Martha Lane Fox was a poster child for the dotcom boom

Ms Lane Fox has long signalled her intention to take a back seat at Lastminute once it had achieved a full year of profitability.

This it managed during the past financial year - to the tune of �200,000 - having lost �16.2m the previous year.

Lastminute shares fell 17% on the news, partly because the results were on the weaker end of analyst's expectations.

But partly also because of the "Martha effect".

The departure of the MD overshadowed the financials. This is because the company and its top manager are no less intimately bundled together in the public eye than Bill Gates and Microsoft, or as Jack Welch once was with GE.

And she is just 30 years old.

Public property

The fact that Lastminute is almost synonymous with Ms Lane Fox is a matter of both accident and shrewd strategy.

She co-founded the company with Mr Hoberman in the relatively early stages of dot.com business, by all accounts with little expectation of what would follow.

The internet business orthodoxy of the time dictated that brand and visibility had to take precedence over profitability.

With no bricks and mortar presence on the high street, online retailers had to - and still have to - compete in the sphere of media mobilisation.

The news media themselves also had an interest in following the dot.com story closely. A new medium was both a threat and an opportunity to their own businesses.

So the photogenic and public relations savvy Ms Lane Fox became a natural star of the show.

Publicity, after all, is cheaper than marketing.

Leader of the pack

Few executives at loss-making small or medium sized enterprises can have been doorstepped by tabloid journalists.

But underlying the publicity was some shrewd business strategy that helped Lastminute pull ahead of the pack.

Ms Lane Fox and partners timed their public offering immaculately, cashing in at the top of the market in March 2000.

Lastminute shares rose 28% on the first day of trading, representing a valuation of �732m and earning the company �113.5m.

Ms Lane Fox and Mr Hoberman had bought the lastminute.com domain for �5,000 in 1998.

The share issue generated a cash pile which allowed the company to ride out the stormy waters that flooded in later that year.

Lastminute stock launched at 380p, touched 550p and tanked to less than 20p in October 2001.

But the company was able to restore faith by spending wisely on devalued rivals and small enterprises in less volatile, and less developed international internet markets.

Exposure was the key to market share in the early dotcom days

By the time the public love affair with all things dot.com ended, Lastminute had already crossed the line from tech start-up to retailer - an altogether more solid sector.

Bargain hunting

In the past three years the company has acquired Degriftour in France, Travelselect.com, Travel4less.com, Travelprice.com and Holiday Autos.

The company now operates in 13 countries. The share price has quadrupled since March this year.

Capitalisation is now more than �800m.

Analysts have generally commended the way management moved to reassure investors, shopping carefully, and hanging on to a safety net of cash - about �45m - from the flotation windfall.

The company also heartened markets by naming Allan Leighton, former boss at supermarket chain Asda, as non-executive chairman in October 200.

The appointment helped bury the parvenu image of the late 1990s.

Brand width

But Lastminute is still in a high-risk game.

The full-year profits announced alongside Ms Lane Fox's resignation may owe something to a traditional summer burst of holiday spending.

Travel generally is a cyclical industry, hyper-sensitive to economic downturns, as holiday plans are often the first expenditure to be culled when consumers are feeling the pinch.

Then again, Lastminute, which specialises in short breaks and shifting excess capacity at knockdown rates, is in a position to pick up some of the slack left by the more dramatic decline in long haul travel.

The company has also integrated the idea of risk and spontaneity into its brand.

This may have helped win market share early on in the dot.com era when consumers were generally wary of spending online.

Check out Lastminute.com's latest share price

They also did well to be offering a non-tangible service, being less at the mercy of the distribution bottlenecks that revealed some websites to be little more than front-of-house interfaces for old fashioned (and not very good) mail order firms.

And does anyone remember overambitious and overhyped boo.com?

Happy Holidays

So far Ms Lane Fox and her partners have benefited from a happy combination of luck and good judgement in volatile conditions.

All of which suggests that the departing managing director, who nonetheless stays on as a non-executive director with more than 3% of stock, should be able to withdraw smoothly from the front line.