Former dotcom poster child finds her lucky voice

Shortly before meeting Martha Lane Fox, her publicity people call to postpone the photographer. Lane Fox, who walks with a black polished stick, had fallen over and was sporting a scab on her nose, something that has happened all too often since a horrific car accident in Morocco four years ago.

Lane Fox, a co-founder of Lastminute.com and one of the best-known faces of the internet boom in the late 1990s, has endured 23 operations since the crash, which happened after she had quit the online travel firm and finally found the time to do some exploring herself. Her forearm is criss-crossed with faint scars that could be mistaken for creases. "My friends all tease me, because I have now got a new epithet of brave Martha or tragic Martha, having gone through dotcom Martha. I can't stand it."

Lane Fox works from a small office in fashionable Fitzrovia in London's West End, next door to a new contemporary art gallery. She is gradually building her interests back up, both in business and in a handful of charitable projects.

She is the chair of Lucky Voice, a Tokyo-inspired karaoke club that allows groups of friends to hire small rooms, which she started with her own cash three years ago. There are two clubs - in London and Manchester - and she hopes to develop it into a chain. "The ambition has grown," she says. "I like businesses where you feel as though there are bigger macro issues going on - all this Pop Idol and X Factor stuff."

She is a director of Channel 4 and Marks & Spencer - "I either wear incredibly expensive designer clothes or I wear M&S, accessorised brutally" - and is also on the board of MyDeco, an interiors website begun by Brent Hoberman, her Lastminute co-founder. Hoberman also invested in Lucky Voice.

"It would be an awful, terrible thing if Brent wasn't deeply integrated into my working life," she says. "It could have gone either way - some people could have had the most awful bust-up."

Anti-authoritarian

Her charitable interests are centred on her own foundation, Antigone, which focuses on criminal justice, health and education. Lane Fox studied ancient and modern history at Oxford but for those less familiar with ancient Greece, Antigone - often seen as an anti-authoritarian heroine - was a fearless woman who fought to get her brother, a traitor to the state, a decent burial.