Martha Lane Fox
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Martha Lane Fox (born February 10, 1973) is a British e-commerce business woman, charity trustee, board member of Channel 4 and non-executive Director of Marks & Spencer. She is the daughter of the British historian and gardening correspondent Robin Lane Fox.
She was educated at Oxford High School, Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where she read ancient and modern history.
Martha Lane Fox, together with Brent Hoberman, founded Lastminute.com in 1998, 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 but managing to survive its subsequent burst.
Lane Fox made a fortune from the company. Young employees of lastminute.com lost out on the shares they bought, as the price plummeted and lost thousands of pounds.
She is a strong advocate of progressive causes including prison reform and is a trustee of Reprieve, a prison reform charity.
On November 20, 2003, it was announced that she would step down as managing director of Lastminute.com, though she remains a non-executive director. She was replaced by Ian McCaig, Lastminute's chief operating officer.
On December 28, 2003, it was revealed by The Sunday Telegraph that Martha 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 May 2004 she was severely injured in a car accident in the tourist resort of Essaouira, near Marrakesh in Morocco. She spent a year in the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford having metal inserts and bone grafts.
In 2005 she launched her private karaoke company Lucky Voice with a club in London's Soho.
She is also a non-executive director of Marks & Spencer, Channel 4 and mydeco.com
