Andres Blank is super smart. After completing a degree in industrial engineering at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, in Caracas, Andres founded a successful lumber company. Then at the age of 24, with Venezuela falling apart and crime escalating, he decided to attend graduate school overseas. The Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) accepted him into their MBA program, where he soon began to create an app called Pixable.  Andres and his two co-founders worked like madmen for over a year, gained major investors, and was able to sell it to a Singapore telecommunications company for $26 million. Since then, Andres is not living the high life. In fact he has started and left behind five product lines. Today, Andres works in a co-working space in New York, as lean as possible, and enthusiastically developing his best product yet, a text messaging service exclusively for your business contacts. It’s called CALIBER.IO. Download it on your phone's App store! Andres shares deeply about his love for Venezuela, and gratitude for the US.  I also ask his thoughts on making Venezuela a more compelling environment for entrepreneurs, to which he offered a clear framework. In this interview, Andres gives sage advice on how to:   Move yourself from a desperate environment to an ideal one   Believe that you can do the unimaginable (like getting accepted to MIT, from Venezuela)   Build an ideal team for a product company Inspire multiple rounds of investors to get involved in your start-up Keep your start-up lean Recognize and use your immigrant advantages As always, please subscribe, tell us what you liked about this interview, what would be helpful to you in your entrepreneurial journey.