Interview with Eva Pascoe

Eva Pascoe was born in communist Poland in 1964. Her mother and father were both economists. Eva spent her youth reading and making things, including a computer, she explains: “If you wanted a computer, you needed to make one. We would go from one tech market to another just buying different components and putting them together.  We had lots of friends who were interested in computers. … In Poland women were interested in computing as well.  It wasn’t such a big gender difference.”

Eva says that her father was her biggest influence and taught her to be curious. Through her family’s travels, which included living in Zambia, Eva found that she was good at languages and gained a global perspective. Her first business while at school was making dresses out of fabric nappies which she dyed and then sold on market stall in Wroclaw. She adds: “I realised that if you make something, people were prepared to pay for it and that stayed with me, that ability to use your hands to making beautiful creations.” Not being particularly interested in fashion, Eva’s next business was teaching English at university.

Eva went to school in Wroc?aw which she says had a very creative environment.  She explains: “It was a town which came to Poland after the war, originally a German town.  It was very liberal and progressive, even for the communist standard. I went to a school which was extremely radical in a way, and definitely politically radical.  It opened my mind to having a different view on life.”

After school, Eva went to university in Warsaw to study modern languages, mainly Spanish, with the aim of being able to travel and leave Poland. With the Chernobyl explosion, Eva changed direction and decided to study the interaction between the human brain and technology. In 1986 she moved to Birkbeck College, London, to take one of the very early human-computer interaction degrees.  She studied part-time in the evenings and worked full time as a business analyst to fund her degree during the day.

In 1991, after completing her degree, Eva started her PhD. She says: “I got really interested in decision-making, and particularly decision-making and the dynamic context.  How people respond to a situation of crisis where you have to make a decision quickly, and as it happened, there was a grant for such PhD. I applied for that, got it, and then spent three years researching interface design for nuclear power stations.”

 In 1993 Eva got a fellowship with Imperial Cancer Research at City University and continued her research into “how people interpret information on the screen when it’s a health risk”.

On 1 September 1994, Eva, together with her partners, David Rowe, Keith and Gene Teare, opened Cyberia Café on Whitfield Street in Fitzrovia, London. It provided desktop computers with full Internet access. Eva had hoped that it would be a women’s only café.  Initially, most of the customers were men until they started to attract digital artists, many of whom were women.

Eva says: “The tools we had when we opened Cyberia were extremely limited, because the speed of the Internet at that time relied on very early modems (Sportsters).  We were connected, but the bandwidth was still tiny.  So, people were very excited about it, but I think they were more excited about the idea than the reality.  We did have email, we did have FTP, and Mosaic had just started, so you could download software and little games.”

The idea for the café came to life when Eva’s partners, Dave and Keith were looking for a way to launch Easynet ISP Internet provider and after Eva had visited San Francisco where cafés ran SF NET. Eva explains: “We were looking to make it easy for people to understand why they want to be on the Internet, if you’ve never seen it, how do you explain to people?  So, we thought the café would be the best way to contextualise it and show them the wide range of tools, email, FTP, browser, the ability to download games, music.  A lot of that was really only possible in the café where you could help people because a lot of people were completely technophobic at that time. Also, I wanted to teach computers, particularly HTML, to whoever we could teach, but really for women. So, we combined our resources. It seemed like a good idea to combine the way of showing people the Internet and encouraging them to sign up for the Internet from home, and provide a training centre, and make it non-anoraky, non-geeky.”

“The whole ambience I was aiming for was like a European café. The computers were there, but it was almost secondary, that you wanted to go there for nice coffee, fresh croissant.  I remember there was a time in London when the only other café was really Bar Italia in Soho.  People drank tea, coffee hadn’t really happened yet. We were probably five years before Costa, and many more before Starbucks, so we were really introducing coffee to Londoners, not just computers.”

The café was arranged in a U shape with all of the computers facing inwards to ensure that the browsing not private and so that people could help each other in these early days of internet access. Eva explains: “We wanted to make sure that the environment was welcoming, and everybody was comfortable with it, but more so that people could help each other.  … It was a very collaborative environment.”

