If it is possible to systematize the archetypal two guys in a garage (and they are generally guys), the year-old Y Combinator wants to do it. The company's formula is to throw smart people together and provide them $6,000 in seed money per person to cover the initial costs of the company, cookie-cutter legal paperwork and an extensive network of business contacts.

In return, Mr. Graham and his partners -- Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris -- collectively own 1.2 to 12 percent of the company, with an average of 6 percent a person. The company holds two boot camps a year for about eight groups each session, a summer one in Cambridge and a winter one in Mountain View. Y Combinator is not so much an incubator as a hatchery for baby companies, and as with all things spawned in bulk, some will die, some will flourish and some will eke by.

"Y Combinator comes down to two kids in a room with two computers and ramen noodles for a summer," said Chris Sacca, a principal of new business development at Google and a speaker at Y Combinator's one-day start-up school conference in October at Harvard. "It takes ambitious geeks and puts them in a situation with no distraction and expects audacious outcomes from them. The reason we like it is that that is what Google is." Indeed, Google has made acquisition overtures to one of the companies that was formed during the summer session, which the founders turned down.

Mr. Graham got the idea for starting Y Combinator after giving a talk to student entrepreneurs at Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science. He told them to look for seed money from rich people they knew, preferably ones who had made their wealth from technology. "Then I said, 'Not me,' and they all looked kind of downcast and then I felt like a jerk," he said. Then, on reflection, Mr. Graham thought, why shouldn't he try to support young hackers?

The goal for Y Combinator's young entrepreneurs is twofold: to make something people want (which is the company's motto); and to stretch their financing long enough for additional investment or to get acquired. For instance, Mr. Graham's former company, Viaweb, which made software to build commercial Web sites, was bought by Yahoo and reborn as store.yahoo.com. One Y Combinator business created last summer, a company that uses cellphones for social networking, got financing from a venture capital firm. Two other Y Combinator companies, a calendar Web site called Kiko.com and a news site, Reddit.com, received additional angel financing.

Y Combinator relies on certain premises: that open-source software and falling hardware prices means that tech start-ups are cheap to finance; that large companies are no longer at the forefront of innovation; and that mature technology companies find it cheaper to buy than to build.

The company takes its name from an obscure mathematical term, describing a function that generates other functions. Y Combinator is a company that creates other companies -- a sly reference that would elicit a smile from a very narrow set of people, but luckily the same set that the company is trying to appeal to. It is the philosophical triumph of the passionate computer hacker over the uptight M.B.A.