At a Startup Weekend here in the Bay Area, I watched government delegations work the room. Germany had a table. Poland had a table. Estonia had a table. Each one was there representing its own founders, opening doors, making introductions and doing the unglamorous diplomatic work of getting someone from their country in front of the right investor.
A few weeks later, on a random errand in Cupertino, I walked past a Korean government-funded startup house: a real office, staffed with one job, getting Korean companies into Silicon Valley.
None of this is a coincidence and none of it is new. It’s routine, funded government infrastructure that a long list of countries treat as a baseline. Once I started looking for it, I found more of it in every direction than I expected.
The pattern
Germany runs the German Accelerator, a free three-month program funded directly by its Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, with people on the ground in Silicon Valley and New York.
South Korea runs KIC Silicon Valley, one node in a government network that also covers Washington DC, Berlin and Beijing. It worked with more than 80 Korean startups in 2023 alone.
Poland’s state investment agency keeps a dedicated Silicon Valley office and a grant program, Poland Prize, built to move a foreign startup through Poland and out into the US market.
France does the same through French Tech San Francisco, backed by a national mission under its economy ministry.
The most useful example, though, is the one built for countries our size. Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland don’t each run their own Silicon Valley house. They run one, the Nordic Innovation House in Palo Alto, jointly funded by their national business-growth agencies since 2011.
None of those five countries alone could easily justify the cost. Split five ways, they’ve kept it running for over a decade.
What Kosovo and Albania already have
This isn’t a start-from-zero problem for us.
Albania already runs Startup Albania, its national startup ecosystem initiative under the Ministry of Entrepreneurship.
Kosovo has had Innovation Centre Kosovo since 2012, originally backed by Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ICK has since trained more than 11,000 people and put over seven and a half million euros behind more than 500 startups.
Between the two countries, the domestic side, the incubation, the training and the early funding, is already built and has a track record.
What’s missing is the last mile every one of those other countries treats as essential: a physical foothold in the one market where distribution, capital and technical talent actually concentrate.
I felt that gap firsthand back in 2012, winning the first Startup Weekend Prishtina with an idea we never turned into a company, partly because there was no obvious next step once you left that room.
The conversation about what keeps Kosovo’s talent from staying or coming back hasn’t gone away since.
The model and the ask
For me, this isn’t an abstract idea.
Almost every time someone from Kosovo or Albania tells me they’re coming to the Bay Area for a conference, a startup event, a meeting or sometimes just to visit, I get genuinely excited. I want to meet them for coffee. I want to introduce them to someone they should know. I want to point them toward the right people, places, companies, investors or opportunities. If I can help, I try.
Over the years, I’ve had countless guests stay at my home, shared meals with my family, given people rides, made introductions and offered whatever help I could.
And I’m not the only one.
I can name at least five other people in the Albanian diaspora here who do essentially the same thing.
The problem is that we’re all doing it individually.
Imagine what happens when that same instinct is organized.
Neither Kosovo nor Albania needs to build a German Accelerator or a KIC on its own. Neither country is large enough to justify duplicating that infrastructure and trying to do so would miss the opportunity.
What fits is the Nordic model: two governments, two ministries, one shared house. Call it the Startup Embassy.
But the Embassy shouldn’t just be an office. It should formalize something the diaspora is already doing naturally: opening doors.
Put it in Palo Alto or San Jose. Staff it jointly through Startup Albania and ICK, with support from the diaspora and private sector. Give it a small, practical mission: when a founder from Prishtina or Tirana lands in the Bay Area, there should be a place to go and a network ready to help.
- Need an introduction to a VC? Start there.
- Looking for a technical cofounder? Start there.
- Trying to understand the US market? Start there.
- Visiting Stanford, Google, Apple or a startup event? Start there.
- A diaspora investor wants to meet promising founders from Kosovo or Albania? Start there.
And the most important part: make the network bigger than the people who happen to live here today.
Because if five of us are already inviting people into our homes, giving them rides, making introductions and helping them navigate Silicon Valley, imagine what 50 of us could do through an organized network.
Imagine 500.
That is where this gets interesting.
Kosovo and Albania already have talented founders. They already have people building companies. They already have diaspora members who want to help.
What they lack is a structure that connects those three things consistently.
We shouldn’t have to wait for someone to know me personally to get an introduction. We shouldn’t have to rely on whether one person happens to be available that week. And founders shouldn’t have to figure out Silicon Valley from scratch every time they arrive.
The goal isn’t to create another government office with a logo on the door.
The goal is to turn the hospitality, knowledge, relationships and ambition of the Albanian diaspora into infrastructure.
Because if we organize what people are already doing voluntarily, the result could be much bigger than a shared office in Silicon Valley.
We could create the conditions for the next generation of Albanian founders to build companies that reach global markets and maybe, eventually, produce our first unicorn.
We’ve already built the ecosystem at home. We’ve already built the diaspora. We’ve already proven that people are willing to open their doors.
Now we need to connect them.
We’ve done the second thing. Time to do the first.
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