Tushar Ahluwalia

Founder at | Previously Founder Razor Group (German Unicorn) | 🇩🇪💛 & 🇮🇳🧡

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

Win the battle of your mind. I have found that Equanimity isn’t the answer but action is. Do it anyway. Fortune favors the bold 💥

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

How to know that your SVP Eng is cracked; see below 👇🏼

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

chatted with various boomer VC friends over the last few days abt their insecurities

a root cause is that LPs don’t care for excuses abt why you missed the category leaders

you either did the seed/A/B of OpenAI or Anthropic, or you did not

career ending miss for many :/

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

The value is moving up the stack. One misconception about application-layer AI is that it gets squeezed from both sides: companies can build their own automations with Claude, while frontier labs will eventually capture the application economics. I think both ideas miss where the hard part is.

For most tasks, the model is becoming a commodity input. The harness around it is not. AND getting an agent/ AI workflow automation to somehow function once is easy. Getting it to reliably execute a messy enterprise workflow, with the right context, integrations, evals, confidence, permissions and human fallbacks across many customer-industry-workflow combinations, is hard.

But if you do it right, that work amortises. The first deployment takes a lot of forward deployment. The tenth should be faster, more accurate and increasingly productised. However, there is an important step before the harness. Can you get the first customers in the door and forward deploy to eventually build a harness that then also works for many customers? That is far from trivial.

I predict a bunch of companies will emerge from this enterprise AI wave that build the best harnesses for specific industry-workflow combinations. The winners will be the ones that can own more and more of those combinations without losing the quality of the harness for each one. That, to me, is what will define the champions in our space.

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

@vonderleyen @grok who are those guys on the picture

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

Cheese from India makes its mark globally…

India made an impressive debut at the Mundial do Queijo do Brasil 2026, which is a vibrant international competition for cheese and dairy products. Four Indian products won medals, including 1 Super Gold, 2 Golds and 1 Silver.

The Super Gold was won by Eleftheria Gulmarg (Brie Style), the Golds were won by Yak Churpi-Soft, Nordic Farm, Leh, Ladakh and Eleftheria Brunost (Whey Cheese) while the Silver was won by Eleftheria Kaali Miri (Belper Knolle Style). Congratulations to Mausam Narang and Thenlay Nurboo.

Such successes strengthen India’s artisanal dairy sector on the world stage.

[Jaya Gupta @JayaGup10]

https://t.co/p4VyKQpJww

[Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant]

We are entering into the "everything is a service" era. Product was a "concept" that came about when the same thing could work for everyone. Why? You try to mould others to like what you've built. Coke is the same for everyone. It's a product + brand play. But when you can instantly make a coke just for me, the right colour, sugar content, etc with my face on the can, it becomes a service. But you couldn't. Service only worked for very very high priced items like a Maserati. Low price, high vol items can't be service because customising it took too long for every product in history.. except.. people, because people are self learning, self adjusting, self guided. Ford said I'll give you any colour as long as it's black. Classic product. Maserati is a service. Ford is a product.

Now with AI, you can make every product into a service. The token self edits, self learns, self adjusts. That's a huge unlock for finally converting low price high vol product to a lower price , higher vol service. Those who really get this shift are going to avoid a lot of pain ahead.

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

@grok @irshad5005 this is showing more shelling happening right now is this correct?

[Chris Hoffmann @STLChrisH]

Favorite excerpt from Brent Beshore's annual letter:

What CEOs Are and Aren’t

Most people think of a CEO as the person at the top. That’s true in the same way it’s true that the windshield is “at the front” of the car. Technically correct.

Also, misses the point. The windshield isn’t the engine. It isn’t the wheels. It doesn’t move anything. But it does determine what the driver can see, what they ignore, and what they slam into at 70 miles an hour.

When done well, the CEO job is an arbiter of truth. The CEO stands at the border between the outside world and the inside world, between company mythology and competitive reality. That sounds obvious, but it’s not.

I’d argue the norm is delusion, where organizations create realities disconnected from truth, complete with alternate headlines, villains, and heroes, all proclaimed with a shocking level of certainty.

So the CEO’s job starts with a basic question: What’s true?

Not what’s comforting. Not what’s politically convenient. Not what our dashboards can measure. What’s true?

And what should we do about it?

But deciding what to do and then doing it, requires a blend of rare attributes.

The CEO must be confident enough to pick a direction and humble enough to change it.

Optimistic enough to inspire and paranoid enough to prepare.

Warm enough to build trust and hard enough to make calls that disappoint people they like and care about.

We need to strip away the mystique.

In practice, the CEO allocates three things:

Attention: If you want to understand a CEO, ignore their strategy deck and read their calendar. Where attention goes, energy flows. Where energy flows, money follows. And where money follows, the organization slowly becomes something different, usually without anyone noticing until it’s obvious. This is why the CEO’s attention is so expensive. It’s why it’s so easy to waste. There are a thousand “important” meetings that are actually just elaborate ways to avoid the one meeting that matters. There are a thousand “urgent” problems that are actually just the company asking the CEO to temporarily soothe anxiety. A CEO’s attention is the company’s flashlight. Point it at the right things and companies transform. Point it at the wrong thing long enough and the wrong thing becomes the thing.

