Kosovo received about 1.32 billion euros in remittances in 2024, roughly 12.7 percent of its GDP. Albania received about 1.28 billion euros, roughly 5.1 percent of its GDP. Those two numbers show up in almost every article written about either country’s economy, usually as proof of how dependent both are on people who already left.
They are also the wrong number to be optimizing for.
What one company actually does
In 2005, eBay bought a small Estonian company called Skype for 2.6 billion dollars. Skype itself did not make Estonia rich. What it did was seed a generation of engineers and early employees who went on to found, fund or mentor the next wave of Estonian startups, a group people there still call the “Skype mafia.”
Taavet Hinrikus, Skype’s first employee, co-founded Wise, now valued north of 5 billion dollars and moving over 197 billion dollars across borders a year. Skype veterans backed Bolt early. It is now one of Europe’s ten most valuable startups. Estonia has produced ten unicorns off a population of about 1.3 million, more per capita than any country in Europe.
None of that was centrally planned. It was one company’s exit turning into capital, mentorship and credibility that the next founder could actually use.
Why this is a national question, not just a startup one
Remittances are money moving in one direction: from a person abroad to a household at home. They pay rent, cover school fees, keep a family afloat for another month. That matters. It is also the entire transaction. The money arrives. It gets spent. The cycle resets next month.
A unicorn works differently. It keeps working after the headline fades.
- Early employees who vest equity become the country’s first real pool of angel investors, the ones willing to write a 20,000 euro check into someone else’s idea because they understand the risk from the inside.
- A generation of engineers gets trained to a standard that global companies recognize, then some of them stay to build the next thing instead of leaving for it.
- Foreign investors who would never have looked at Prishtina or Tirana get a single, legible reason to start paying attention.
- Every founder who comes after gets a real answer to the question that kills most startups before they start: has anyone from here actually done this.
That is the case for treating a unicorn as infrastructure, not a lottery ticket. Estonia’s e-Residency program formalized this instinct into policy: over 2,700 startups have applied to relocate through it. A quarter of Estonian startup founders are now foreign nationals building on top of what that first exit made credible.
What this means for the ask
None of this argues against remittances. It does not argue against the domestic institutions Kosovo and Albania have already built, from Startup Albania to Innovation Centre Kosovo. It argues for pointing some of that same energy at the highest-leverage outcome available: getting one founder far enough to matter.
That is what the Startup Embassy is actually for. Not to replace the remittance economy, but to build the one piece of infrastructure that could eventually make it optional.
We already know what one company can do. The only open question is whether we build the conditions for it, or wait for it to happen by accident again.
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