Venture veteran Danny Rimer has shot to the top of the Midas List Europe thanks to writing the first check for $20 billion design startup Figma. Here’s how the Index Ventures partner landed the deal of the year.
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The black and white portrait photographs glaring down from the walls of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art didn’t offer Figma cofounder Dylan Field much relief from a tough conversation. The collaborative design tool he launched just months earlier in 2016 was a runaway hit, but the four-year-old startup wasn’t making a cent. Now his lead investor, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, was pushing him to start charging users. “Danny encouraged me to be more commercial,” says Field.
Field feared that charging users would stall Figma’s explosive growth and his masterplan to replace PhotoShop as the go-to tool for creatives. But adding a monthly subscription starting at $12 per user did nothing to slow its adoption and set Figma on track to earn a forecasted $400 million of revenues in 2022. In September, Adobe announced a $20 billion acquisition of the business, the largest private tech takeover in history. “I pushed back a lot at the time because I didn’t think we were ready, but looking back Danny was absolutely right,” says Field.
The deal (which has still to close) represents a $2.6 billion windfall for Index Ventures, one of Figma’s largest shareholders. This exit also vaults Rimer to No.1 on the Midas List Europe 2022.
Rimer has been a newer presence on the Europe list after returning to London in 2018, but had been a pillar of the international Midas List for more than a decade thanks to investments in Dropbox, Etsy, and Patreon from Index Ventures’s San Francisco office, which he set up in 2011.
“Figma is the quintessential venture capital story,” says Saul Klein, cofounder and partner, LocalGlobe, and a former Index partner, who also invested in Figma. “From an idea all the way to the exit, Danny wasn’t just an observer — he was encouraging and supporting at every step.”
The seeds for Rimer writing the first check into Figma had deep roots. The Swiss-Canadian investor had met then 19-year-old Field when he was an intern at Flipboard, another of his investments. The pair reconnected when Field and cofounder Evan Wallace began to fund raise for what would become Figma. “Danny understood what we were doing right away — perhaps better than me even. He called me hours after our first meeting with a term sheet,” says Field.
The growth of Figma unfolded over a weekly meeting at SFMOMA, where Rimer was also a trustee. “Taking the conversation on neutral ground and seeing brilliant work of a different medium allowed us to talk about more challenging topics,” says Rimer.
Now Rimer’s new base in London’s affluent Mayfair district overlooks another shrine to design, the Royal Academy of Arts. A statue of Archimedes peers into the windows of Index’s gallery-like office, which is lined with paintings from British abstract painter Jeremy Moon. Rimer, who’s also a keen art collector, and now a trustee of the Tate galleries, has a curated take on venture investing. “Lots of VC’s understand numbers, but Danny is the rare investor who also has taste,” says Field.
Canadian-born Rimer grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, before moving to the United States to study art history at college. After a stalled bid to build his own art-focused startup, he covered the IPO of Amazon, Yahoo and other dot com stocks as an analyst. “I had two passions at university: the internet and art,” says Rimer. “I tried to marry both but realized I didn’t want to be in the art world, I wanted to work with internet entrepreneurs.”
Rimer started investing into startups with the Barksdale Group before joining his brothers Neil, David and another cofounder, who had formed Index Ventures in Switzerland in 1996 with the idea of bringing Silicon Valley investing to Europe. Appropriately, Rimer returned from the Bay Area to inject some West Coast knowhow into the opening of Index’s London office in 2002. “Danny has a European mindset, but he also speaks fluent Silicon Valley,” says Klein, who has also cofounded a startup, Lovefilm, that Rimer backed.
Dinner at a North Beach Italian restaurant in November 2016 year helped cement one of Rimer’s other major investments: social messaging platform Discord. The company’s cofounder and CEO Jason Citron shared some numbers on Discord’s growth, and Rimer called back the next day with an offer. He ultimately led the startup’s $50 million Series E round, and Discord raised $500 million at a $14.2 billion valuation in September 2021.
“It felt like it was an effortless way to raise money, and it came from his conviction of what ‘great’ looks like,” Citron says. “To this day, I have never done a partner meeting with a slide deck with Index.”
This low key, understated approach—along with a compelling track record, contacts book and international perspective—seem to be a draw for founders. “He’s a very interesting and broad human, rather than just a finance guy,” says Bliss founder Marcia Kilgore, who turned to Rimer to raise her first venture investment for her new startup Beauty Pie.
In the boardroom, Rimer is rarely the loudest voice. But his counsel, which draws from the experience of backing over 22 unicorns, means he has the ear of investors and founders alike. “He's a pattern recognizer. And that is a gift,” says Kilgore, who raised $100 million for the cosmetics membership club.
Venture investors themselves like to tout the merits of pattern matching. That ability has an expiry date, according to Rimer, who warns that many older investors lose their ability to connect with entrepreneurs and make their worst investments later in their career. “You’re good for a period of time, and then it’s time to retire,” says Rimer. “If I’m at an age where I’m a grandfather to the entrepreneurs, I’m not going to be able to spot the next Discord.”
Rimer calls Index’s hands-on approach to investing “artisan,” and it looks somewhat traditional compared to some rival funds’ aggressive expansion. Index’s own growth plans are modest by comparison: adding a new partner in Tel Aviv earlier this year, and opening a New York office led by fellow Midas List Europe investor Martin Mignot in October. “Every decision we take is very deliberate,” says Rimer. “It took us 10 years to open San Francisco, and it took us 10 years to decide to open New York.”
This conservative approach also led Rimer and Index to largely avoid crypto startups when many rivals threw themselves on what Rimer now brands the Web 3.0 “delusion.”. “We spent an enormous amount of time on crypto but decided not to invest,” says Rimer. “I’m proud of that discipline.”
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What has excited Rimer in recent years is the booming creator economy that’s been expressed in investments like Discord, subscription platform Patreon and website builder Squarespace, which went public in May 2021 at a $2.4 billion valuation. “I know this sounds fluffy, but I’m attracted to entrepreneurs building businesses that are going to have a cultural impact,” says Rimer.
Ecommerce startups with a brand that helps connect with shoppers are another big draw for Rimer. Vintage marketplace Grailed’s acquisition by sneaker resale platform Goat in October marks Rimer’s latest exit, and he still counts Emily Weiss’s beauty unicorn Glossier, cosmetics buying club Beauty Pie and sustainable online outlet Otrium in his portfolio.
Back in Index’s London office, Rimer is characteristically optimistic about the prospect of Europe’s startups despite the tech slowdown and the war in Ukraine. “In the early days, there were always great entrepreneurs but there was very little talent,” says Rimer. “The success stories like Adyen, Farfetch and Spotify have inspired operators to join startups so the whole ecosystem is much more at par with the U.S.”
Rimer interrupts himself to pull down a book on Diana Arbus’ photo portraits of “outsiders.”. The peripatetic investor is now on familiar turf but clearly seems drawn to her subject, and founders carving their own path. “It’s an outsider status I’m comfortable with, and the same goes for a lot of us at Index.”
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