People: The CEO builds the team that builds the team. I’ve learned that a healthy company isn’t built by a heroic CEO. It’s built by a great team operating with clarity, trust, speed, and accountability. The CEO’s role is to create that environment, protect it, and, when necessary, make the painful personnel decisions that preserve it. This sounds straightforward until you live it. Then you realize you’re not moving boxes on an org chart. You’re messing with people’s dignity, livelihoods, and families. You’re also messing with the morale of everyone who stays. Every hire is a bet. Every promotion is a signal. Every tolerated behavior becomes a de facto policy. The CEO becomes, whether they like it or not, the embodiment of culture. It’s not what they say they value, but what they practically reward, punish, ignore, and allow.

Money: This is the CEO’s most difficult job because it’s often the one they’re least trained for, that seems the most glamorous, and is extremely impactful over time. Most CEOs come up through some form of excellence in sales, operations, engineering, or product. Then one day they wake up and realize the biggest decisions they make are capital allocation decisions: reinvest or distribute, grow or consolidate, buy or build, add headcount or automate, bet on the future or play it conservative. Capital allocation is where strategy stops being a noun and becomes a verb. It is where vision gets an audit. And it’s also where a CEO can quietly ruin a business while looking busy.

It’s remarkably easy to confuse action with progress, and reinvestment with wisdom.

Oftentimes the best capital allocation decision is painfully boring: Do fewer things, do them better, and keep your powder dry. But, that’s not what gets applause.

In our world, with long-term owners, permanent capital, and no forced exit timetable, this is where the CEO job gets simpler. We don’t need theater. We don’t need growth for growth’s sake. We don’t need to hit a narrative for the next fundraising cycle or quarterly call. We can play offense when the opportunity is real and defense when it isn’t. We can say “not now” without pretending it’s “never.”

This brings me to what might be the most misunderstood part of the CEO role: The CEO is the Chief “No” Officer. Every yes is a no to something else. Every strategy is a pile of exclusions. Every commitment is a tradeoff.

The organization will always ask for more: more initiatives, more products, more meetings, more hires, more exceptions, more complexity.

Increasing complexity is the default setting of life, and companies are not exempt from natural order. A CEO has to become comfortable being the person who disappoints people in the short term so the company doesn’t disappoint everyone in the long term.

This is where I’ve personally struggled, both as a leader and as an owner. I want to be helpful, agreeable, and liked. I can easily slip into short-term people pleasing at the expense of leading well. Sometimes I’ve confused my progress anxiety for insight. I’ve wandered into decisions too early because “someone should do something.”

I’ve also learned slowly and painfully that a CEO can add enormous value simply by refusing to add noise. Clarity is kindness, but often feels like inaction to busy people. A lot of CEO work is invisible. It’s pressure management. It’s absorbing emotion without spreading it. It’s knowing what you think and how to say it with grace. It’s carrying the weight of uncertain outcomes while still asking the team to move forward decisively.

This is why, in our portfolio, we care less about a CEO’s charisma and more about their character and judgment. We’ve found that the best CEOs have a rare combination of humility and intensity. They don’t need to be the smartest person in the room, but they do need to be the clearest. They don’t need to have all the answers, but they do need to be willing to make the hard call.

[Jaya Gupta @JayaGup10]

Most “agent products” today don’t own the decision. They generate a draft action, and then a human finalizes it somewhere else. When that happens, the system never produces a clean, machine-readable record of why the decision was made.

A decision trace is the missing artifact. It’s the structured bundle that explains an action at the moment it becomes real: what signals were consulted, what policy/version applied, what constraints were active, what exception path was used, who approved or overrode, and what action was executed. If you don’t capture that trace at the point the decision is finalized, you’re left with outcomes (“approved,” “closed,” “merged”) and vague post-hoc explanations.

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

@TweetsOfSumit All of India would claim you Indian, btw! Might consider mumbai - awesome city

[Roman Kirsch @kirschenroman]

Next ICONS EU with Razor Group Founder @Tushenium1 talking about raising $700m+ an buying & operating over 300 Amazon FBAs, why Indian e-commerce is the most exciting in the world and his new venture https://t.co/tviBptk9Zo
Link: https://t.co/SmRw0SJmwA

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

Ada AI - soon coming out of stealth

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

lessons lessons victory

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

Time is the greatest teacher, Arjun. When the right time comes, your abilities will be revealed before everyone.

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

Per aspera, ad astra

[Tushar Ahluwalia @Tushenium1]

What motivates people to do difficult stuff over sustained periods of time? Being part of a cult. A cult is defined by people, unorthodox values and unreasonable buy-in.