Frontlist | Mihir Dalal’s book on Flipkart wins another award

Frontlist | Mihir Dalal’s book on Flipkart wins another award
on Jan 22, 2021

The book on Flipkart’s story by Mihir Dalal has won the CK Prahalad Best Business Book of the Year Award – as well as the annual Gaja Capital Business Book Prize.

The second annual Gaja Capital Business Book Prize has been awarded to Mihir Dalal’s Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story. The winner was selected from a compelling shortlist of six books, and gets a purse of Rs 15 lakh.

Regarded as the biggest business book prize in the country, the award honours authors and their chronicles of India’s spirit of entrepreneurship. “The Indian growth phenomenon is one of the great stories of the 21st century. It needs to be told,” says Gopal Jain, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Gaja Capital. The 2020 shortlist includes Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story (Mihir Dalal), Saying No to Jugaad: The Making of Bigbasket (TN Hari and MS Subramanian), The Moonshot Game: Adventures of an Indian Venture Capitalist (Rahul Chandra), The Making of Hero (Sunil Munjal), HDFC 2.0 (Tamal Bandyopadhyay), and Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma (Katherine Eban). The jury was unanimous in choosing Big Billion Startup as the winner of the 2020 Prize. “The Flipkart story reminds us that Indian entrepreneurs will forge their own independent paths of innovation serving a diverse and very demanding Indian consumer,” according to the jury statement announcing the award. The next award will be given to books published between April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021. Gaja Capital will invite nominations for the 2021 edition and come up with details on how to do so. Big Billion Startup Mihir Dalal grew up in Mumbai and currently lives in Bengaluru. His 300-page book on Flipkart makes for a fast-paced read, with over 20 pages of references and sources. Spanning two decades, the story is placed within the broader context of the rise of the internet economy and venture capital industry in India. Mihir paints a detailed picture of the Flipkart’s workings based on over 250 interviews, articles and documents. Founder passion, VC politics, and boardroom conflicts are portrayed along with the tensions of finding a balance between technology and product, growth and profitability, and local and global priorities. At the Bangalore Business Literature Festival 2020, Mihir's book won the CK Prahalad Best Business Book of the Year Award. See also reviews of related books The Making of BigBasket and Failing to Succeed. “A good business story faithfully and accurately recreates the real world of its subject. It doesn’t dumb down the financial and technical details but illuminates how those phenomena came into being,” Mihir explains. “There are certain aspects in the book that I feel are worth highlighting. One, how technological determinism is a folly that many tech leaders are susceptible to. Two, how innovation happens in different forms,” he adds. Transparency and growth-profit alignment are important for founder-investor relationships. “Eventually, the relationship comes down to whether the company is able to continually increase its valuation,” Mihir observes. Source: Your Story