 The café’s Internet provider was Easynet, which had been designed by Keith Teare and David Rowe and was the second internet provider in London. Easynet grew quickly and had about half a million subscribers. It has gone on to forms the infrastructure for Sky.

As Cyberia grew in popularity it also expanded into the whole building, taking over the basement (Subcyberia) to cater for gamers and the second floor which became a co-working room (Transcyberia). Eva explains: “We kind of accidentally invented co-working because we were the only ones in town with a good Internet connection.” They also introduced Cyberia Records with help from Nick Ryan, a composer, who together with Keith Teare, invented the concept of embedding digital rights in the code. Eva comments, “We were ahead of Spotify by quite a long time.” Other start-ups were Cyberia Payments with digital cheques which was the invention of Thiebaud, a French engineer, Cyberia magazine, and a design department to create merchandise which was run by Sebastian Conran. The café also became known for its post-rave Sunday breakfast club as ravers would head there to check their emails before going home.

With women representing just 3% of Internet users in 1994, Eva decided to organise HTML courses and only-women tech courses, an idea she had from her PhD course where she taught nurses to use the first computers in the NHS. She explains: “I developed this U shape concept there, and I realised that actually women are absolutely capable of learning anything, but you have to develop motivation.  You have to show them something they actually want to be doing, because learning programming for the sake of programming wasn’t going to fly.”  She used visual images and the Louvre as motivation and found that women were very much more motivated to create rather than simply learn to code. She adds: “I still think that we’re making fundamentally an error in how we train women in technology because it is just not exciting for them to learn coding for the coding sake.  There has got to be a reason, a motivation; our differences in genders are somewhat under-explored.”

The café, located next to Whitfield Recording Studio, started to attract visiting performers who wanted to learn about the Internet or email. Eva says: “One of the early people was Kylie Minogue, who was recording an album then, and popped into Cyberia and wanted to learn email.  … Similarly, U2 came and Bono because they were intrigued to see if they could send their music to other people.  … The most interesting visitor was David Bowie. He was extremely involved in the early technology.  He had his own BowieNet, and we had quite a few connections with him.”

 Having started the café on their own money, Eva and her partners realised that they would need investors to help them finance it as it continued to grow and secured funding from Maurice Saatchi and Mick Jagger which they used to open Cyberia in Centre Pompidou in Paris; the first UK company ever to be invited to Centre Pompidou.

Eva says: “Cyberia Paris was much more political in a way, but also much more sophisticated, because we spent money on a top architect, Bernhard Blauel, who was very minimalistic but also he understood the kind of slightly dystopian cybernetic ambiance. Cyberia in Centre Pompidou was quite dark because we didn’t have to worry about the nerds anymore; it had stopped being a nerdy environment, it was just, a very beautiful, very creative environment. Bernhard designed this beautiful cybercafe which attracted people like Bill McAlister who worked for George Soros.  They used to pop in for chats before seeing the exhibitions.  We were first in Paris by a very long time, so if you wanted to see what the Internet was about, you had to come to my Centre Pompidou Cyberia.”

After the success of Paris, Eva and her partners set up a franchise scheme and opened between seventeen and twenty further cafés including ones in Manchester (which they owned), Edinburgh, Tokyo, Bangkok, Manila and Rotterdam with Virgin as a partner. Eva says: “At some point we had some franchises that we didn’t really oversee that tight, but it was rapid development.  By two thousand, we had one in probably every city.”

In 1998 Eva left Cyberia which continued under the management team but with the growth of home connections the team realised that they needed to move on. They found a partner in a Korean company called Be the Reds which was looking for somewhere to provide support for gamers and went on to create thousands of game cafés in Korea and in northern China. Eva’s partners then concentrated on Easynet. Keith and Gene moved to Palo Alto in the US, where Gene became one of the key development leads in Crunch, Crunchbase.

In 1998, Eva left Cyberia after being approached to head a joint venture to provide the Topshop internet; Zoom She says: “The challenge for me was, I knew that women were still not using technology.  There was still, minority of users were women.  And I thought, maybe fashion.  I had to go back to my original idea of fashion online and at that time, Topshop was one of the leading brands for young people, so I thought, if we can create online shop for Topshop, then women will surely come.”

