Lucy P Marcus

A high-tech woman for the 21st Century

New Yorker Lucy P Marcus is a successful, UK-based businesswoman who has been nominated as one of Britain's 50 Most Powerful Women and recently named Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum.

Born in New York, Lucy did an internship with Senator Edward Kennedy while studying at Wellesley College in Boston, Massachusetts. She later worked on public policy at Price Waterhouse and the US Treasury before she decamped to the UK.

Lucy took her Master's at Cambridge before setting up Marcus Venture Consulting, in Somerset, in 1999. Aiming to help investment firms become 'smart money' in an increasingly cutthroat climate, she flew in the face of the received wisdom of the time, which suggested venture capitalists neither needed, nor wanted advice.

As the spectacular bursting of the dot.com bubble demonstrated, straight-talkers like Lucy were bang on the money all along.

What's different about her approach?

Lucy says: 'I don't tell anyone my age. I'm too young for some people and too old for others. I'm amazed how important age is to people. People look for boxes to put other people into. You're a woman, you're American, you're x or y age.'

In March 2000, Lucy started HighTech Women, an on- and offline mentoring and meeting place for women in technology-related businesses. Born from a single e-mail to a handful of friends and colleagues, the forum now boasts over 2,000 members worldwide in 70 different countries.

Proof positive of Lucy's belief that: 'HighTech Women was something that had to be done: I kept going to conferences and being one of four women in a roomful of 200 CEOs. I found that I'd meet the most interesting people in the ladies' room!'

Lucy also sits on several boards, among them Cambridge University Business School's the Judge Institute of Management Studies Advisory Board and the Advisory Board of the Asian University for Women.

'My job is like being a metal detector on a beach - finding the gem, the essence of anything, is so exciting. It's the Hegelian way of looking at things… to find what existed before and what exists now, and then pull that together into what's going to happen next.'