The Internet Entrepreneur !

Brent co-founded lastminute.com with Martha Lane Fox in 1998. He was CEO from inception, the company raised £120 million in an IPO 18 months after the site launched. Seven years later, the ground breaking travel and leisure website had acquired 14 businesses and was sold for $1.1 billion.

Currently Brent is Executive Chairman of mydeco, non-executive Chairman of WAYN (a travel and leisure social network with over 9 million members), a non-executive board director of Guardian Media Group and also acts as Governor of University of the Arts College, London.

Brent is also an angel investor and has invested in seed rounds in amongst others: moveme.com, viagogo, t5m, imagini.net, academia.eu.

In detail:

Brent co-founded lastminute.com in April 1998 with Martha Lane Fox in the living room of his London flat; three years after Brent had drafted the initial idea when working as a strategy consultant. Brent was 29 and Martha was just 25.

lastminute.com is based on the idea of matching supply and demand, it offers consumers last minute opportunities to acquire airline tickets, car hire, hotel rooms, package holidays, entertainment tickets, restaurant reservations and home delivery, speciality services, gifts and auctions. Brent’s initial vision remains unchanged - “to delight customers with great value inspiration and solutions when they are going away, going out or staying in.’

The company floated when the dot-com bubble was at its peak - the IPO was in fact 40 times oversubscribed and the price increase during the process was a record for a UK company. lastminute.com was the UK's highest profile site and it remains number one Travel website in Europe 7 years on. lastminute.com was acquired by Travelocity’s parent company Sabre Holdings Corporation on July 20, 2005.

As CEO, Brent is instrumental in maintaining and developing the Group’s relationship with all the key stakeholders in the business including the financial community and our customers. His unique vision of technology ensures that the lastminute.com customer experience continually benefits from the latest innovations in technology.

Brent, now 36, was born in South Africa, educated at Eton and holds a MA in French and German literature from Oxford. His previous roles include business development at LineOne, five years consulting at Mars & Co and Spectrum Strategy Consultants where he specialized in media and telecoms. Brent was also Head of Business Development and founding member of QXL. His family have lived all over - New York, Lisbon, Paris, South of France … but now he’s firmly settled in Chelsea, where he lives with his wife, Genevieve and two daughters, Jade and Celeste.

Brent believes his entrepreneurial streak comes from his grandfather who built a single clothes shop into a chain of 650 in South Africa and his passion for technology was inherited from his father who always said he should be involved in a start up. He also loves his gadgets. When asked what three things he can’t live without he listed his blackberry; mobile phone and of course lastminute.com – he is still as obsessively passionate about the business as ever – he has sales figures emailed to him every 15minutes and even when holidaying he’ll be combing through internet magazines on the beach or attached to his blackberry.

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