Prishtinë is what happens when a city has to invent itself in real time. Most European capitals are 800 years old and look it. Prishtinë is, depending on how you count, between 17 and 25, and it looks like that too — half construction site, half coffee shop, all opinions.
We've run the studio from here since 2024, which by the standards of the city is the medium-old generation. There were software people here before us. There will be more after. But it is still a small enough scene that everyone who runs an engineering team in Prishtinë can fit in one bar, and we know this because we have done it.
A few things people get wrong about working from Kosovo. The internet is faster than San Francisco. The coffee is better than London. The timezone overlaps with the Western European working day from 9 to 6 and the Eastern US working day from 1 to 6, which is a coincidence that turns out to be the entire selling point. We did not design this. The geographers did.
The thing that surprised us most about running a studio here is how small the difference actually is, day to day, between Prishtinë and Berlin or Lisbon or any other secondary European city you might have considered moving to. The ergonomics of remote and hybrid work are now the ergonomics of any city with a decent internet connection. Cost of living is lower here. Talent is excellent here, and growing. There is an absurd amount of restaurant capacity. Sundays are quiet.
The part that's harder is the part nobody can fix from a city: the politics of operating a business out of a country whose name some clients still need to look up. There are entire procurement systems in larger Western companies that don't have a dropdown entry for Kosovo. We have been blocked by Stripe twice for reasons that were eventually resolved, but were genuinely about the country code. We've had wire transfers held up because compliance officers needed to confirm Kosovo is, in fact, a real country with real banks. We've made our peace with this. It is the cost of being early.
The benefit is the cost of being early as well. We're not competing with three hundred other studios in our city. We're competing with eight, and we know all of them, and most of them are good, and there is enough work to go around without anyone having to hate each other. That's a rare thing.
We're not leaving. Eventually somebody will write a piece about how Prishtinë is the next Lisbon. We will read it. We will not move.