Danny Rimer


Danny Rimer OBE is a partner at Index Ventures, a global venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1992. Rimer opened the firm's London office in 2002 and its San Francisco office in 2012. He has become a leading voice on venture capital in Silicon Valley and Europe, and has been actively involved in various philanthropic and cultural activities.

Early life

Rimer was born in Canada, but grew up in Geneva, Switzerland. After graduating from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in history and literature, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in California.

Career

While in the Bay Area, Rimer and some friends began a company to digitize images of famous artwork and sell the downloads, forging exclusive deals with galleries such as the Louvre and the Uffizi Gallery to commercialize the images.
In 1994, Rimer joined Hambrecht & Quist, where he began an Internet sector equity research group. He was managing director and underwriting analyst for Amazon, Netscape and Verisign. and helped to take Netscape public.
Rimer became a general partner of The Barksdale Group in 1999, where he invested in a dozen companies including Crossgain, Ofoto and Tellme Networks, before joining Index in 2002 to establish the London office. He later co-founded the San Francisco office in 2012 with Index partner Mike Volpi.
In his early years at Index, Rimer made a series of notable investments in infrastructure and services companies such as Skype, MySQL and Last.fm. More recently he led the firm’s investments in 1stdibs, Anki, Boku, Dropbox , Etsy, Farfetch, Figma, Flipboard, King, Zesty, and Scoop, among others.
Rimer was previously a director at KVS ; Last.fm, Lovefilm ; MySQL ;
Neoteris ; Sky PLC ; Skype ; and TrialPay (acquired by Visa in February 2017.

Awards and honors

Rimer's various awards and honors include:
He is a fixture at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, an annual gathering of business leaders, political figures, and major figures in the philanthropic and cultural spheres.

Philanthropy and non-profit involvement

Rimer serves on the board of Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres, a network of drop-in healthcare centers across the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, with the aim of helping cancer patients. He was formerly on the board of trustees at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.