Graham invited the restless Stanford undergrad to come to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and pitch his concept in person. Perhaps it’s a bit lofty of a goal, but we say aim high.” “Infogami is the Macintosh of building websites. Instead of just being able to work with text, anyone could use it to do graphics,” Swartz would later write.

Instead of typing arcane commands, you could point at what you wanted. (The name Infogami, which rhymes with salami, is a compound of the words information and origami.) “The Macintosh completely changed the way people used personal computers. Swartz submitted a proposal for a service called Infogami, a tool for quickly building customizable, visually interesting, wiki-enabled websites. The Summer Founders Program offered an escape route from a life of undergraduate ennui. On his blog, he chronicled college life, adopting the tone of a priggish anthropologist studying some vulgar foreign culture. He found his classes boring, his fellow students insufficiently serious. “It’s hard to say this without sounding even more superior than usual, but it doesn’t strike me that most Stanford students (and professors) are exceptionally bright,” Swartz wrote during his first week in Palo Alto. Swartz didn’t particularly care for college. The idea sounded great to Aaron Swartz, who, at the time, was finishing up his freshman year at Stanford University. “If that sounds more exciting than spending the summer working in a cube farm,” Graham concluded, “I encourage you to apply.” The participants would each receive approximately $6,000 in seed funding and would spend the summer developing their businesses and learning from Graham and his well-connected friends. “The SFP is like a summer job, except that instead of salary we give you seed funding to start your own company with your friends,” he wrote on his blog. In March 2005, the entrepreneur and essayist Paul Graham announced that he was soliciting applications for a project he called the Summer Founders Program-an early version of what would eventually become the renowned startup incubator Y Combinator. Excerpted and adapted from The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet, by Justin Peters.

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