Brooklyn’s Nordic invasion continues

Last summer we learned about Mik Stroyberg’s Lemonsqueeze incubator and the surprising number of Danes, Swedes and other former Viking peoples that have taken a position on the Brooklyn tech front.
Now we find that the Danes have advanced further, taking a giant-sized foothold in North Brooklyn.
Falcon.io, a full-stack social media marketing company, graduated from Lemonsqueeze and now has a 30-person space at the Williamsburg WeWork. Last year it raised $16 million in a Series B round, bringing its total funding to $23.7 million. In addition it its 30 workers in Brooklyn, it has about 200 more in Copenhagen and Berlin.
We caught up with Falcon.io founder Ulrik Bo Larsen to talk about Brooklyn, startup growth and how the U.S. is different from Northern Europe.
On building a tech company in Brooklyn:
Our entire brand persona is being the cool kid on the block and it’s a nice narrative in being in Brooklyn from that standpoint and Williamsburg specifically. That’s working well for us for building the business and attracting talent.
One of the things I was worried about, starting up in Williamsburg, if you build up a team there will you be able to attract talent? Not being locals, we kind of felt like that would be a good thing to do and it really has worked out well. I think WeWork is a good vibe. There’s a good talent pool in NYC and if they’re not in Brooklyn you can get people to get there.
We’re scaling the business and looking to really wanting to entrench our position here.
On being successful:
What we do from a product standpoint is combine a lot of things you often get from different vendors (social media monitoring, social media engagement) and try to stitch that together and put metrics on top. We put all that together and people can get it at one go. No one else in the space is really combining those things.
We had zero revenue in 2012 and we’re expecting more than $20 million at the end of the fiscal year. It’s been quite an exciting rocketship growth story.
On Europe:
New Yorkers in general are much more outspoken. If you look at salesperson in New York they’re much more outspoken and have a different tenacity and hustle about them. I think that’s a little more subdued around the Danes.
Things are a bit more shorthand in the U.S. I think things can get a little more boilerplate in Europe with email intros and sign offs and that’s not necessarily needed. In the U.S. it gets done quicker.
On the L train:
There’s no problem getting into Manhattan for meetings as long as they don’t fuck up the L train. If that’s shut down or diminished, we have some optionality if that is not panning out the way we think it should. A lot of what we do is also inside sales and we do a lot of client acquisition from outside of New York from in the Brooklyn office. It would be sad to see the L train service shutting demising that.