Marks & Spencer said this morning that it had hired Martha Lane Fox, the dot-com entrepreneur, as a non-executive director.

The retailer said Ms Lane Fox, who co-founded lastminute.com in 1998 and is also a board member of Channel 4, brought with her "considerable business experience as well as knowledge of the online sector".

Ms Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman, with whom she launched lastminute, sold the business to Sabre Holdings, the owner of Travelocity, in a £577 million deal in 2005. The sale is thought to have earned her £13.5 million.

Mr Hoberman and Ms Lane Fox founded lastminute on April Fool's Day in 1998. The company floated at 380p in March 2000, with shares hitting 487.5p on their second day of trading. They peaked at 555p before plummetting as low as 17p when the dot-com bubble burst.

Educated at Westminster School, Ms Lane Fox went on to study history at Oxford. She worked for three years at Spectrum Strategy Consultants, a management consultancy to the media and telecom industries, before joining Carlton Communications in 1997.

In 2005, a year after she was seriously injured in a car accident in Morocco, she and her new business partners opened Lucky Voice, an upmarket karaoke bar in Soho, in which she is the main shareholder.