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Hello and welcome to Women with Balls, where I, Katie Balls, speak to today's trailblazers.

My guest today has referred to herself as a dot-com dinosaur. During the dot-com boom of the early 2000s, my guest was

telling people that the internet would change her lives forever. She was proved correct, even if not

everyone believed her at the time. Growing up in London, she moved into the tech sector after

graduating from Oxford University and co-founded Last Minute.com, a travel and leisure website.

But then she was involved in a dangerous car crash, where she spent two years in hospital.

Following that, she was approached by the Prime Minister at the time to improve Britain's digital

literacy, part of which involves setting upgov.ukuk. She was made a peer in 2013 where she

now sits as a crossbencher, becoming the youngest female to take that role. My guest also chairs

multiple boards and importantly is the co-founder of Lucky Voice, a private karaoke company set up in 2005.

My guest today is Baroness Martha Lane Fox. So Martha,

thank you very much for joining the podcast today. I really appreciate you finding the time.

On this podcast, we always begin by asking, was yours a happy childhood? As I mentioned,

you grew up in Oxford. It was a happy childhood. And probably as a 50-year-old woman, one that I talk about

too much. I had two very loving and incredibly supportive parents, both of whom did interesting

things with their lives and were kind of an amazing example to me of how to be in different ways

you could live. There's nothing very conventional about either of them and that was, I guess,

very freeing as a young person and as a child. But most of all it was... years now I think about 52 years does it every week it's quite unbelievable but he's also going

kind of always got funny side businesses going on and side hustles and he's a whole book in himself

and my mum was always an entrepreneur she worked with her best friend starting businesses and

doing interesting things so I feel very lucky to have had this very stable and, you know, extremely many ways privileged start in my life.

...