I remember in the late 1990s how tens of millions of dollars are pouring into ventures with a business model that has more to do with lavish operations spending than profitability. It's a wild time for visionaries and tech entrepreneurs. The dotcom bubble was the biggest hype that captivated the hearts (and pockets) of investors and the attention of Wall Street. Back in those days value investor Warren Buffett wasn't smiling as the valuation of these digital enterprises skyrocket, with their IPOs grabbing headlines in major news outlets and the international press.

A few months later, no one - in the dotcom industry, wall street or even the investment banking world - was smiling. The bubble was poked, millions of capital was loss, hundreds of companies went bankrupt and thousands were left unemployed as the market corrected itself. The then emerging tech world landed back to the fundamentals of what makes a business a real enterprise. That is - it has to be profitable, way sooner, for it to survive. 

Meet the ultralights, businesses that operates as lean as possible in order to become profitable without taking in any venture capital. Owners of ultralights know that their business better be profitable now, or they'll perish later. Last February 16, Graham Lawlor, founder of Ultra Light Startups, a community of online and media entrepreneurs with these types of business shared with me how he founded the organization, why you're never too young to start a business now and how he made his first sale at a ridicuolously young age of three!

You can read the story here at Yeah New York.