Zoom was both e-commerce and an Internet service provider, providing free Internet to customers. Eva explains: “Zoom was going to be easier than Easynet. I just kept pushing with making the access acceptable even for technophobes so that people could get access from home with minimum number of clicks and minimum amount of installation. We designed this new ISP called Zoom, and Zoom fashion portal, and we had these beautiful disks designed by a very expensive agency that made it look very vibrant and easy, but Topshop didn’t want to invest in the infrastructure so, we went to Easynet and developed a white-label version; underneath Zoom was Easynet but with a slightly easier installation.”

While at Topshop, Eva also developed the first mobile WAP- based e-commerce solution despite Alan Sugar’s reservations that no one would want to have data on a phone. She explains: “Smartphones started coming up in 2005, but there was a previous technology WAP which was like a pre-smartphone. I was quite convinced early on that mobile phones needed to have data reception, because, we were all commuting, and so we thought that mobile phones will be useful if you can do a bit of browsing, or if you want to pay your bills online.  … WAP was the first wireless platform, but it wasn’t successful.  It was superseded by the next generation, but we developed a WAP version for Topshop online and it worked. … It was an early start, but it taught us a lot and when we developed Topshop for smartphones, we had a lot of solutions in place, so we were quite early on, it was really, really very exciting.”

In 1997, Eva and her partners began to be concerned about digital privacy after the invention of cookies, the growth in collection of personal data and its use by third parties. They pulled together a group of people from the hacking community and academia who shared their concerned and began Cybersalon. Eva explains: “We started working with people who could lobby against it and used artists to show the harm if your personal data gets collected by the wrong people and then leaked out by the wrong people. At some point, it morphed into more of a general protest against large companies, because the large companies took hold of the Internet very quickly.”

The group started to develop a Digital Bill of Rights to protect people from the risks. She continues: “For many years people thought that we were just crazy; why would you worry about digital privacy?  What people didn’t understand, it’s not so much you hide, but if people know that you care, let’s say about your hip replacement or your thyroid, then political parties start showing you apps which are personalised one to one, and say if you vote for UKIP, we will give you free hip replacement.  If you vote for somebody else, we will give you free prescriptions forever.  If the advertisers know your weak points, they can persuade you through one-to-one marketing and you don’t even know you are being persuaded.  That’s what we objected to.”

In the early 2000s, the group started to run monthly events at the ICA, the Dana Centre, and the Science Museum. As well as teaching people about the advances in technology, science, and gaming, the group also created Cybersonica; a series of festivals about music, the art of connected sound and modern technologies which Eva describes as “a kind of virtual jamming” with music streaming from different artists from around the world. Before smartphones, they ran the first wireless festival called NODE London for the Dana Centre. Eva explains: “We parked a black taxi in front of Dana Centre, and we had people sending messages to the taxi, and then those messages were relayed into posters in different cities.  That was pretty mad.  It was to show what mobile connectivity can do.”

In 2013, the group was approached by the Department of Media, Film and Performance at Middlesex University which has historically been involved in cybernetic activities, to help them to create a series of events for the students and postgraduates, as well as developing a BA in Digital Media to reflect what modern digital media.

The group also worked with the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and Middlesex University to create a series of events introducing modern computing for visual artists with Sun Microsystems sponsored top end computers.  Eva adds: “It was a very cross-pollinating environment, because Sun has attracted top end technical engineers and a lot of top end graphic designers, from that, the London game community benefited.  It was like a spur of development, at a relatively low cost, because you can apply to be a resident there, artist-in-residence, and get access to top level combination of computer and bandwidth.”

