How Fox is free to roam

Martha Lane Fox, the 30-year-old star of Lastminute.com, has announced minutes before we speak that she is quitting as managing director of the company she co-founded with Brent Hoberman five years ago, and she is fullthroated with emotion.

All morning she has been rushing between meetings and dealing with massive amounts of attention, and her voice cracks when I ask how she is going to celebrate.

"I don't know!" she cries. "It's a funny feeling, I don't have any plans for tonight yet! I'll probably hang out with Brent and people at work, and be calm. It's quite overwhelming: I'll probably burst into tears."

We conduct our interview as she dashes from one meeting to the next; her mobile going crazy and her head in a whirl. She and Hoberman have just delivered their annual results, and their first full year of profitability, something she wanted to achieve before she stepped into a non-executive role. "I'll still be on the board, and I'll still be bossing Brent around," she says, laughing happily, "but I was 24 when I started the business, I'm 30 now. It's the right time for Lastminute, and for me."

It's the end of an era for Lane Fox, who was the darling of the dotcom boom. In the late Nineties her picture - messy hair, lots of bangles - was on the front page of every newspaper. She looked like a fawn, very thin, very soft, very upright, though as the years went by the student look was replaced by a crisp authority and glamorous Prada outfits: during the long nights in Lastminute's stucco offices in Buckingham Gate, Victoria, she would treat herself by ordering designer clothes from Netaporter.com.

The reason she has decided to quit is that, with success, her social life vanished. She worked seven days a week, 16 hours a day, for six years and her love life ground to almost zero, a deeply sensitive issue for someone heading towards 30.

"It's difficult when you're working this hard to be able to support somebody in a way that would be quite right for them to demand to be supported." It had got to the point, she says, where she felt that her "whole life was going backwards while this one thing was going forwards". She didn't have time to pay her bills or repair her car, her flat was collapsing, she was always too knackered to go to parties where she might meet a man, and worried she wouldn't have any friends left if she cancelled them for dinner just one more time.

Her decision to move on, she says breathlessly, is "kind of about having my own life. I don't want to fall into the trap of saying I'm taking time out to find a boyfriend and have babies - it's not about that. It's more about the fact I've really only worked in one business, and I've only worked with Brent, and that's amazing and fantastic, and I'm passionate about Lastminute. But I've always wanted to do something else. I want to see if I can."

But what? I ask her, and she laughs. "I have no idea. I've got to have a think." Lane Fox is from a bohemian, academic background - her father teaches Classics at New College, Oxford - and she doesn't rule out the possibility she might do something more arty. "I think it will be business, not creative," she says, "but I don't want to be categorical yet. Brent has known that I will do this for years. But I've only just made the decision."

Does she want to get married? "I'd love to have a lovely, successful family life," comes the answer, "but I'm not big into marriage. I'm not religious. But I'd love to sort out my personal life, definitely." She admits the kind of man she is looking for doesn't have to be rich, but does need to have "enthusiasm, optimism and kindness".

She and Hoberman launched Lastminute.com in June 1998 from a "broom cupboard in Portobello Road" - they began by unglamorously cold-calling airlines. A year later they were famous.

Asked about Lane Fox's contribution, her chairman, Allan Leighton, remarked that "all the operational stuff, all the really hard stuff we've had to do, Martha's done. As we've bought businesses we've had to lay people off, and where we've got fat we've had to lay people off, and Martha has been the one to do that. So underneath that nice veneer she's much tougher than anybody thinks."

But she didn't pretend to know it all. She was the MD of an incredibly successful company, a multimillionairess (on paper, at least, she is worth more than £30 million, but she says she has no plans to sell up immediately, and is giving up a salary of more than £146,000 a year), but she stayed on in her two-bedroom flat in Bayswater (she always maintained she wasn't interested in material trappings). She would admit openly that she doubted her ability to do the job.

SHE always said she felt "hugely lucky" that she met Hoberman in her first job. That was at a management consultancy called Spectrum in the early Nineties, when she was fresh from reading ancient and modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford. Hoberman interviewed her. "And he didn't like me at all," she recalls. "Luckily the others overruled him."

While working with him, he kept mentioning his idea for an internet site selling excess hotel and flight capacity. "Then we had a drink and he said, 'I'm going to do it.' I said, 'Okay. I'll come with you.'"

It was the start of a ride that saw their shares soar, plunge, and then soar again - Lastminute has more than doubled revenues in the past financial year. She describes the experience as a "personal and professional roller-coaster, all-consuming and exciting and difficult and exhausting and stressful: I've never done anything before where your mood can go from elation to complete desperation in a nanosecond." She admits it got "personally nasty post the crash, in 2000. People were writing, in quite reputable broadsheet papers, that we were greedy or that the business was a sham, that it was going to go bankrupt or I was incompetent and just there because I was a young blonde."

Now the older and wiser blonde is beginning the next phase. Plan A is to repair her social life: "I'm going to take a couple of months off and see some of my friends and I'm going to have a think about the next stage. And then," she adds, "I'm going to go on one of our Lastminute.com holidays that I've seen other people booking every day, hooray!"