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Martha Lane Fox isn't used to accepting defeat. "I'm a real optimist, I think the potential for change is the most exciting thing," she says on a warm summer afternoon in London. When her startup Lastminute.com -- co-founded in 1998 when she was 25 -- lost 90 percent of its value within a year of being floated on the London Stock Exchange, she and co-founder Brent Hoberman managed to keep it buoyant and sell in 2005 for £577 million, not long after she turned 32. A year before the sale she had suffered a serious car crash in Morocco, which resulted in her undergoing 28 operations, and a lifelong need for a walking cane.
Since returning to public life, Lane Fox, 42, has been Britain's "digital commissioner"; in her role, she campaigned for more of the UK population to go online – Lane Fox says that ten million people have never used the web. She helped set up the Government Digital Service, which brought government transactions with citizens on to a single digital platform -- Gov.uk. She is also on the boards of Marks & Spencer, Channel 4 and Makielab and she co-founded the karaoke chain Lucky Voice, which turns ten this year. "I never imagined Lucky Voice would be anything more than a slight vanity project, but it's really exciting to see that it's grown to eight venues around the world," she says.
In March 2014, she was appointed chancellor of the Open University; the year before she was made a life peer in the House of Lords (Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho), sitting as a crossbencher. "Earlier this year, I delivered the BBC's Dimbleby Lecture, where I posited the idea that the UK could be brilliant and world-leading at internet infrastructure, digital skills and government services -- but we need a completely new civic organisation to help us do that," she says. "I am now working on what it might look like."
The first point on her agenda: addressing the major problems with the internet in the west. Her big concerns are the lack of women in large tech companies ("Only one large technology company is run by a woman, which is absolutely unbelievable to me," she says) and the ethical issues creeping up around online privacy. "We know from Snowden and the public domain that we are one of the most surveilled countries on the planet and we've walked right into that," she says.
"I think as a society we'll look back and think, 'Whoops, we gave up our privacy in quite a dramatic way.'" The public body she proposes -- which she calls Dot Everyone -- would be a civil organisation staffed by researchers and ethicists who would unpick the ethical questions about privacy and the under-representation of women in tech, and then take a global lead on how to address them, she says.
Aside from public advocacy, Lane Fox's passion is a new entrant into the political landscape -- the Women's Equality Party. "As a crossbench peer, I have to be careful, but this is fascinating -- a non-partisan force with some really radical ideas such as equal pay for women and ending violence against women," she says. "I'm supporting them carefully from the sidelines as I'm a non-political peer.
I just have to find the right relationship with that party as it develops."
And what about returning to her roots as an entrepreneur? "I have one business that I'm dying to do, but it's quite a difficult, grubby, unpleasant business. It's dealing in a bit of the world that's really quite hardcore, but I know it's a good idea," she says. "You'd think starting a massive new public institution, a new political party and continuing with my business interests might be enough. But you never know."
Written by Madhumita Venkataramanan, WIRED's associate editor. She wrote about BrainGate in 05.15
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