Eva is currently consulting to the Retail Practice, a multichannel retail and technology consultancy in UK and Europe. She took the role after getting interested in how digital technology could help large retailers following on from her experience with developing Topshop’s e-commerce which was well ahead of many other retailers. Her role today is to help retailers to migrate to digital faster.  She explains: “I knew that it’s possible to restructure a large company to fit the Internet and I started looking for clients who would want to move from physical shops to online, because I could see how quickly the online fashion was growing, and I could also see that that probably spells early death sentence for physical shops, so I felt a little bit concerned.  I didn’t realise how quickly that would happen, but I could see it would happen.”

Eva was also a part of the High Street Review team, led by Bill Grimsey produced for the Government in 2013 to highlight the expected rate of closure and work with the

Government to mitigate the change.  Unfortunately, the report was ignored. Eva says: “We wrote another one a few years later when the high street was really beginning to die and we highlighted a number of solutions that were necessary to minimise the damage. Again, we didn’t get much result and as you can see today, the high street is on its last legs, and I think within the next three years about 80 per cent of stores will close.”

Recently, Eva has also been looking at the ability of the Internet to provide solution for small retailers and young fashion brands working with a platform called Shopify. She explains: “I found a few women founders that I liked and approached them, and I am working now with a couple, particularly helping with technology, but also fundraising. I invested in a number of companies and led probably the most successful fundraiser on Crowdcube.  We went for £500,000 and ended up with one and a half million pounds – it can be done. I am just fascinated about how young women can drive and set up their own businesses, with a relatively low cost and a little bit of technical knowledge.  … That’s my big passion, and that’s the area which I think I will stick with for the next few years.”

Of her proudest achievements Eva includes setting up Cyberia saying: “I think opening Cyberia to non-technical community was very exciting, and the fact that we managed to invite people to the Internet on very positive and gender-neutral terms. … I’m very glad that a lot of women had good experience in Cyberia, and even today, many of people who came to Cyberia are now heads of digital for huge companies, or ministers for digital in the Government. I think we contributed starting the digital journey in the right way.”

In addition, Eva is proud of her work with Topshop where she led the team to develop e-commerce well ahead of other retailers in 1999.

Eva is a digital trustee on a number of non-profit organisations, including Help for Heroes and Digital Liberties among others. She says: “I get involved with a lot of things where either gaming, simulations or digital skills can move things forward.

Having got involved with Wikipedia and offering training to women to become editors, Eva believes that “we can genuinely educate everybody, if we choose to, who has access. Equalising access to information across many countries in the globe is still something that’s ahead of us but I think it’s happening.” However, Eva still has strong concerns about digital privacy and the risk created by the fact the Internet is in the hands of just a few large companies, putting the Internet at risk from attack by hackers.

Another concern is the negative impact on the environment from data centres. Eva says: “Data centres are very polluting; they generally run on coal meaning that dirty energy powers the Internet.  Nobody really knows it, because we don’t see it, but, trust me, it’s one of the biggest downsides of the Internet. We are working with Nordic countries to create data centres powered by water. My husband has created this organisation called Hydro66, which is based in northern Sweden, where 10,000 computers emit the same CO₂ as one computer in Germany in data centre.  That’s an enormous improvement there. … I think we can spend the next few years fixing it and moving the Internet provision, the data centres, from coal-driven to alternative energies.”

“I think if you started in IT or digital today, you would really want to work on environment, doing it in an environmentally friendly way therefore I think, a combination of computer science and environmental studies are probably best. When you look at how we educate our engineers, it’s a very narrow education; they don’t really have ethics, philosophy, nor environment education either. I think we need to bring ethical, environmental awareness, and technology together. The biggest challenge is how do we educate our best people?  For those starting today, you have to look around, see what damage we have created, what opportunities there are to clean it, look wider, and bring that to the clients and make them aware of what can be possible.”

“Learn by doing. Study things that are hands-on and practise, because technology is all about practise.  The more you do, the better you get.  Try to get involved in hackathons, in fab labs, in, interactive fashion, which is always a great place to start, and maybe a little bit of robotics for home or for fashion.  Follow things that are interesting to you, but explore as much technology as possible, because in the future there probably won’t be that many jobs left, but there will always be jobs in technology.”

Interviewed by: Elisabetta Mori on the 17th November 2019 in London

Transcribed by: Susan Hutton

Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley