Martha Lane Fox

Martha Lane Fox, Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho CBE, is one of Britain’s most distinctive voices at the intersection of technology, business, and public life. She first came to prominence in 1998 as co-founder of Lastminute.com, the pioneering European travel and leisure platform that she and Brent Hoberman built from a two-person startup into a publicly listed company sold for £577 million in 2005. The journey made her a defining figure of the dotcom era — and the near-fatal car accident in 2004 that left her hospitalized for nearly two years gave her a perspective on technology, resilience, and human purpose that informs everything she has done since.

As a digital transformation speaker, Martha Lane Fox has spent the past two decades moving between entrepreneurship, public service, and advocacy with rare fluency. Appointed UK Digital Champion by the government in 2009, she architected the creation of the Government Digital Service (GDS) and the launch of GOV.UK — now considered a global benchmark for citizen-centred digital government, adopted as a model by countries from New Zealand to Estonia. In 2013 she was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for services to the digital economy and charity, and became the youngest woman ever appointed to the House of Lords, where she sits as a crossbench peer and an active legislative voice on technology, education, and inclusion.

Her subsequent ventures have consistently prioritized technology as a force for public good. She founded Doteveryone in 2016, a think tank dedicated to responsible technology that shaped UK digital policy until 2020, and co-founded Lucky Voice, the karaoke bar group she continues to chair. In 2024 she was appointed co-chair of the UK Government Technology Innovation Panel, guiding AI integration and digital reform across public services — returning her to the center of national digital policy at the precise moment it matters most.

Boards, the Lords, and a Life in Public Life

Martha currently sits on the boards of Chanel, Multiverse, and British Airways, and is a Director of Peers for the Planet. She is President of the British Chambers of Commerce, Chancellor of the Open University — the UK’s largest university by undergraduate enrollment — and an elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In November 2024, she joined the board of Multiverse, the British apprenticeships company co-founded by Euan Blair. She has written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, and The Times, appeared on Desert Island Discs and Question Time, and was named by The Drum in 2019 as the most influential woman in Britain’s digital sector over the previous 25 years.

As a speaker, Martha Lane Fox is that uncommon combination: a genuine founder who built and sold one of Europe’s biggest internet companies, a public servant who created infrastructure used by millions, and a legislator actively shaping the rules by which technology is governed. She speaks with candor, humor, and the authority of someone who has seen both the exhilarating promise and the real-world failures of digital transformation from the inside. Audiences at leadership events, technology summits, and board retreats leave with sharper questions about how their organizations build, deploy, and take responsibility for the technology they touch.