Martha Lane Fox

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2004

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the dot-com millionaire and businesswoman Martha Lane Fox.

She says that as a child she was confident and bossy - tormenting her younger brother and, in games of teachers and pupils, always marking him lower than her line of teddy bears. Her drive and ambition were recognised at school and college - her brother claims her nickname was 'Fast Lane Foxy'. After studying modern and classical history at Oxford University she became a management consultant at a small company and met Brent Hoberman - who had the idea for lastminute.com. Initially, Lane Fox rubbished the idea, but eventually Brent convinced her and she joined him, appropriately enough, at the last minute. The pair launched lastminute.com in 1998 - it started out as an online bucket shop - selling the holidays that small travel agents couldn't get rid of - and branched out into entertainment and gifts. On March 14th, 2000, days before the markets peaked, lastminute.com was floated on the stock exchange - and over the following weeks prices collapsed. Martha Lane Fox became the face, the figurehead and eventually the fall-girl for the dot-com bubble. In November 2003, after lastminute.com announced a profit for the first time, Lane Fox announced she was resigning as managing director.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Get Happy by Judy Garland Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Luxury: A karaoke machine

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an entrepreneur, her lineage is old and aristocratic, her attitude modern
0:35.5	and dynamic. In the mid-90s she joined forces with a business partner who had the idea of
0:40.6	selling last-minute holidays on the internet. The rest is dot-com
0:44.6	history. After only 18 months of trading last-minute dot-com floated on the
0:48.8	stock market, raising a hundred million pounds. Immediately afterwards the internet wave receded and people
0:54.8	predicted the whole thing would go bust but it didn't. Last minute turned out to be
0:59.2	long term and at the end of last year its co-founder, having seen it into profit, decided to leave for
1:05.4	pastures new. The whole idea she freely admits had been someone else's, but she has been its
1:11.5	public face, the perfect image for the internet generation.
1:15.6	My parents, she says, gave me the luxury of thinking I can do anything, so I did.
1:21.3	She's Martha Lane Fox. How do parents do that?
1:23.9	How do they instill that kind of self-confidence in it?
1:27.4	I think it's a combination of things. Firstly, just a huge amount of love and laughter at home.
1:32.0	Always very, very lucky lucky and I think also the
1:36.4	privilege of a great education and their own slight zaniness probably best the way
1:42.1	to describe it.
1:43.0	Is that what it is?
1:44.0	I think so, I can honestly say I think my father would have fallen off his chair with horror
1:47.6	if I said I was going to go and be a banker rather than I was going to go and work in
1:51.5	television or start a business or something so I've always
	...

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