Journal Will Showcase High-Tech Companies for Potential Investors

Martin Dolgin has just the thing for all those venture capitalists with some spare change in the pockets of their gray wool suits and a fondness for things Western: The California Hi-Tech Funding Journal, a newsletter scheduled to hit the mailbox April 4.

The Irvine-based journal will showcase what Editor/Publisher Dolgin likes to call “raw, new, exciting technology companies” from throughout the state, private companies “that are looking for seed money, bridge money, so they can continue doing their research and development.”

Dolgin won’t divulge his own start-up costs, and right now there isn’t much of a subscriber list to speak of. A subscription drive netted 92 interested readers before publication. Dolgin hopes to increase his readership by to about 1,000 by the end of the year.

“About 30% of the initial subscribers are outside of California,” Dolgin said. “They’re in Honolulu, Ontario, Boston, New York. It’s surprising to me the interest in Canada and Honolulu, way beyond anything I can imagine.”

A hefty $435 a year ensures subscribers a new Funding Journal every 3 weeks. If the debut issue is any indication, subscribers will get about 16 pages of market analysis and company profiles for their investment.

Issue 1, Volume 1 features a look at companies that make such products as “affinity chromatography matrices,” “array processors” and “complex integrated circuits.” There’s an article on “floptical diskette technology” and another on research and development.

Dolgin figures that 60% of his prospective audience will be made up of venture capitalists and investment bankers looking for “promising young companies.” The rest of the readers-to-be, he said, will be “knowledgeable technologists who do investing in the high-tech world.”

“We are an extremely focused publication,” Dolgin said. “We’re not really advising investors in any sense. We’re giving a fresh, new look at these companies so the investors can make up their own minds.”

Which differentiates his prospective newsletter from the reams of high-technology stock journals already passing through the post office. The California Technology Stock Letter out of San Francisco offers its 1,000 subscribers what its masthead calls “authoritative, independent advice for high-technology investing.” In stocks, not companies.

The Medical Technology Stock Letter and its sister publication, the Ag Biotech Stock Letter, try to make the technical palatable--and give stock advice--to their combined 925 readers.

But the California Hi-Tech Funding Journal is looking for a different audience and has a different mission. Dolgin’s mission, now that he’s accepted it, is this:

“Every day, there is a new, exciting company that needs funding and should be identified,” he said. “I’m hoping that we will do the kind of job that will help these new companies.”