Danny Rimer is one of Europe’s leading venture capital investors (second in the Forbes Midas Europe list last year), who has built a reputation among his peers as a top talent spotter and start-up champion.

After stints as a West Coast banking analyst, working on the IPOs of Amazon and Netscape, and as a general partner at investment firm Barksdale Group, Rimer moved to London to open an office for Index Ventures in 2002. A decade later, he opened Index’s San Francisco office, giving him a good comparative perspective on both the US and European tech scenes, before returning to London in 2018.

Rimer has mostly invested in start-ups in the software, consumer and creative sectors, including Figma, Dropbox, Farfetch, Glossier, and Etsy. “Venture is a really hard business to do well, but Danny has a special ability to find really talented and extraordinary people,” says Kathryn Mayne, managing director at Horsley Bridge International, which has invested in Index for almost 20 years. “There are not many investors who have taken start-ups from seed to multibillion outcomes on both sides of the ocean.”