The Lastminute.com Series A ...

One of the biggest adventures and pleasures of my life was working closely with Brent and Martha from September 1998 onwards to raise their first round of capital. I was an Associate Director at New Media Spark at the time, fresh out of INSEAD getting an MBA.

I actually remember driving the valuation up to ￡6 m from ￡5 m on the Series A pre-money due to over-subscription, but this is her story and her company, so I'm sure she's right ... Martha is lovely and Brent is quite brilliant it's true.

Brent was the first person I met in the UK on Easter weekend 1997, and he was my first client. He also introduced me to my co-founders at First Tuesday. Super Connector, and I was pleased that we shared so many ideas many years ago. They are great people.

The following was published, today, in the Business Section of The Sunday Times.

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‘The trouble with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” President George W Bush reputedly once quipped to Tony Blair. Whether true or not, it was revealing.

There are many ways to measure entrepreneurship, and governments vie for globally recognised top spots. I embarked on some research to understand the diversity and complexity of these rankings, but I came away baffled. After an hour, I felt I could declare Martha-stan the entrepreneurial capital of the world without too many experts quibbling, as long as I had produced an insane number of metrics.

These myriad frameworks may be helpful when world leaders are competing with each other for bragging rights, but in my opinion, the numbers don’t reflect the wealth of founding?talent we have all through society, wherever you are. Think of all the people starting charities, developing a “side hustle” or forced to become freelance because of Covid.

Entrepreneurship has underpinned my whole life. My mother started her own successful business, and some of my earliest memories are of stuffing envelopes full of books when my father self-published one of his gardening blockbusters. In 1994, my first job was in a start-up consultancy. I was the tenth recruit and I learnt as much about the media and telecoms sector in which we specialised as I did about building a small business. It was also there that I met Brent Hoberman, the brilliant brains behind Lastminute.com, with whom I would embark in 1998 on one of the most rollercoaster entrepreneurial experiences imaginable.

One thing I have learnt from working in the public, private and philanthropic worlds is that everyone can find some benefit in thinking like an entrepreneur, even if they don’t want to be one.?

There are obvious ways of cultivating an “entrepreneurial mindset” — take risks, apply for a job you don’t think you’ll get, suggest a product innovation you’ve been secretly imagining — but for me there are two other qualities that you hear less about.

The first is curiosity — finding out the detail of how something works, being interested in jobs that aren’t your own. It will never be time wasted. Starting a business normally involves a massive learning curve; you can’t get funding or build a product without asking questions about everything and of everyone.

Good questions make the difference. For example, when I was helping set up the Government Digital Service with a team of civil servants, they were brilliant at asking about every part of the existing process for keeping the public informed. This enabled them to dismantle the old technology with a deep knowledge. Nothing was out of bounds and all ways of working were questioned.

As they began to build Gov.uk, they did so having mapped out everything carefully and understood how all the pieces fitted together. They were civil servant entrepreneurs.

The second quality is persistence. When I first described the idea of Lastminute.com to people, they walked away from me in disbelief. When Brent and I started trying to raise money, we were refused by all but one venture capitalist. Brent is one of the most persistent people l know — he called the head of sales at Alitalia about 30 times to convince her to meet us so that we could get airline seats to sell.

Persistence is different to tenacity and to hard work. Persistence means you just plug away at something that might even be boring but is important. All of us have tedious parts of our work, but an ability to keep going is surprisingly rare.

I was impressed recently when I met someone who was running client sales in a global ad company. Winning new business is always hard, especially in these tough economic times, but they were growing their accounts and absolutely relentless in getting in touch with prospective customers. “I’m not too grand to call someone ten times,” they told me. “I will keep on with the tedious work of trying to make contact by whatever means necessary.” That meant a lot of chasing, calling and texting and doing this repeatedly. It paid off.

You may think you don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in your body. You may despair at our societal lionising of founders. But don’t let these thoughts stop you seeing the benefit of thinking like an entrepreneur occasionally. You never know, you might like it.

Martha Lane Fox co-founded Lastminute.com and Lucky Voice. She is president of the British Chambers of Commerce, chancellor of the Open University and sits on multiple boards.

@marthalanefox