Martha Lane Fox

Technology speaker 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 rose to prominence in 1998 as co-founder of Lastminute.com, the pioneering European travel and leisure platform she and Brent Hoberman built from a two-person startup into a publicly listed company sold for £577 million in 2005. That journey made her a defining figure of the dotcom era, while the near-fatal car accident in 2004 that hospitalized her for close to two years gave her a lasting perspective on technology, resilience, and human purpose.

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

Her later ventures have consistently treated technology as a force for public good. She founded Doteveryone, a responsible-technology think tank that shaped UK digital policy, and co-founded the karaoke group Lucky Voice, which she chairs. In 2024 she was appointed co-chair of the UK Government Technology Innovation Panel, guiding AI integration and digital reform across public services and returning her to the center of national digital policy at the moment it matters most.

Boards, the Lords, and a Life in Public Service

Lane Fox sits on the boards of Chanel, Multiverse (the apprenticeships company co-founded by Euan Blair), and British Airways, and serves as a director of Peers for the Planet. She recently completed distinguished terms as President of the British Chambers of Commerce and as Chancellor of the Open University, the UK’s largest university by undergraduate enrollment, and is an elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She has written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, and The Times, appeared on Desert Island Discs and Question Time, and was named the most influential woman in Britain’s digital sector of the previous 25 years.

As a speaker, Martha Lane Fox is a rare 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 how technology is governed. She speaks with candor, humor, and the authority of someone who has seen both the 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.