Paul Graham is definitely the guy. I’ve been reading his articles since the beginning and I’ve always liked his way to talk about things and about technology and Lisp.

After his (pretty) good experience in successful start-ups, Paul Graham released a couple of very interesting articles about how to start a startup. These articles are valuable because written from real experience and going into business is intimidating for a lot of people (including myself).

So, Paul Graham just announced something amazing: helping you funding your own software startup during summer, as a summer job. Pretty much like VC but without the suckage, the conditions are agreat and the opportunity unique. From Paul Graham point of view, there could be ten times more startups than there are. He made the hypothesis that young hackers could start viable startups if someone gave them someone just gave them enough seed money to develop a prototype.

The Summer Founders Program is an experiment to test this hypothesis. You just have to fill an application form, and if accepted, you’re about to start your own company during next summer with $6000 in bank. After the summer, you’ll be free to give up or to keep on and if your company is promising, you’ll probably get more help to make it viable. The program is targetted to undergrad students because there are the more likely to have the potential, time and flexibility to do it, but anyone is actually free to apply.

Man, how cool is that?