From a pitch meeting in 1998 to a City Hall task force in 2026, we followed Baroness Martha Lane Fox through the problems she kept choosing over the ones she could have sold.
Picture the room, it is London, 1998, an investor settled behind a vast desk, and a 25-year-old Martha Lane Fox who has just finished the biggest pitch of her life alongside her friend and former boss Brent Hoberman.
It was the first and only meeting they had managed to secure, and the investor’s first question was, “What happens if you get pregnant?”
Now, what does a founder do with a moment like that, swallow it or carry it forward?
Well, Hoberman and Lane Fox decided to keep going and eventually raised £600,000 in seed funding for a website selling late holiday deals.
The company they built was lastminute.com, which is the part of her story most people know, and the lastminute.com history is usually told as a lesson in timing.
It floated in 2000, at the height of the dotcom boom, at a valuation of £571 million, when she was 27.
The shares jumped on the first day and then fell sharply over the following weeks.
The lastminute.com founder stepped down as managing director in 2003, and Sabre Holdings bought the business in 2005 for £577 million, with Hoberman staying on as chief executive. In 2014, Sabre agreed to sell it for £76 million, a fraction of what it had paid. For a founder who had already left, what was left to prove?
Time away from the business became a different kind of ordeal for Martha Lane Fox. In 2004, a car in which she was travelling in Morocco hit a tree, and she has since said she “broke 26 bones and had a stroke”.
She spent two years in hospital and still returns to it, and in the years that followed she co-founded Lucky Voice, the karaoke business she still chairs, and joined the board of Marks & Spencer. By 2010 she was the UK Digital Champion, asked by the then Prime Minister to push government and the wider public sector to get people online.
Martha Lane Fox’s first major piece of work in that role was a review of Directgov, the government’s main website.
It argued for replacing around 750 separate sites with a single front door, and its title set the tone: “revolution, not evolution”.
In her own account, it led to the Government Digital Service and the move to GOV.UK. Alongside it she ran Race Online 2012, a campaign that had more than 800 partners by the end of 2010, and which became the charity Go ON UK, built to close the digital skills gap.
Why would someone who made her name selling holiday deals turn to the state’s own websites? Her answer, as we read it, was digital exclusion. By 2015 she was telling viewers that 10 million UK adults could not get the basic benefits of being online, a digital divide split almost evenly between over-65s and people of working age and skewed towards the lowest incomes.
In 2013 Martha Lane Fox stepped down as UK Digital Champion and entered the House of Lords as a crossbench peer, taking the title Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho. Two years later she used the BBC’s Dimbleby Lecture to propose something stranger than a campaign: a new public institution, Dot Everyone, to put understanding of the internet, women in technology and the ethics of the web at its centre. Women then made up 14 per cent of the tech sector, against 24 per cent in the Lords, and she argued that a technology meant for everyone should be built by everyone.
It doesn’t need to last forever, it probably needs to make itself redundant. — Baroness Martha Lane Fox on Dot Everyone, Dimbleby Lecture, March 2015
Doteveryone, the responsible technology think tank that grew out of the lecture, took her at her word. Over five years it published research on public attitudes to technology and built Consequence Scanning, a method for teams to ask what a product might do to people before it ships. It closed on 28 May 2020, passing its research to the Ada Lovelace Institute and its tools to the Open Data Institute. Was closing the plan all along, or a concession that a think tank cannot easily balance the platforms it was set up to question? We think both readings deserve to be taken seriously.
But we believe stopping can be important too. — Baroness Martha Lane Fox, Doteveryone closing statement, May 2020
Martha Lane Fox’s board roles have run in parallel. She was a Twitter non-executive director, sits on the Chanel board, chaired WeTransfer from 2020 and became President of the British Chambers of Commerce in October 2022.
In November 2024 she joined the board of Multiverse, the apprenticeships company co-founded by Euan Blair. Does that breadth help or dilute a founder who has said she wants institutions to know when to stop?
The newest problem arrived in April 2026, when Mayor of London Sadiq Khan named the former UK Digital Champion chair of the London AI and Jobs Taskforce. Three months later its report put around 600,000 Londoners in occupations with higher exposure to AI and a lower capacity to adapt, concentrated in clerical and administrative roles and disproportionately held by women.
The Mayor accepted its recommendations and backed them with £30 million, a figure combining £18 million announced that day with £12 million set out the month before. Martha Lane Fox describes AI and jobs disruption as something that, for many Londoners, still feels like “something happening to them, not with them”.
That echoes 2015, when she argued that people affected by technology should have a hand in building it.
What does a taskforce with a Mayor’s backing have that a think tank did not?
The through-line is easy to draw and harder to test.
A lastminute.com founder who was asked about pregnancy in place of her business plan has spent two decades on who gets left out of technology, first of the web, then of public services, and now of the jobs AI is reshaping.
What the public record cannot tell us is how she decides which problem earns the next decade, and which one should be allowed to end.
What We’d Still Like To Ask
- Which of the problems she took on after lastminute.com does she count as finished, and which as unfinished?
- When Doteveryone closed, what would have had to be true for her to keep it going?
- How much of GOV.UK as it exists now does she recognise from the original Directgov review, and what would she change?
- What would she tell the 27-year-old who floated a company at the top of the market?
- A year from now, what would count as success for the London taskforce?
Editorial note
This piece is based on secondary research. We have not spoken to Baroness Lane-Fox or to the organisations named. If you have worked with her, or have first-hand knowledge of any episode above, we would welcome a conversation.
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Sources: Doteveryone, “Five years fighting for better tech for everyone” (28 May 2020); Dimbleby Lecture transcript, BBC Media Centre (30 Mar 2015); Red, “There’s Something About Martha” (Sept 2018); GDS blog, “A GDS Story 2010”; Lane Fox letter to the Prime Minister, GOV.UK (20 Nov 2013); Cabinet Office, “Digital by default proposed for government services” (23 Nov 2010); Computer Weekly, “Martha Lane Fox calls for ‘revolution’ in online government services”; GOV.UK, “100,000 Digital Champions to get Britain online”; City AM and Scottish Daily Mail on the 2014 £76m sale; NBC/AP and Out-Law on the 2005 Sabre deal; Mayor of London press releases (28 Apr 2026, 21 Jul 2026); Lane Fox’s Three Peaks fundraising page; TravelMole (4 May 2004); WeTransfer release (1 Jul 2020); British Chambers of Commerce announcement (Oct 2022); Wikipedia and Founders File for the Multiverse appointment.
