What do our previous PandoMonthly guests Dave Morin, Chad Dickerson, Sophia Amoruso, and Drew Houston all have in common? Danny Rimer invested in them.

Rimer doesn't have the instant name recognition of many of our other VC guests like Ben Horowitz or Reid Hoffman. But man does he have the investing chops, portfolio, and respect of entrepreneurs in the know. If you are starting a company, and you don't know Danny Rimer, you should go buy a ticket right this second.

In addition to a knack for getting into deals that few VCs can -- or no other VCs can in the case of Nasty Gal -- Rimer is a real thought leader. He helped build Index into the preeminent London venture firm, when Europe wasn't considered sexy. He was an early backer of Skype when few other VCs were interested and one of the first to embrace the open source movement in the mid-2000s, backing some of the most important companies in the space including MySQL.

Then he was one of the first advocates of ecommerce 2.0, backing many of the early European wave of ecommerce companies, which many US companies ripped off. (Possibly the only time we can say that in European startup history.)

Rimer recently relocated to Silicon Valley -- less to develop more deal flow here, and more to support the existing Valley companies in the portfolio. He's a co-investor of choice for many of the top VCs, because he never tries to hog the spotlight and brings a decidedly different perspective to the board room.

I've covered Rimer since the days when I wrote about open source for BusinessWeek and we've never had a boring conversation. This is going to be a good one.