At least between Kraków, Warsaw, and nearby cities like Brno, Czech Republic, any cost differences are inconsequential compared to the impact that an experienced, bicultural (has lived and worked in both countries) local team leader will make.<p>If someone from your team isn’t bicultural, consider recruiting the team leader in any of these cities. When you find someone who you believe in enough to make a first-class part of the team (including whatever you’d offer a senior dev manager in the US, like stock options), let them use their existing network to build the local team.<p>Hopefully this is obvious, but just in case: if no one on your team is bicultural and the team is tiny, like 2 or 3, it makes no sense to accept all the effort of a second culture, management, and timezone. For a tiny team like that, build an entirely location-independent team - see <a href="https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/" rel="nofollow">https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/</a> or <a href="https://blog.dnsimple.com/2015/04/the-dnsimple-team-on-remote-working/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.dnsimple.com/2015/04/the-dnsimple-team-on-remot...</a>.