Waves of investment in new technology are often likened to gold rushes in their cycles of boundless enthusiasm, frenzied activity -- and disappointment for the vast majority of people for whom things don't quite pan out. Entrepreneurs bear the most risk in that they wager years of their lives (not to mention personal savings) on individual claims, whereas investors can spread their bets around in the hope that at least one promising property will make good. Even the certainty that a budding technology will change the world is no more help in making money than the certainty that there really is gold somewhere in them thar hills. The typical hundred dollars invested in Internet startups in 2000 would barely pay for a snail-mail stamp today. Clearly, transmuting raw hope into net profits requires investors and entrepreneurs to place extremely prescient and/or damn lucky bets on those rare companies that will actually convert cutting-edge research into commercially successful products.

Or does it? Brian Lim, founder and CEO of Santa Barbara, CA-based Atomate, believes he has found a unique way of capitalizing on the latest gold rush, nanotechnology. Rather than attempting to develop specific nanotech products, such as nanowires or nanomachines, Lim and his colleagues are selling fabrication systems to other nanotech researchers. "We're selling the pans to the prospectors," he says -- not trying to do the prospecting.