Danny Rimer OBE is a Partner at Index Ventures, a global venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1992. Danny joined Index in 2002 and established the firm's London office. He later opened the San Francisco office with Mike Volpi. His current investments include 1stdibs, Discord, Farfetch, Figma, Glossier, GOAT, Good Eggs, Grailed, Humu, Patreon and Scoop. Prior to Index, Danny was a General Partner at The Barksdale Group, where he invested in over a dozen companies. Earlier in his career, he was at Hambrecht & Quist (now owned by JP Morgan), where he began the Internet sector equity research group. He was managing director and underwriting analyst and took Amazon, Netscape and Verisign public among others. Previously, Danny was a director of Betfair, Dropbox, Etsy, Sky, Last.fm, Lovefilm, MySQL, and Skype; and formerly on the Board of Trustees at SFMOMA and MAGGIE’S Centres. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to business and charity.
Follow Danny on Twitter @dannyrimer.
Highlights
The realisation was that I wanted to help entrepreneurs and get closer to the source of the creation of companies.
I moved out of banking and it was in equity research I tried to work with operators who run and build companies.
Really, it’s trying to understand the entrepreneur, what’s driving them.
One has to have a lot of patience. Entrepreneurs are the ones driving and as much great advice as I might have, the reality is sometimes it won’t sink in, but they’re going to have to make the decisions.
I mean I certainly don’t feel like I’m fantastic at my craft, it’s something that is always humbling.
My favourite piece of advice: ‘The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing’.
A way of making sure the execution is as good as it should be is ensuring the entrepreneurs don’t get distracted but keep on doing a phenomenal job at the core service.
No, but it really it is one of these things where there isn’t a specific approach to take. It depends on the individual.
Fundamentally you can’t build something of substance if your desire or your goal is to sell it; it’s just not going to happen.