Venture Capital
From Malaysia to Brazil: Action Learning team reunites to make an impact
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Sometimes, an MIT Sloan Action Learning team is so successful that it calls for an encore. That’s what happened for MBA ’25 students Shawn George, Neha Golakia, Trung Nguyen, and Nisha Patel when they teamed up again for a Global Entrepreneurship Lab (G-Lab) project in Brazil after a successful ASEAN Lab project in Malaysia last year.
In spring 2024, the ASEAN Lab students worked on a project with the Asia School of Business (ASB) in Kuala Lumpur to refine the student journey for the school’s MBA program in the blossoming Southeast Asian (ASEAN) region. The team worked quickly and closely, strategizing alongside their host school to devise fresh ways to attract students, fuel cross-collaboration with growing departments, and align student goals with their post-MBA pathways.
Thanks to the intense experience, they formed a deep bond; so much so, that the group decided to bid as a team for the fall 2024 G-Lab class.
I think this is the beauty of Action Learning specifically, and the networking aspect of the MBA on a higher level.
Shifting from business school to venture capital challenges
For their latest project, the group tackled an equally crucial challenge for Brazilian company L4 Venture Builder. The G-Lab team set out to advise L4 on how to further break into the automotive industry, both from MIT’s campus and on an immersive three-week trip to South America.
“Our ASB experience laid the foundation for our G-Lab experience. Going into G-Lab, we knew how to work as a team on challenging topics, but what really stretched us was working together in a team setting in Brazil,” George says.
Founded in 2023, L4 operates as an independent fund with a single-LP partnership: They utilize capital from B3, the largest Brazilian stock exchange. L4 focuses on investing in innovation and growth opportunities to galvanize Brazilian entrepreneurs with a focus on energy, cybersecurity, software, agrobusiness, and now, automotive.
Investment examples include Neogrid, a cloud-based SaaS platform that offers solutions to the supply chain ecosystem; Agilize, an accounting firm that provides automated and digital accounting strategies for small- and medium-sized firms; and Tenchi, an information security startup.
The group maintained three goals: to determine how major B2B sales & marketing analytics players can improve their customer retention rates, and investigated the extent to which customer retention is an industry-wide or player-specific challenge; to map the opportunity landscape for AI in sales and marketing analytics tools; and, finally, to propose specific collaboration pathways for L4 and B3 portfolio companies within the automotive industry.
“During the fall semester, where we were virtually working out of Boston, we focused on really understanding the landscape of sales and marketing analytics companies. We wanted to understand the growth drivers, how they thought about AI, and ultimately how they dealt with fundamental changes in the sales and marketing software landscape that led to customer retention challenges. We were able to offer impartial market research,” George explains.
Notably, the team later spent three weeks onsite in São Paulo, connecting deeply with the company and immersing themselves in the business’s inner workings. There, they worked with a specific company in L4’s portfolio, Bolt, which is building a suite of software solutions to help car dealerships improve sales and capitalize on Brazil’s growing automotive market. This on-the-ground experience was pivotal, the team says.
Making an impact and forming lasting bonds
“Our time with Bolt most senior leadership provided us with an inside perspective from running a startup. As a future entrepreneur, it was a very good learning opportunity,” adds Nguyen. “I come from Vietnam, which is also an emerging country. I learned a lot about entrepreneurship and investment, and how folks do business — from the most formal to most informal interactions — in order to achieve their goals, which I think is invaluable to bring back to Vietnam in the future.”
L4 provided the team with enormous access, says Patel. On site, the team conducted a series of interviews to obtain the “voice of the customer” from dealers and OEMs across Brazil to understand the key pain points in the automotive vertical.
“It was really a wonderful experience, having so much unprecedented time with many senior leaders across each organization. Our team had dedicated days onsite with L4, Bolt, B3, and Neoway (a B3 investment that the team worked closely with throughout the engagement). Working directly with the teams that were informing our recommendations allowed us to bring a much more practical and actionable recommendation to the table, representing a level of collaboration that often feels unheard of for student teams. We had dedicated time to do more rigorous analysis on a very specific hypothesis which I think was particularly valuable to provide a thorough, detailed recommendation,” Patel says.
Meanwhile, L4 executives appreciated the group’s fresh, impartial feedback, the team says, something they had little time for while launching such a new company.
“The main point of feedback that we received when presenting our findings was: ‘We never had the time to have this type of independent analysis done. And now that we have this done, it's really helping us have the conversations that we need to make sure all parties are aligned and moving in the same direction.’ Having our objective analysis and the ability to bring together very different stakeholders is powerful — and ultimately is what will help them be successful in collaborating across their portfolio, and executing within the automotive market segment,” George says.
Their access and advice were invaluable—and the long-formed camaraderie among students was indispensable, impressing their hosts and cementing the students’ bonds for the future.
“I can say with confidence that relationships created like this are the ones that stand the test of time beyond the MBA,” George says.
