Danny Rimer is a partner at Index Ventures

Index Ventures

Index Ventures is a venture capital investment firm based in Geneva, Switzerland, with offices in London, Jersey, and starting in 2011, Silcon Valley. The firm was founded in 1996 by Neil Rimer and Giuseppe Zocco. Since its inception, the firm has raised four main venture funds and a growth...

, a company founded by his brother Neil and his brother's partner Giuseppe Zocco. He established the firm's London office in 2002 and became a leading voice on venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 in Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 and the Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...

.

Early life

Rimer was born in Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. He grew up in Geneva

Geneva

Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...

, Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

. He graduated from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 with a Bachelor of Arts

Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 in literature and fine arts. After graduating, Rimer moved to the San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

 in California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

.

Career

When Rimer moved to the Bay Area, he and some friends began a company to digitize

Digitizing

Digitizing or digitization is the representation of an object, image, sound, document or a signal by a discrete set of its points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal...

 images of famous artwork and sell the downloads. They made exclusive deals with galleries such as the Louvre

Louvre

The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...

 and the Uffizi Gallery to commercialize the images.

In 1994, Rimer joined Hambrecht & Quist

Hambrecht & Quist

Hambrecht & Quist was an investment bank based in San Francisco, California noted for its focus on the technology and internet sectors. H&Q was founded by William Hambrecht and George Quist in California, 1968....

 (now owned by JP Morgan), where he began an Internet sector equity research group. He was managing director and underwriting

Underwriting

Underwriting refers to the process that a large financial service provider uses to assess the eligibility of a customer to receive their products . The name derives from the Lloyd's of London insurance market...

 analyst for Amazon

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

, Netscape

Netscape

Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...

 and Verisign

VeriSign

Verisign, Inc. is an American company based in Dulles, Virginia that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc and .tv country-code...

. He helped to take Netscape public

Public company

This is not the same as a Government-owned corporation.A public company or publicly traded company is a limited liability company that offers its securities for sale to the general public, typically through a stock exchange, or through market makers operating in over the counter markets...

.

Rimer became a general partner of The Barksdale Group in 1999, where he invested in a dozen companies including Crossgain

Crossgain

Crossgain was a pioneer in developing tools and applications to enable customers to build web services. It was acquired by BEA in July 2001....

 (acquired by BEA Systems

BEA Systems

BEA Systems, Inc. specialized in enterprise infrastructure software products known as "middleware", which connect software applications to databases and was acquired by Oracle Corporation on April 29, 2008.- History :...

), Ofoto (rebranded as Kodak) and Tellme Networks

Tellme Networks

Tellme. Networks, Inc. is a company founded in 1999 by Mike McCue and Angus Davis, based out of Mountain View, California, in the United States, that specializes in telephone-based applications....

 (acquired by Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

).

In his early years at Index, Rimer made a series of notable investments in infrastructure and services companies such as Skype

Skype

Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chat over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system...

, MySQL

MySQL

MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...

 and Last.fm

Last.fm

Last.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed 30 million active users in March 2009. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for UK£140m ....

. More recently he led the firm’s investments in Flipboard

Flipboard

Flipboard is a social magazine application and company founded in 2010 by Mike McCue and Evan Doll, based out of Palo Alto, California in the United States for Apple's iPad tablet computer. The application is designed to collect the content of social networks and other websites and present them in...

, Swipely

Swipely

Swipely is an online service and social network where members can share purchases with friends. Users post and recommend purchases, see where their friends are spending and what their friends are buying...

, TrialPay

TrialPay

TrialPay is an alternative e-commerce payment system that works according to the “Get It Free” payment model, in which consumers get an item for free from a participating merchant by completing an offer – buying or trying out a product or service – from a TrialPay advertiser.The company...

, Etsy

Etsy

Etsy is an e-commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies. These items cover a wide range including art, photography, clothing, jewelry, edibles, bath & beauty products, quilts, knick-knacks and toys. Many individuals also sell craft supplies like beads,...

, Go Try It On, PostUp, Astley Clarke

Astley Clarke

AstleyClarke.com is an online boutique selling precious and semi-precious jewellery from exclusive designers in New York, London, California and Paris.- History :...

, RightScale

RightScale

RightScale is a web based cloud computing management platform for managing cloud infrastructure from multiple providers. The RightScale platform enables the management of public, private and hybrid clouds...

, Boku

Boku

Boku may refer to:*The Cuban name for the Ashiko, a type of drum*Boku , a juice carton drink.*Bōku, a board game.*BOKU, the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, in Austria....

 and Viagogo

Viagogo

viagogo is an online ticket exchange that that allows people to buy and sell live event tickets in a safe, secure and transparent environment free from fraud and illegitimate street touts....

. He also serves on the board of Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres.

Rimer has been named to both the Forbes

Forbes

Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...

 Midas List of top global VCs, and Fortune Magazine's 40 under 40

40 under 40 (Fortune Magazine)

Fortune Magazine's 40 under 40 List details the young stars in business across the globe.Mark Zuckerberg topped the 2011 list. Facebook now has over 800 million users.-External links:***...

 list of business’s rising young stars. He is a fixture at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference

Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference

The Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference is an annual conference hosted and wholly independently funded by private investment firm Allen & Company. The conference has taken place in Sun Valley, Idaho for one week each July since 1983. The conference typically features business leaders, political...

, an annual gathering of business leaders, political figures, and major figures in the philanthropic and cultural spheres.