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Why Index’s Danny Rimer bet on Figma and Dylan Field at the seed stage

August 1, 2025

The first time Danny Rimer laid eyes on Dylan Field, Field was just 18 years old.

Then, Field was an intern at the buzzy startup Flipboard. Field gave a presentation to the startup’s board, self-assuredly outlining his research about the features users loved and which ones flopped. Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures since 2002, remembers it very clearly. 

“What was interesting was not only did he do a very good quantitative job of figuring out what features made the most sense, but the way he presented it was incredibly visually appealing and original,” Rimer told Fortune. “I remember him as an 18-year-old and thinking: ‘Wow, this person has a unique, compelling way of conveying information.’”

Rimer met Field again shortly thereafter, as Field was looking to raise a seed round for Figma. It was 2013, and the biggest tech IPO that year was Twitter, and there wasn’t necessarily optimism about design as a market. Field also wasn’t in a rush to put out a product. 

“Here was this 19-year-old, who had a lot of clarity about what he wanted to do—democratize the world of design, and provide tools to everyone,” said Rimer, a college art history major who was drawn to Figma’s taste and ambition. “He had this ambition of dropping out of university to go after this crazy idea, where it’s clear that he’s not going to be able to come up with a product for over two years. In the world of move-fast-break-things, here were two folks [Field and Figma cofounder Evan Wallace] who were saying, ‘We’re not going to have anything for two years, so we hope you’re comfortable with that.’”

Rimer—whose investments also include Etsy, Dropbox, Discord, and Dream Games—bit, leading Figma’s 2013 seed round. At the seed, Index invested $1.8 million, and over the next 12 years invested a total of $86.5 million in the company, a source familiar with the matter told Fortune. Index sold roughly 5% of its shares, a sliver of its total stake, in the IPO to create a float, collecting about $66 million. As Figma shares soared on their first day of trading Thursday, Index’s remaining stake in Figma swelled to north of $7 billion. The source told Fortune that the seed multiple by market close on IPO day was 1300% multiple on invested capital—ultimately, an almost 90x return. 

Rimer declined to comment on specific numbers. Nevertheless, Figma’s absolute shredding of the public markets goes to show not only that tech IPOs are back, but that the company’s original thesis—that design matters and is expansive—was right all along. 

“It was a time when we thought everyone in the world wanted to be a designer,” Rimer said. “Design was sort of what architecture was in the early 20th century, during the Bauhaus movement. Everyone was talking about being a designer of apps, of software, of fashion. It was a term that became synonymous with the future. So, we thought design meant a lot more than just designing software or graphic design, that it would be an all-encompassing term. And that probably meant most people would want to try out their chops at designing.”

It’s why Rimer and the Index team—also backers in two of the venture capital success stories of this year, Wiz’s $32 billion mega-sale to Google and ServiceTitan’s IPO—don’t subscribe to the much-quoted total addressable market (or TAM) metric. Chasing an exact TAM can be misleading, Rimer said. 

“We learned a long time ago to think of the total available market as noise, and we’re probably going to get it wrong,” he said. “An example: We invested in Etsy, while most folks were thinking: How big can Etsy be? How many Sunday crafts people are there going to be in the world? 100,000? 200,000? And we said, this is actually a phenomenon. Everyone wants to make their passion their vocation. We could have millions of these folks. Conversely, we passed on Airbnb because we were thinking, how many hotel rooms they can cannibalize, instead of thinking Airbnb is actually going to expand the market dramatically again.”

Figma amid the AI boom, Rimer said, is a full-circle moment of sorts, as AI creates more vibe designers in the way it has created vibe coders. 

“We did not predict that AI was going to create another exponential curve of opportunity for Figma,” Rimer said. “We already thought that the number and the speed of apps and software being created pre-AI was already really compelling. But, of course, AI has lowered the bar for anyone to create an app, and anyone to be a developer. So, the core necessity of design has only become more central for a much larger pool of people.”

The intern with the thoughtful slides had it right all along: Design wasn’t peripheral. It was fundamental. 

ICYMI… The Term Sheet Podcast has officially launched! I can’t wait to talk to you all every week. Our first guest: Will Hurd, chief strategy officer at CHAOS Industries. Episode 1 is live here.

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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