So one of the great things about being an entrepreneur
is that you don't have to pretend to be someone you're not.
You can build the culture around things that you care about,
build your own value system.
You don't have to pretend to be a suit in an office.
The funny thing is that I don't really feel very successful.
I know I've been lucky to build a company,
and that company got sold for a lot of money.
But in my own head, I still beat myself up and I think,
"Come on! You haven’t actually contributed something to the world.
You've got to do something that's more meaningful,
make sure we don't screw up the next 10, 20 years."
I think that's quite a good tension,
if you can make sure that you channel it in a positive way
and not something that whirs away in your head
and feels like a negative thought.
Lastminute.com was really one of the first e-commerce companies in Europe.
We had to convince people, back in 1998,
that people were going to buy stuff
with their credit cards on the internet.
Can you imagine that?
Isn't there an awful lot of pressure on you now?
Because this has become a major company.
There's always been a pressure on us,
but it's no worse than it's been for the last couple of years.
It's so hard when you're in a start-up
because your personality
is part of how you market and communicate.
But if I look back, I think I put myself out there a bit too much.
When the stock market collapsed
and our share price went from £5.35 to about 19p
I got a lot of attention in the media,
and I got a lot of handwritten letters.
I got 3,000 letters from people writing to me
telling me I was an awful person for taking their money.
I was naive in dealing with the media,
and I was naive a bit in thinking we could attract all this attention
and not meet the consequences of that.
So, be yourself,
build things around the values that you have,
but hold a little bit back.
So in 2004, I just left my company, Lastminute.com,
and I was taking a few months off.
And I was in Morocco with my new boyfriend
and I fell out of a car.
I wasn't wearing a seatbelt, we skidded off the road.
I broke 28 bones and I had a stroke.
I had to then spend pretty much the next two years in hospital,
and the next probably two years after that
in hospital in my own house
recovering from that cataclysmically bad event.
I was pretty out of it for a long time in hospital
but I had decided I was going to start another business
before I had the accident, called Lucky Voice.
It's a karaoke business,
and the guy I was going to start the business with
used to come to me in hospital
and start showing me kind of designs and drawings,
and all the things we were going to do.
I was completely high on morphine
and I don't really remember anything that I said to him.
But it actually was pretty important for me
because trying to rebuild your body,
but at the same time you want to get your brain back a bit too.
And I didn't want to be slowly wasting away,
just focusing on whether I could stand up.
I'd built an online e-commerce business -
pretty much the most techy thing you could do,
and then all of a sudden it's building bars in the real world.
But I think being imaginative in how you build your life
and your career is really rewarding and actually quite important
in terms of how we build resilience as human beings.
I am the worst karaoke singer you can possibly imagine.
I pick things which you can't really massacre,
and now post the accident I often sing Elton John, I'm Still Standing,
for obvious reasons.
Inspiration and things can come from all kinds of surprising places.
I've never really had a plan, don't tell anyone.
But I would really urge you to be open-minded
about how you build your career and about opportunities.
So always take the call, always be opportunistic, always be open-minded,
and talk to people and meet people
and don't feel like you have to have a set way of doing things.
The incredible thing about being an entrepreneur
and understanding a bit about technology
is that you see how quickly things can change
and how innovation is possible.
You don't have to be the person doing the coding,
you can be the person working in any aspect of technology.
So don't shy away from technology
because it can help us solve the big problems.
That cat!