanamo Bay. Lane Fox is also a patron of Camfed, dedicated to fighting poverty, HIV and AIDS in rural Africa through the education of girls and young women.