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When Aaron Swartz met Paul Graham his life–and the entire internet–changed forever

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Excerpted and adapted from The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet, by Justin Peters. 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. “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. 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. “If that sounds more exciting than spending the summer working in a cube farm,” Graham concluded, “I encourage you to apply.” The idea sounded great to Aaron Swartz, who, at the time, was finishing up his freshman year at Stanford University. Swartz didn’t particularly care for college. “It’s

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