After studying management at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, Dawe founded Unipalm in 1986 and Pipex in 1988.
[3] In 1996 Dawe also founded Safety-Net (later renamed Internet Watch Foundation) which proposed ideas to combat obscene material on the World Wide Web, for example a rating system that would tag web content similar to the BBFC rating scheme and block unrated or age-inappropriate material.
[4] For his work with the Internet Watch Foundation, Dawe received an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 2001.
[6] Dawe ran as the UK Independence Party candidate for the Ely North and East seat in the 2013 Cambridgeshire County Council election.
[8][3] Dawe ran for Parliament in the 2019 United Kingdom general election, where he stood as the Brexit Party candidate for Cambridge, losing to incumbent Labour Party candidate Daniel Zeichner, receiving 1.9% of the vote.