Making a big deal out of near nothing.

• Position: People

Jerry Soderquist thinks small. He's a managing partner of Nanotech Capital LLC, a Tryon-based venture-capital company trying to make big bucks off tiny technology. Nanotechnology creates microminiature equipment by manipulating atoms and particles as if they were parts of a machine. Nanotech Capital's first step: a June 2002 agreement with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee that gives it dibs on research ready to be commercialized. "We know the right people," he says of himself and his three partners.

Soderquist, 59, is an architectural engineer who retired to Tryon four years ago. Born in Waukegan, Ill., he got his bachelor's in engineering from Chicago Technical College in 1970 after a hitch in the Army, then briefly worked for U.S. Steel in Chicago before managing public works for a county in Illinois.

Inlaws lived in Raleigh, so he and his wife moved to Tryon to be closer to them. At a party, he met Arthur D. Ackerman, who has a home in Tryon and is executive vice president of the Middleton Group LLC, a Stamford...