Finkle-McGraw left the university without a diploma and went back to the 
farm, which he managed for a few years while his parents were preoccupied with 
his mother's breast cancer. After her death, he moved to Minneapolis and took a 
job with a company founded by one of his former professors, making scanning 
tunneling microscopes, which at that time were newish devices capable of seeing 
and manipulating individual atoms. The field was an obscure one then, the 
clients tended to be large research institutions, and practical applications 
seemed far away. But it was perfect for a man who wanted to study 
nanotechnology, and McGraw began doing so, working late at night on his own 
time. Given his diligence, his self-confidence, his intelligence ("adaptable, 
relentless, but not really brilliant"), and the basic grasp of business he'd 
picked up on the farm, it was inevitable that he would become one of the few 
hundred pioneers of nanotechnological revolution; that his own company, which 
he founded five years after he moved to Minneapolis, would survive long enough 
to be absorbed into Apthorp; and that he would navigate Apthorp's political and 
economic currents well enough to develop a decent equity position.